graven images in the commons...

     I have a few thoughts for you, and this is as good a place as any to offer 'em, here among friends. [Looks around wondering who will actually read this.] First, graven images are harmless things. They have no power. It is stupid and superstitious to be outraged over them, just as it is stupid and superstitious to cling to them as magic totems of a 'heritage' defined largely by sentimental justifications of brute force. Second, the categories used to 'understand' what's happening are old, tired, and need to die. They weren't any good in the first place. What's more, nearly everyone seems to be re-enacting, in deadly ernest, some period of the past. This isn't the thirties in Germany, or the late fifties and early sixties in Alabama. It isn't Reconstruction. The old scripts don't work, so let's throw them out. Even what passes for 'radical' and 'progressive' is obsolete. You want change, so change for Christ's sake.