What's The Big Idea? True Blue versus Deep Red: The 2006 Bradley Symposium at The Hudson Institute

Bill Schambra was kind enough to email me an invitation to a new Bradley Foundation Symposium on "Red America....Blue America. " I probably can't go, since I am just a working stiff, not one of those jet-setting public intellectuals like at Rooster Foundation, Crowing in The New American Century. Still, I will read the Bradley Symposium proceedings with interest.

"Clearly," wrote Bill Schambra, in his promo piece for the Symposium, "if American politics is driven by 'big ideas,' think tanks and foundations are key players."

"Yup," replied The Happy Tutor, poking his noble, large-domed head from the Dumpster out behind Wealth Bond*ge, "if American culture is driven by soundbites and propaganda paid for by special interests, think tanks and foundations are clearly key players. So, Bill, you got it covered either way."

I wonder sometimes if  Bill Schambra, were he to let himself go, might become an articulate critic of both Red and Blue, and a thought-leader for the old Red, White, and Blue. He could rally very diverse groups to his vision of a grassroots, compassionate, Main Street America in which wealth has its privileges and its responsibilities and we try to keep one another straight. The part that is under-stated in his current writing is responsibility (except the responsibilities of the poor for their own survival). What the rich owe the commonweal is the topic he must delete, I am sure, over and over in his word processor. From that to how we extract what is owed by the free-riding rich, is only one more paragraph. Peer pressure, moral suasion, satire, invective, tar and feathering, or taxes. Of these the last seems most civilized, but far less fun.

Red and Blue via the think tanks is green all over. Well, green is also associated with the Holy Spirit; it is Mary's color, the color of hope. That Bill thought of me fills me with hope that maybe real conversation is possible across our artificial divides. In real conversation, not the Punch and Judy Show of  think tank debate, we would risk ourselves in creating a new and vital community, not located in the nostalgic past, but here again in America: The World We Want, as Peter Karoff says.