from Elizabeth Wurtzel, The Pop Culture Clause
It's possible to view the American Revolution as an act of collective lunacy. The theology of freedom had spread throughout the land, a belief so huge that eventually men were willing to take up arms to defend an idea—possibly against their better interests. This was not France, where the masses were actually starving when they stormed the barricades—this was America, where they could afford to toss tea into the Atlantic out of sheer outrage. At any rate, I think it's hard to consider the American Revolution as philosophy-driven without also taking seriously the possibility that the whole thing was kind of crazy: that a sort of hysteria was passing through the people of the American colonies that was simply not normal.Put it another way: we all tend to think that sex—or at least hot sex—was invented in 1967. Or 1981. Or last year, if you're a teenager. It's hard for the postmodern mind to believe that wild times might have been long ago, maybe even before Woodstock or Studio 54. Perhaps the people were as crazy in late eighteenth-century America as any version of craziness that we are accustomed to now. Perhaps it was its own Age of Aquarius in a way that even we could recognize, if we thought of it that way. Perhaps, as Bob Dylan said of a more recent era, "There was music in the cafes at night / And revolution in the air." I think I'm trying to say that it might be advantageous to look at the American founding as a project that was the product of people not necessarily acting in their right minds.
The point is, this was a land of people who were not functioning happily in the Old World; this was obviously meant to be a whole New World. The Founding Fathers had seen this crazy country be consumed by pamphlets—they must have known that the potential for creativity had to be out there, despite all the apparent talent for nothing but farming. While early America was hardly a happy home for an artist or artisan (or probably much of anything that required a cultural sphere), there had to be money in this madness somewhere down the line. If human beings might someday fly rockets to the moon, this was the place to launch them.
