Tired autumn tirade

I'm tired of being a "liberal blogger." I can also be conservative. I can be Marxist. I can be Darwinist. I can be Deweyan. I can be Kantian. I can be utilitarian. I can be Machiavellian. I can be Rortyan. I can be Senian. I can be McDermottian. I can be pluralistic. I can be logical and illogical. I can be Emersonian, Thoreauvian, and Whitmaniacal. I can be analytic, postmodern, pragmatist, and feminist. I can be American, French, Japanese, Thai, Greek, Venezuelan, Nepalese, Chinese, Kenyan, and Mexican. I can be imperialistic and I can be indigenous rightist. I can be environmentalist and I can be neoclassically pro-growth. I can be a teacher and a listener. I can be nonsensical and I can be a paragon of rationality. I can be morally and politically earnest and I can be absurdist. I can be disgusting and I can be pure. I can be authentic and an utter sham. I can be a believer and I can be a nihilist. I can be happy and I can be morose. I can find the shadows of leaves on concrete to be beautiful and I can find Leonardo to be the only beauty on the planet. I can find sympathy, empathy, and obligation to be central to my being, while finding self-interest to be central to my being. I can find economists to be incredibly stupid and occasionally smart. I am state school and I am private school. I can find philosophy to be incredibly useless and incredibly useful. I love a certain kind of France and I love a certain kind of America. I have "exorbitant eyes," as Emerson said, and I am blind. I am a professor and I am a student. I love and I hate. I rejoice and I resent. I am dead to the world and I am alive to it.

Some peg us as otherwise -- and they aren't just the uneducated yokel bigots we well-educated elitists often deride. It's worse from the Harvardites and Princetonites and Yalies who've buggered themselves on their self-titling and entitlement. If you were fortunate enough to go through these places and don't understand that it means nothing at all, except income, it's your own stupid fault. Sickness.

We're like this. Make your own damn list. Mine goes on and on. Yours might collapse onto some obsession with relativism or uptight Christianity or the nature of analysis or parochial intellectual or emotional or political interests. What do you want? Certainty? Absolution? Integrity? Justice? Formulation? Get your own damn formulation -- there are a billion out there from which to choose. How do you choose? Read your Rawls and Nozick and Marcuse and Habermas. Read your ridiculously inflated Bullwinkle pundits. Read your Bibles and Korans and Torahs and Confucian sayings. Write your poetry and prose and analysis and formulas, fix your car, turn the lathe, sweep the walkway, nurse the child. Live and die with dignity and loyalty, and die living.

Just, just, don't let the word we swallow whole on a daily basis be the daily basis of the word.