The fun part of writing my most recent post was imaging all the different ways in which it would be terrible to live a Little House lifestyle. The boredom. The threat of disease bandits and indians. The possible run ins with US Army forces trying to stop you from stealing the Indians land. Freezing to death, high infant mortality, the list goes on. The possibilities for snarky cosmopolitan humor at the expense of those who romanticize the frontier were many. After all, I can't help, life in a Little House was a mere step from the state of nature, nasty, brutish and short.

My impression of this state is built up as much from having read the books as it is from relating Hobbesian stereotypes about life outside the city. But then I ran out of steam. The last part of the entry, the part I'd really been looking forward to writing, just didn't entertain when I finally got around to it. What after all would be wrong with such a life? Sure, its not the most appealing way of life, and Laura Ingalls Wilder and Henry David Thoreau excepted, not the most conducive to either literature or philosophy (and Thoreau's shack wasn't that far from the settled town of Concord and today would be considered a relatively easy commute to Boston).

Of course, prison has traditionally been considered a rather productive environment for writers of all sorts. So, conduciveness to the life of the mind shouldn't be considered sufficient for a worthwhile form of life.

Maybe I've been infected too strongly by the Socratic bug, the unexamine life holds no appeal and a constant struggle for existence leaves little in way of time for examination, of an either philosophical fashion.

Moreover, I don't have any imaginative connection with the people of the frontier, the people who settled this country. I come more from those people who Howard Dean refers to built America. My forebears left Ireland and the thought of shoving the family into another two room shack to risk starvation would have seemed like defeating the whole purpose of emigration. That, and holy days of obligation were probably a serious inconvenience on the open prairy. I romanticize the tribalisma and corrupt politics of those who came before me in the same way that the descendants of the settlers look back fondly on the struggle to displace indigenous Americans.

Post-message: now there's a nice contrast, the people who settled this country (enamored of the frontier, agricultural background, rural, suspicious of large organizations) and those who built it (the teeming masses, industrial background, urban, at least acclimated to large scale organizations such as trade unions, governments or the Catholic church), to describe the red-blue divide. Of course, it's just as facile as any other simple division.