You are kidding of course?  Start over again?  Pardon my laughter as I am laughing so hard that it hurts…  Are you meaning to say that we Americans have reached a fold point in our history, that our society as it now stands is unsustainable?  Do you really think that conditions are in such a dire state of imbalance, centers of power so poorly synced, political, commercial, regional — that the nation is being pulled apart by centrifugal vectors of those forces?  You sound as if you are describing the equivalent of colony collapse disease, the die-off of a bee colony, a result of multiple toxic conditions.

Yes.

So where to from here.  The time has come to lay down, to show the hand that you are holding.  To put the matter bluntly:  where to from here?  Your criticism of the inadequacy of “reason,” the weakness if you will of our rational capacity to knit together a collection of towns, cities, and rural areas distributed geographically across a continent, what better basis do you propose?

Bar-B-Que…

What I mean to say is connoisseurship, the development, education, cultivation of “good taste,” of practices assessed as excellent, of gustatory sensation, of appearance, of the ritual of presentation in everything from the almost infinite range of food and libation which we American’s enjoy, — to how the enormously popular game of football can be played…

Your first thought to my offering of a new beginning, of an alternative foundation for a complex late capitalist society is likely to be:  that’s crazy!  How would we measure something like you propose? 

My response: you could continue to measure anything you wish, — continue to use “big data” in our widely appreciated sports, baseball, soccer, football, etc.  However measurement would be subsidiary, to what we celebrate and cherish above all: the play executed with elegance, beauty, the winning touchdown, or the goal line stand, that courageously defends with skill and extraordinary effort, thus being the tipping point of victory…  Appreciation if you will!

I suppose that I have said enough.  And that is enough without getting into the excellence of Bar-B-Que, the regional variety in this culinary artform…  Should Bar-B-Que not be a useful “common ground” for conversation, for story telling that effects empathy, fellow-feeling between Midwestern Americans and Americans residing in the Carolinas, or in Texas, or in California?  Naturally as one thing always leads to another, surely we’d touch on Global Warming, how environmental conditions impact our food sources?

And you could extend my proposed method of connoisseurship to literature, to everyday products, to theater, to all of the trades…

What do you think?

---

And as for a tune to hold onto for today?  This one seems to fit…

Helter Skelter

By U2

When I get to the bottom
I go back to the top of the slide
Where I stop and I turn
And I go for a ride
Till I get to the bottom
And I see you again

Do you, don’t you want me to love you?
I’m coming down fast, but I’m miles above you
Tell me, tell me, tell me, come on tell me the answer
Well, you may be a lover, but you ain’t no dancer.

Helter skelter, helter skelter
Helter skelter

Lyrics by Paul McCartney, John Lennon