[Even] without . . . an extremity of this kind . . . the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.
[The spirit of party] serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds . . . access to the government itself through the channels of party passions.
[Italics added because—wow!—G.W. predicts Russian hackers two hundred years before the Internet was invented.]
[The spirit of party is] a fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume.
**** Letter to Benjamin Waterhouse, the first doctor to employ smallpox vaccine in America thereby keeping a number of young men alive long enough to become Methodists, Baptists, and so forth.
***** Adams was, of all things, acting as defense attorney in the murder trial of British soldiers who had fired into an angry Patriot mob during the 1770 Boston Massacre. Although Adams was a prominent opponent of British rule he felt morally obligated to ensure that the soldiers received a fair trail. (Also, he detested mobs, patriotic or otherwise.)
****** Hamilton believed these rights were already protected under common law and that if a federal government were allowed to meddle in common law the meddling would never cease. (Which it hasn’t, but God knows what kind of meddling the federal government would have gotten up to if we didn’t have a Bill of Rights.)
******* Horatio G. Spafford, author of the 1824 Gazetteer of the State of New York, who, given the mercantile basis of New York’s economy, should have told Jefferson to put a sock in it.
******** From a 1776 letter to that husband.
******** Richard Steele, playwright and essayist, founded the British magazine The Spectator with Joseph Addison in 1711. The magazine was popular in the American colonies. Steele was a stern moralist—and, as Franklin’s audience knew, a duelist, drinking man, and father of an illegitimate child. Thus Steele’s name itself was a laugh line.
******** “There’s no one who is always right but me.”
What I Like About U.(S.A.)
Always look on the bright side of life!
—Eric Idle, Monty Python’s Life of Brian
Three things I like about America are fast food, suburban sprawl, and traffic jams.
The Traffic Jam as Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor
My own personal form of taking Zoloft is to listen to “Traffic on the 3s” every ten minutes on WBZ Boston news radio, 1030 on my AM dial. Nothing cheers me up more than a Boston traffic jam—when I’m not in it.
I live far and gone in the New England back country where there isn’t any traffic. But I get lonely out here, feel isolated and down in the dumps sometimes, especially when New England weather is awful the way it’s been this winter, and last winter, and last fall, and last summer, and the way it will be this spring.
Good weather is so rare here that we don’t even have a word for it and just stand around with our mouths gaping open, rendered speechless by sunshine.
Anyway, when I get depressed I tune in to the WBZ traffic report, and I’m instantly full of optimism, good feelings, and love of life—compared to the people in Boston who are stuck in traffic. Which would be all of them. WBZ has a slogan for its traffic report: “Boston—it’s an hour’s drive from Boston.”
Why Boston traffic is so bad I don’t know. Boston isn’t a huge city, less populous in fact than Columbus, Ohio, or Charlotte, North Carolina. And Boston drivers are notoriously aggressive—curb-jumping, left-turning-on-red, one-way wrongwaying lead-foot lane-hopping lions in the zebra crossing.
They should, by all rights, be able to hot rod their way out of any traffic tie-up. (Why don’t Boston drivers use turn signals? That would be giving classified information to the enemy.)
But Boston has something called the “Leverett Connector.” This is where I-93, Rt. 1, Rt. 3, Rt. 28, Storrow Drive, the Charles River, Boston Harbor, the Zakim Bridge, the Rose Kennedy Greenway, and the Callahan Tunnel to Logan Airport all meet. If you’re coming into Boston from the north . . . or the south . . . or the east . . . or the west you will end up in the Leverett Connector. You may not mean to but you will.
If you want to go to Faneuil Hall, Old North Church, the Bull and Finch Pub (the bar that inspired Cheers), Fenway Park, or a Celtics or Bruins game you’ll end up in the Leverett Connector.
Even if you’re headed someplace that’s nowhere near the Leverett Connector, such as Gillette Stadium, you’ll end up in the Leverett Connector. It’s the Murphy’s Law of driving in a city where a lot of people are named Murphy.
However, if you’re not in Boston—the way I’m not in Boston—it doesn’t matter into what depths of despair you may have fallen. You can turn on WBZ any time night or day, even 5:03 a.m. on a Sunday morning, and hear those wonderful inspiring words that will snap you out of your gloom and put joy back into your heart: “It’s a sea of brake lights on the Leverett Connector.”
Actually, I like traffic jams even when I am in one. (Though not on the Leverett Connector. People have gone through puberty, grown to adulthood, become middle-aged, and gotten Alzheimer’s between the exit from the Zakim Bridge and the entrance to the Callahan Tunnel.)
I like traffic jams because they give me a chance to look at my fellow Americans while they’re doing what most defines us as Americans—being stuck in a
