I did not take you for a Tea Partier.

Well, I did drop that one-liner about Boston Harbor, didn’t I?

Between you and me, in those days I think I would have been both a Tory, and the Mad King’s worst critic of a loyal subject. I do love my country, having been born here and all that, but privately have long thought that this experimental republic was a terrible idea to begin with, and that we would all be enjoying a much fuller and better-informed life as citizens of a British Commonwealth, than this exercise in clueless bludgeonly hegemonics of an American empire has managed to bring us.

But I read a quote once during the Gorbachev era, I don’t know where, of a Soviet citizen asked about how their people live with the legacy of Stalin, and in a very Russian reply he said (more or less), “well , one cannot spit on one’s own history, what would be the point?”