Age of Reason

I have been slow to enter into my LOA edition of the collected works of  Thomas Paine. My edition was still relatively fresh, with spanking hardcover newness, in the stone age of 1997 when I was still healthy enough to interview at organizations like New Orleans, which did for mental retardation and developmental drooling what The Matrix Research Institute did for psychiatric illness, but at approximately a paragraph to a page a week, Common Sense is still a refreshing read, and illustrates Paul Rabinow's point about our intellectual interdependence on the Enlightenment Era.  In contemporary time, I reflect on Paine's complaint about monarchical authority, but surely the colonial polemicist knew some executive force had to be in charge. 

It is not much of a stretch to sense that Paine would have been appalled at the state of the divided government in the US today; his passion against Britain's increasingly decorative monarchy, to use Niall Ferguson's phrase, can be extrapolated, and Paine would have lashed out at executive branch authority with the same zeal, even while he died a pauper in the country that took on England's mantle.

Telling.