{"id":1107,"date":"2006-05-31T13:10:00","date_gmt":"2006-05-31T18:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/?p=1107"},"modified":"2006-05-31T13:10:00","modified_gmt":"2006-05-31T18:10:00","slug":"kunstler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/?p=1107","title":{"rendered":"k\u00fcnstler"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is a man in a golf cart by the side of the road. He is there nearly every time I drive to lunch. He is large and unkempt, with a substantial beard and ragged hair, and a labrador retriever sits quietly next to him on the cart. They sit alone by the side of the fallow fields in the middle of the industrial park in which I work. Rumor has it that he is the owner of the fields, good land, and that he has, for years, stalwartly refused to cede the land for development. Today, for the first time, I saw a sign posted by the road in one of the fields, which read something to the effect of “Town Meeting to Discuss Rezoning” with the date and time. So the town may attempt to appropriate it anyway. The man, though, just sits placidly on the cart and waves at the cars that pass. I wave back and he nods. A feeling of solidarity passes between us. I feel like through the act of waving I am joining him in a common cause, even through every single thing I have heard about him and the land is hearsay and could be untrue. But, if nothing else, in a time of increasing isolation and secluded individualism, it is an acknowledgment<\/i>, and there is worth in that.<\/p>\n

* * * * * *<\/p>\n

After Coffee Theology last night, Diane and I segued over to Barnes & Noble for a bit. We are still waiting for the arrival in the mail of the “pure” version of Trivial Pursuit, which I had to order online, and we discussed the irony of it possibly being at the store after it had just shipped the day before (it wasn’t). We looked for Crunchy Cons<\/a>, a book describing a subculture of conservatism that has been growing by leaps and bounds recently.<\/p>\n

We enlisted the aid of one of the booksellers in our search, first to find the “politics” section and then, after a few minutes of browsing, again to find the book itself. He helped us, but the finding of the book turned out to be almost incidental, as the conversation that erupted between him and Diane and myself made the evening.<\/p>\n

He was a recent Penn State grad who studied political science, if not as his major, at least as a minor or concentration. I was unsure as of his ties to North Carolina, but mentioned that he planned on staying in the area until at least October, when he planned to move to Sweden, of all places, where he has family. This was surprising given the conversation that initiated our encounter and led up to that declaration, namely that he was a stalwart libertarian with a thoughtful, comprehensive knowledge of American political history and the cross-influence of various fields of human inquiry (i.e. politics, philosophy, economics) on political and social movements. The conversation was uniformly fantastic and we all made recommendations about authors to read. His escapes me at the moment, but we made sure to plug Richard Maybury and Francis Schaeffer.<\/p>\n

The initial stages of our encounter were a picture-perfect example of stereotyping, in both directions. Based on our request for assistance, he had us pegged as dyed-in-the-wool, lockstep Republicans. For our part, we sized him up as a liberal, brainwashed to an equal degree as he thought we were, who accepted the tenets of his subculture unquestioningly. I think we both made the happy discovery that just a few words further into a conversation can make all the difference in the world. We certainly hope to talk with him again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is a man in a golf cart by the side of the road. He is there nearly every time I drive to lunch. He is large and unkempt, with a substantial beard and ragged hair, and a labrador retriever sits quietly next to him on the cart. They sit alone by the side of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1107"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1107"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1107\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}