The upside of dreamy escapism is not having to take seriously that politics is war by other means. Even if it comes packaged as socially significant theater by people you would have hated as a child if children - more or less normally dysfunctional and emotionally vibrant children - had it in them to hate.

The downside is forgetting where you parked and collection agencies. Which are the worst.

The upside of civil disobedience is the grand moral tradition on which even the petty, guileful playacting draws. Yes there is something to lose and it is worth losing rather than giving up and winning. Or giving up and barely skating by.

The downside is the collective, which is kind of categorically attached to the collective in all its tawdry guises, convenient fictions, and obvious masks.

I prefer my polymath literary geniuses to speak and write American, not British, and to cast their witticisms in a dry parched desert stripped of piety that doubles as a jungle of penetrable pragmatism in the rainy season. Thoreau as to ponds, Heidegger as to rivers, and Melville as to the endless depths of the wine-red sea.

I have not been asked to sit as a stand in for a portraiture by the indistinguishable Flemish or the inimitable Auerbach. I have not been candidly captured by the beat-down photographers of the dustbowl or the New Romantics who haunted the cold-water flats of the lower east side when the city was still burning.