Well well

Just now I was reading, elsewhere, that one should not conflate the unrest in the Middle East with that in Wisconsin and growing list of Republican states. The grounds for this, we are told, are that comparing the unrest of the prosperous against their duly elected representatives with people fighting for life against tyranny. We are told that the comparison is naive and facile.

(Pause to adjust my historian's robe and hood.)

Wrong. That may be the popular notion, but the brutal fact of sudden political change is that unlettered masses don't accomplish it, and those who do don't achieve it out of nothing. It is accomplished in the first place by learned people who understand that there can be something better. Reaction is the fuel of revolution. Its tinder is the ressentiment of people, once prosperous in their own eyes, who perceive that their comfort and prosperity is being taken away. Revolutions that don't draw upon such ressentiment generally succeed; those which do not generally fail.

In my younger days, I earned my bread and pursued my principles in the then-new field of public history, which concerned itself with the lives of common folk, not great men. One such figure who got much of my attention was Paul Revere. (That no doubt surprises anyone who knows nothing of the man beyond the words of 19th century poets and 20th century debunkers, both mythmakers in their own way and with their own intentions.)

The myths have little to do with the man. He was of modest, somewhat comfortable, means until very late in life. As a silversmith, he was very much a creature of the age of mercantilism (silversmiths were integral to a colonial society with little or no capital) and on paper had everything to gain by supporting the status quo.

Instead, he became one of the prosperous expressing their unrest against the duly elected government of the British Empire. When following this modest career, it occurred to me that when the British lost Paul Revere, they had already lost.

My spouse, a public employee of modest means and many years of conscientious service, has inhabited the sidelines of political life for all those years. Tonight, her union called to invite her to a conference call in solidarity with the unions under attack in other states by the forces of reaction.

Tonight, she answered the call.