Wrongdoing

I've done a great deal of wrong. Some of it was the relatively innocent wrong of folly, but in the main I committed deliberate high crimes and misdemeanors, including treason, thereby disqualifying myself from public office. It worries me that men like Mitt Romney are public officials, less worried about Donald Trump who I believe crossed the line numerous times. The weakest of men never do wrong, never sweat discovery, never get their souls dirty. Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were rascals, and John Hancock was a rum runner. Without their personal experience of serious naughtiness, there'd be no United States. The founder of Mormonism was a lunatic, liar, and bigamist, without whom there'd be no Utah to elect a squeaky clean poodle like Mittens.

It's very difficult to create anything new unless you skate all over the landscape, slide into filthy swamps occasionally and encounter monsters, look evil in the eye, as warriors do. You have to be willing to be wounded grievously, price no object, and quick enough to get away with sin. I wished I was braver, killed in action or executed, yet grateful to have escaped it. Danger gave me license to stand apart from other men and think for myself.

There's a brief, important introduction to The Constitution of Government In Galt's Gulch. "Children stand in the fire hose of good evidence and philosophically well formed formulas, unable to resist, unless someone takes a hatchet to the damn thing and says: Wait a minute, let me think for myself." Doing wrong is a fearsome, shameful gateway to original firsthand knowledge of liberty. Can you see Mitt Romney promoting liberty like Thomas Paine did?

Women naturally despise crime. That's why I freely agreed with Mark Twain's assessment, that there's only one good sex, the female one, and I openly advocated that women should judge men, make and enforce law in defense of innocents, mindful of the rights and best interests of children. Hopefully, women can be persuaded to honor due process, which is slightly unnatural to them. Their crimes consist of snap judgments in anger.

Men and women are not inherently law abiding and morally tame like Mitt Romney, groomed to perfection. I understand that many of my brothers are too timid to risk the adventure of crime. Very few consign their lives to the loaded gamble of treason. Without treason, there would have been no Boston Tea Party, no American Revolutionary War of Independence, no Civil War and its aftermath of an opportunistic, supremely libertine Gilded Age that lifted millions of immigrant paupers into modest prosperity, a nascent middle class. It pays to read history. In corruption and chaos and crime, America became a beacon to the oppressed, a dynamic society with opportunity for all to ignore the rules and thrive, like Carnegie, Edison, and Gould, penniless ragamuffins who became fabulously productive rascals.

Edison summed up the spirit of the Gilded Age: "All religion is bunk."

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