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guppie you have access to cable yet a flush inside toilet is beyond your reach....

McCullough understood these men and had a passion for them and we again have IDOLIZED and in a quinessential American way where we ignore the realities of who they were as men. They had no place for women in the Congress and yet it is quite obvious that women were piviotal in their decision making process. They were slave owners, they were farmers, Quakers, they were soldiers without armies, they were men educated in the British system and they were all well men with passion.

I honestly don't see that passion in many today.. no doubt you see how cagey and wiley Franklin was and how many of them well understood their constiutiences and that playing to the crowd even then a small and lowly educated one is essential in building power and support. But you do see America came from the grassroots.. the families who had enough.. sadly it goes to show we also still have our roots in torture (tar and feathering) and in discrimination.. but again it just proves the voices of the "silent" can speak loudly when needed.

And we do have good people in Government..my beloved Henry Waxman.... look him up and his "heroes" of our Congress who investigate the fraud in the US Government. I broke up with him briefly over his need to shove his head in MLB's steroid scandal.. really that is hardly a national issue when his group has done so much to expose Blackwater and the fraud in the State Department..they showed what a dumbfuck Condi Rice really is.. oh they are there... they are the quiet voices that we don't hear loudly and enough.

They were MEN for god's sake.. but I do love that next week Adams walks into the room and Bennie is in the tub with some French whore... god Spitzer anyone?

We do hold that Constitution a little too biblical for my tastes and again these men were not infallible.. certainly the electoral college - a great idea at the time to hold back Virginia's power - is completely useless and unnecessary today but yet we want to amend the fucking thing to make marriage only between a man and a woman. I wonder what Adams would say to that or the gay dude from So Carolina.

Once again I find myself utterly transfixed on this series as so much of this seems as if it is in the present and not our past. Perhaps I am too like the French where I have found history so essential that I have romanticized what is a legacy and therefore allow it to color all things today in the same delicate pallet.

From the politics to the personal there is nothing here that does not resonate. How John Adams is a man of the present.. impatient, ungallant, quinessentially American with bluntness and directness that shocks even his peers still rooted in European manners. Yet we are much like the French when it comes to history, to arrogance, to our disdain for those who do not embrace the culture as distinct and valuable.

How this man carved out success was due to his sheer determination, his own ego and his need to see independence of the Americas. Yes he is our American prototype.. a mixture of personal agenda with the political. And be damned those who cannot see that.. They are always never mutually exclusive as we have come to learn. Nothing comes from duty without purpose and that purpose is not always of the higher ground despite the belief it is. Adams clearly was a complex individual but the outcome of his "duty" could have easily gone in a totally different direction.. but his intelligence, his will, his beliefs clearly kept him on a course that led to our independence.

As for Abigail, she was if I recall, a woman of great beauty and charm. She clearly too had an agenda but her hand was sheathed in a velvet glove and it was clear that without that velvet John was an iron fist. There is no question she was the epitome of behind every great man is a greater woman.

My own disdain for America of late has come from this shame that our need to be a Superpower has come at a cost...that our Education that Adams so referred to as a process has become what I am sure he would fear.. elitist, two tiered and largely unsuccessful. Our Economy and our cities homes to those who have and those who have not.. the Farmers do not mix with the Lawyers and do any of them know Philosophy or Opera that he so believed they would?

We have only money as our God and it is ironic that on that money we state "In God We Trust" Perhaps that too should change.. so much of that foundation I have no doubt Adams would agree has become lost in our zeal for personal independence at the sake of our collective dependence. We are nothing without each other yet we are not the country that those men AND women so desperately fought and sacrificed for.

The American dream, the American way is now all about me and get out of my way as its about me and what is in for me... even the economic downturn has brought some odd justification, a balance. That symbol of liberty, the scales.. its been out of balance for quite some time now and I don't know if America has the ability to regain it. The America of our history, of our legacy, is long gone....