A Private Letter to Harper de la Kierkegaard

Harper, i'm pretty elated to hear so much about you. It sounds like you must really know your stuff. How's Boston this time of year? Cool coffee shop scene? I imagine just loafing around Harvard Square and maybe draining a pint at a pub and really surrounding an issue with other really grounded students. And when i say students, i mean students of the world, and of truth. Not students of "what's going to get me into the international relations graduate program at Johns Hopkins??," or any kind of empty ambition like that. i'd really like to meet you and toss ideas back&forth with you, Harper. Maybe i'll drop into Beantown sometime this month, catch the Sox and get to know your mind or whatever.

i'm so stoked to meet you because you're into Hegel!! Even though you trashed me on basing my political values on Marx, i think this is a disagreement that's easily resolvable, Harper. i mean, Marx was SO heavily indebted to Hegel as the basis of his dialectical system, man! You got to remember that. Capitalism, the business elite, and the bourgeois middle class are the thesis in the West, Harper, whether you want to believe it or not. Not like i'm going to write my thesis on capitalism, but it's the dominant trend, you know? Anyway, it's got us clutched at the throat. Then the proletariat and social revolution, BOTTOM UP, are the antithesis. In our times, with utter ridiculous media saturation, the revolution WILL be televised, probably on YouTube, haha. The synthesis is a classless society, i.e. civilization sans social hierarchies. Not like i need to give you a crasher on Marxist ideology, Harper, but a point is to be stressed. Marx is the natural outgrowth of Hegel in the world of economics, IMO.

This gives me a really cool idea for a political cartoon. Two American intellectuals are arguing Hegel against Marx in a coffee shop, a real Socratic dialectical dialogue, maybe the one man is rich and the other is poor, then they come to a sudden agreement, SYNTHESIS!!, and the bomb crisis is averted, and they just throw back a couple of draughts in that bar from Cheers. Beantown, you know, right Harper?

Catch you again real soon, in another setting, hopefully.

~Chez