Tea Party Autobiography Analysis

Afterword
So much has interested me in writing this manuscript. Tea Party assumptions are the focus, but each assumption led me down interesting paths, some of which I had not explored before. That is certainly true of evolution and immigration. Self-reliance and politics were well-trod paths that I had pursued before having written four other books over the past twenty years. I certainly don’t expect readers to turn to those earlier works, but I don’t think a writer ever fully disengages from earlier paths. After all, they were intriguing then, and, for me, they remain intriguing now. So I have to admit, if it wasn’t already evident to a reader, that without really planning it, self-reliance was part of my education and getting a law degree. Politics came next as I immersed myself in the work of Ed Koch as a Congressman and later as Mayor of New York City. As for free enterprise, my private law practice with corporate clients taught me a good deal, as well as when business interests were at stake as New York City tried to recover from being on the edge of bankruptcy in the late 1970’s. From City Hall, I experienced the enormous challenge of reconciling free enterprise with politics from day to day. I have been writing as long as I can remember, although when people say “Oh, you’re a writer,” I usually flinch and deny the title. It has
never provided a living wage nor have I pursued writing for that reason. More important, it has been a compulsion, as William Faulkner told me years ago, “David, when the bug bites, you’ll write.” And so I have, and so again this book. I am always interested in what others think about what I have written, whether praise or criticism. Writing is a solo act for me, but sharing what is written is why the “bug” has bitten me so many times over the years—from writing scripts and lyrics for a college show to poetry in London, to short pieces here and there ever since. It’s not like talking to yourself, although that’s where first drafts begin. It’s reaching out with ideas, opinions, and your own experience to make some connection with colleagues, friends, and strangers. Why I read others’ work is why I want to share my own. The conversation, so to speak, never ends, unless, of course, it does when others have better things to do and when I put down a book and turn to a game of chess, walking the dog, or just resting from the sometimes hard work of writing or reading. Having written a book about assumptions, which I have found a fascinating path to explore, I should stay in character here and ask you, the reader, whether my exploration has given you reason to do your own exploring of subject matter that perhaps you would not have pursued otherwise. My trail ends here but I hope yours takes you to questions and ideas about assumptions, your own or others, that provide new directions, even the possibility, eventually, of new destinations. As Mark Twain said: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” The Tea Party movement, I’m sure, will continue to provoke many non-believers like me.
For that reason alone, the movement should be a welcome intrusion in everyone’s thinking. The “Notes of George Commoner” offers a similar, but disappointing end to Jefferson Bean’s brief excursion into the real world. For Tea Partiers in a world of their own is not that different, although with much greater staying power in American history, which is why it both attracts and repels so many. I rather doubt that I will write again as I pursue paths that take me deep in a woods that I don’t know and from which I rather doubt I will emerge
again.