To prove a point

Some of you, you know who you are, think that I do very little over here at Glasgow, what with my regular trips to Belgium, my newfound interest in the blog, and the tedious tales of my boredom abroad. Not so, I say. I can't even read an issue of The Atlantic without being reminded of my research. In this month's issue, for instance, one finds the delightfully-named Jebediah Purdy and his article on suspicion in contemporary America. The upshot of his essay is:

We know that in the 1990s, without faith in government, trust in business turned out to be groundless. The question now is, If we don't trust one another enough to keep civic culture strong, will our growing faith in government prove equally misguided? Then we could fall back only on the weak reed of our solitary selves.

Benign enough, right? Perhaps even something you church-going folk find a bit edifying, inspiring even. My lot in life, however, is to bear the weight of odd, burdensome synaptic connections. While reading Purdy's essay, I couldn't help but think, I swear, it really was against my conscious will, of the August 18, 1849 edition of the Literary World, wherein one finds the purloined perspective of the Merchant's Ledger on the subject of con men and duplicity -- 'purloined' insofar as the academic citation of the article has been, at least since the 1960s, the last time somebody bothered to look, the Literary World, due to the fact nobody's been able to track down a copy of the latter. You still with me? If not, or regardless, try this on for size: consider, merely that, the implications of the following; or, if not the implications, whirl whimsically about your room as you think, perhaps with a bit of haughtiness, as though you were onto the secret that, yes, the cliché is true, "Some things never change":

That one poor swindler, like the one under arrest, should have been able to drive so considerable a trade on an appeal to so simple a quality as the confidence of man in man, shows that all virtue and humanity of nature is not entirely extinct in the nineteenth century. It is a good thing, and speaks well for human nature, that, at this late day, in spite of all the hardening of civilization, and all the warning of newspapers, men can be swindled.

The man who is always on his guard, always proof against appeal, who cannot be beguiled into the weakness of pity by any story -- is far gone, in our opinion, toward being himself a hardened villain. He may steer clear of petty larceny and open swindling---but mark that man well in his intercourse with his fellows -- they have no confidence in him, as he has none in them. He lives coldly among his people---and when he walks an iceberg in the marts of trade and social life -- and when he dies, may Heaven have that confidence in him which he had not in his fellow mortals. (his emphasis)

What's the point of all this? That question is not nearly as rhetorical as you might think, as I'm in danger of forgetting myself. My point . . . it isn't to say that the opinions of Purdy and the Merchant's Ledger are one in the same, that 150 years converge at the blink of an eye, at the flick of a literary critic's keystroke; though, I must admit, the similiarites are striking. No, the point, the only point, of all this, besides linking you (once again) to an interesting article in a typically very good magazine, is to get, or at least to attempt to get, no matter how invariably vain the attempt, a handful of people off my back that I never actually get any work done.

Granted, it was all last year, but that's grossly beside the point, if there ever was one to begin, or end, with.