1. I took a quick trip to Maine this weekend to see my niece and nephew in a play, as well as to celebrate my father’s birthday, hence why this is coming late.
2. The play was The Taming of the Shrew, the second time I’ve seen it recently (a friend was also in a production last fall). The production was very good, and the young cast did a truly impressive job in their roles (and I’m not just saying that out of avuncular partiality). Overall a good time was had by all.
3. Taming of the Shrew is a very fun play, albeit one that needs rather careful handling. I really like the dynamic between Katherine and Petruchio, the battle of wills making up the bulk of the comedy along with the underlying indications that they really are a well-matched couple (e.g. he is able to match her sarcasm beat-for-beat), in contrast with the more conventional, but ultimately less successful romance between Lucentio and Bianca.
4. The key element, to my mind, is that Lucentio and the other would-be suitors to Bianca are really not much to write home about, as men. Katherine’s disdain for them is really quite justified, as is her resentment towards her rather selfish and materialistic father. Then Petruchio comes in, and he actually is a man of substance beneath his devil-may-care attitude (as indicated by his reminding the others that he’s been in real battles and storms at sea, so he isn’t afraid of a woman’s tongue), but Kate only knows how to be defensive and self-assertive, so needs to be ‘tamed’ before she can take up her place as a loving wife.
5. AI will never truly revolutionize the economy because it is much too resource intensive to scale properly. Also, we are beginning to discover that in many cases it is much more trouble than it is worth.
6. I feel like the digital revolution has somewhat sucked the air out of the innovative and inventive spirit of America (which is one of our real virtues); it’s made people think only in terms of computers rather than other forms of mechanics or engineering. That might just be my layman’s perspective, though.
7. Americans, I find, tend of all people to be the most oblivious the disconnect between what is said and what the reality is. We seem to have an idea that to declare something is so means that it is so, regardless of the reality of the situation. One of the big examples is how many Americans still imagine that the States are, in fact, ‘states,’ that is, distinct, semi-independent nations rather than oversized counties (which is what they are). This is particularly strange given that we had an entire war specifically over this issue. Or the obvious absurdity of a ‘state’ being created at the will of and under conditions set by a larger state, so that it becomes a question of ‘achieving statehood’ by meeting certain requirements.
Cornwall is a ‘state.’ That is to say, it was a distinct political entity once, with its own heritage, culture, identity, etc., which was then folded into the larger state of England. Cornwall has a reality independent of England, even though it is also closely tied to it.
There was no such thing as ‘Arizona’ until the US government created it. Arizona is not a state in any real sense; it is simply a large administrative area.
Serpent's Den 
2-4: Ah, Taming. That brings back memories; I played Biondello in a community production of that once. (I vividly remember one rehearsal where Hortensio completely forgot his lines in IV.ii, and just kept reiterating, “I’m really upset!” till at last he stormed offstage and came and buried his face in his wig.)
5, 6: Amen.
7: Is it absurd, though? On any theory, when Vermont received her statehood, it was a case of Virginia, Massachusetts, et al., saying to her, “We recognize you as what we are,” and what they were, at least according to the Declaration they had all signed fifteen years before, was “free and independent States”. If that’s what they were, that’s what Vermont became – and what she and they together then made Kentucky into, and what the fifteen of them then made Tennessee into, and so on through the rest, Arizona included. (It is true, as you note, that the victorious side in the War between the States argued that they had ceased to be this in 1787 because mumble-mumble-mumble, but I will go to my grave maintaining that just pummeling the other guy until he says uncle doesn’t mean you’ve won the argument. The achievements occupy separate categories.)
More broadly, I wonder how much of the American tendency to take labels at face value is the genuine naïveté you imply, and how much is a debater’s instinct that you can’t go too far wrong holding people to their past statements. (“But, New York, you said yourself that we are and of right ought to be free and independent states! Right here, see?”) Probably there’s a fair admixture of each, of course.
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A sovereign state can enforce its own borders, decide who votes / who’s a citizen, and defend itself with its own military. To the extent that these issues were shifted to the federal level, the states were no longer sovereign, no matter what else they may have called themselves.
That being said. One could say that the states in the union admitted other states to said union. That would seem to imply they were states in their own right before that, a la Texas (if you believe Texans, it still is). It’s a little debatable when a state was clearly under U.S. jurisdiction but was called a “territory” until they decided to give it federal senators; is a “territory” a state that isn’t part of the union, but is instead subjugated by it? Or is it land controlled by the union that isn’t a state? As I understand it such “territories” were not independent countries prior to becoming states of the Union, but feel free to correct me on the facts if I’m mistaken on that point.
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(There I was trying to avoid capitalizing either state or union to avoid distracting from the point I was trying to noodle, and I managed to flub it at the last word. Ah well. Force of habit, I’d have been capitalizing both ordinarily.)
Putting my first point another way. Can a midwestern state deport Californians back to California? If not, I don’t care too much how the midwestern state self-identifies.
[Hey David! I’m your 88888th blog hit!]
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Territories are under the direct rule of the Federal Government. Since the vast majority of states are created out of federal territories, what you have is a nation recognizing a part of its own territory as a distinct nation solely for the purposes of annexing it.
So, yes, I’d call that pretty absurd, at least if we are to take these terms seriously.
Texas, Florida, California, and Hawaii are what I could call ‘soft invasion’ states: they are foreign territories which were settled by Americans with or without permission by the ruling governments, and which the American settlers then rebelled against and declared independent for the purpose of adding them to the United States (Texas only was independent as long as it was – not long at all – because the US government knew that annexing it would likely lead to war with Mexico and so hesitated).
The trouble with the debaters instinct theory is that it actually works the other way; the fact that Americans accept as true a statement which very clearly is not allows them to accept their actual position as if it were what they imagined it to be. So, Americans tend to start from the idea “Arizona is a free and sovereign state” and then interpret that idea in light of its actual political position, instead of starting from the definition of a free and sovereign state and then asking whether Arizona actually matches that definition.
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Isn’t it begging the question to call it annexation, though? Annexed territory is territory absorbed into a monolithic whole, and the whole question is whether the Union *is* a monolithic whole. (Or, rather, whether it “of right ought to be” a monolithic whole. As you say, to deny that it in fact has the power to enforce its monolithic wholeness on its constituents is to close one’s eyes to realities – but, then, one could argue that it only has that power because the constituents themselves either believe that they really are merely “glorified counties” or don’t think it worth the effort it would take to assert otherwise. That’s the basic weakness of the pragmatic outlook: you can’t logically treat brute facts as more important than ideals, since nine times out of ten it’s the state of the ideals that creates the brute facts in the first place.)
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Tangentially, whatever happened back then, we have to recognise the government we have now. For instance, those who figure the Revolutionary War wasn’t justified still have to treat the present constitutional/federal government as more or less legitimate – well, setting aside any questions of squandered moral authority or reasons one side or the other might believe thumbs had been put on scales (Watergate, JFK, you name it) or just plain that individual political actions may be illegitimate either legally or morally. There isn’t any other government that realistically can claim jurisdiction and sovereignty ’round here, whether we think the way it got that way in one war or another was right or not.
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Yes, but the question is whether there’s an ideal present to which you mustn’t let the reality blind you, as our fellow-countrymen, in our host’s remark above, let the ideal blind them to the reality. The goal is to see binocularly, so to speak.
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