Dew, that rain which condenses from the magic of the air has swathed the tall grass, its stalks topped with kernel seeds that remind the eye of from whence wheat comes. The orange bellied spiders have spun their webs across the gaps between the tallest stalks. It is 1974, in the last quarter century in America when anyone can truly be alone without intent. There skips through the dawn soaked fields a young boy, who has fled the still cool quiet of the house, built of brick in the waning days of the last century of absolute kings, and sought out the brushing breeze of early morning.

He has just been reading Sandburg's Lincoln, he knows that Nelson Rockefeller has great dreams for New York and America. Further he knows that Lyndon Baines Johnson set good men to die in a war we did not need, and that it was the Democratic Party that supported slavery to the bitter end. He does not yet know very much, but he knows, because he goes to school in a city, filled with faces of all shades of the human rainbow, that all people are the same and should be held in the same regard before man's courts, and God's judgment. So he is taught in school, and so he learns in church. And thus his allegiance belongs to the party that stands for this equality, for everyone, at all times. And thus he believes himself to be a Republican.

In these days his faith is shaken by the actions of Richard Nixon, and by the probing questions of a lawyer whose drawl he recognizes as being from the old South. The Senator gives, with "specificity", the details of a cover up by the White House of illegal actions intended to take and hold power by corrupting an election. The young boy knows that this is not something Lincoln would have done.

He lives in the land of late summer corn, and country fairs, of old decaying industrial cities that cling to memories of better times, and of complacently shabby country towns scattered across the rolling hills of upstate New York. The Midwest begins only a hundred miles away, where "pop" replaces "soda" in people's vocabularies, and the cluster herds of cows grow thicker and larger. It is the country of a proud poverty, and an even prouder aversion to those from outside.

It would be many turnings of days later, when a supremely confident Ronald Reagan would come into office, smiling broadly, and telling America that "government isn't the solution, government is the problem." It would be through the dry days that followed, as fear came to haunt the faces of friends and family, the pain grew, and even when finances turned in the summer of 1982, and a roaring recovery began in 1983, it was not the same. There was something hollow, something forced, forged, fictional and faked about the process.

That fiction would make him listen with attention as a Senator from Colorado would declare that it was time for "new ideas", and a new direction. He watched the fall of that politician over the issue of adultery and false piety.

In the years that came, the impression that the Republican party was no longer the party of Lincoln, that of responsible and powerful government, descendant of Hamilton's high Federalism and Teddy Roosevelt's Progressivism, but instead had absorbed those influences that were most repulsive of the proudly provincial, and bombastically bigoted, reaches of the American psyche. Cold days spent in bare apartments watching friends fade and waste away. The sounds of Republicanism had changed, filled with nasty fat faced young men, with an edge to their voice and a kind of absolute certainty that faith overwhelmed fact.

It was 1994, and a young man warned Democrats, his adopted party, that there was an electoral wipe out coming. It came, and a blizzard of the very men who had repelled that young man from the Democrats fell from positions of power, to be replaced by Republicans who were in every way worse. In the rage of days that had filled the dry years of the early 1990's he had read certain words that had convinced him that it was not the party, but the principle, to which he owed his loyalty. That principle was of a liberal spirit, and the possibility of affluence for all. In the words of a President he had come to rate above all others, even his youthful hero Abraham Linooln.

"Freedom for everyone, everywhere in the world."