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The best that has come out of this effort, now into its third decade, is the rediscovery of neglected works which had not been included in the standard anthologies taught to college freshmen. Today's literary anthologies overflow with poems, stories, essays, and political polemics that would be totally unfamiliar to anyone who learned American literature in the bad old days.

The worst to come out of this effort is the self-righteous assumption, seldom acknowledged, that those who point out the socially-constructed nature of reality have a superior insight, as if they somehow were above the brainwashing that got to the rest of us, or - in the words of Pilgrim Father William Bradford - "as if they were wiser than God." Having destroyed the old culture in the name of relativism, these elitists now imagine that they know a better substitute, and often their new rules and new codes of behavior are even more rigid than Nurse Ratched’s. As one of the early deconstructionists, Roland Barthes, so blatantly revealed, "Reality is nothing but a meaning, and so can be changed to meet the needs of history when history demands the subversion of the foundations of civilization as we now it." Hence, the generation that in the name of freedom flaunted its use of the four-letter F-word in the '60s now insists that the use of words which even sound like the 6-letter n-word should be severely punished. Once they were for opening up the jails; now they are for putting all of us wretched sinners in the stocks. Condemning this loafers' paradise, they would herd all us all into their workers' paradise and throw away the key.

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They are certainly right that almost everything in culture is in a sense artificial, a con-game. But most of us have long since assumed that we are part of the brotherhood of sinners and realized there is no moral Mt. Sinai on which to stand to look down on the evil idolaters below. Most of us know, as Melville said, that we are forced to live in the world and accept its paper money "as if." The tribe, after all, must also be socially constructed, no more real than any meta-narrative. And Marxism is as much a meta-narrative as any. Their solutions have no more legitimacy than any others except to serve their own elitest ends. We need, not new structures, but no structures. That is what it would mean to be free, at least according to this dead-white-you're-a-peein'-on-us male.