Al was a pretty smart dude. Him and Jimmy and Johnny thought about stuff, talked about stuff, debated and argued stuff, and then wound up writing all that stuff down. Maybe just for us. It was important to them. It was important to the ideas and beliefs that they held, sometimes only after changing their minds in favor of a better idea or opinion that further shaped those beliefs.

Men of principle; men of integrity; men and legends of time. Some might say genius and I would not argue that, not really having the credentials to do so. My genius resides in acknowledging theirs.

You might call them retro, you might call them old school, you might dismiss them for some reason totally uncoupled from their extreme knowledge of history (lessons learned), human behavior (keen observations), and their insightful approach (brilliance employed) to what could work in the realm of humankind and accomplish what had never been done before within that realm.

And once accomplished and once established then average folks like us might believe things could never be undone. Unless you know history, that is. Unless you know the typical directions of human behavior, that is. And unless you have the insight and the foresight to attempt to put in place something that might help to hold the inevitable and persistent wolf at bay.

But even all of that might not, in the final day of days, matter all that much. And they damn well knew it.

They knew it.

“On the other hand, it will be equally forgotten that the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty; that, in the contemplation of a sound and well-informed judgment, their interests can never be separated; and that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying and obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants.”

Al was a pretty smart dude. He could see around corners and on the other side of hills and he tried to help us to do the same, to warn us of what might be there, but perhaps we are just no longer able to understand or, worse, maybe we just don’t believe or even care enough to heed the warnings.

Al was a pretty smart dude. Sure he got some things wrong, and he advocated much too much at times for the side of the larger power, federally speaking, but he was still a giant among men.

And sometimes not very well-liked.   He was shot in New Jersey and died in New York.

Sometimes genius is hard to figure out but the products of its workings are, well, genius. We would be smart enough, indeed, to heed.