(Rorty and America) and other bull shit rantings on a rainy day...

I have attempted to find thinkers out there that share my faith in democracy. These are surprisingly hard to come by if one digs down deep through rhetoric and theoretical mind games. Rorty is one of these thinkers for me. I have dedicated the summer to reading more democratic things (if we exclude the unthinkable amount of Batman comics I have read and there may even be a case here). One of the book I am reading to this end is Rorty's Achieving Our Country. It is a great book. It is a passe thing these days to right about pride in one's country (unless you are from another country living in America) or maybe it is simply unthinkable these days to be proud of being an American. Though I see Michelle Obama's point. Rorty started his book with the words, "National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self improvement." A point well made and a point well taken. Those of you who know me or have heard me rant from atop a bar stool know of my pathological love of the American Pragmatic tradition. I am sympathetic with almost all of it: its democratic ethos. Its distrust of epistemology, the correspondence theory of truth, and metaphysics in general. Its embracing of flux and change. Its belief that things can be made better and that we must stop wasting time. I suppose that in all of my rantings against philosophy it is precisely pragmatic philosophy that fuels this ranting and at the same time my own thoughts that come to me when I am in the midst of doing something else. I suppose we must believe in what we are doing and know that in doing so that we can affect change. This goal cannot be separated from time and place in my mind. The pragmatic spirit has a thorough going American spirit in it. That is where my goal comes from and returns to I suppose. I modest and delusional goal perhaps but mine none the less.
"To say that the United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem is to say that America will create the taste by which it will be judged. It is to envisage our nation-state as both self-creating poet and self-created poem." -Richart Rorty