JJ comes in, pulls open the fridge, chugs from a half-gallon jug of watery orange drink.

The kitchen is dim. Angled rays of sunlight slip through nearly-shut blinds, creating a pattern of bars over the room. JJ gulps down orange drink, pants, gulps again.

His shock of messy hair is limp. His elbows and knees carry grassy-muddy smears. And his skin itches. Across the faux-hardwood kitchen floor lie the crumbly clods of dirt JJ just tracked in with his soccer cleats.

JJ is eleven. He breathes through his nose as he takes one last swig of thin orange drink.

JJ sets the plastic jug on the marble countertop, beside the steel sink with its built-in garbage chopper. He uses the corner of his red T-shirt to wipe his mouth. Then JJ circumnavigates the countertop island in the middle of the room, his cleats clicking like cat claws on the floor as he walks.

He stops outside the folded-open door to the long kitchen cabinet and surveys the well-stocked shelves, up and down. The house is too quiet, so JJ hums softly. A jingle for soda pop. After a while JJ uses a foot to scoot a stool out from underneath the marble countertop and he clambers up, standing tippy-toe in his cleats atop the stool, reaching to grab something from the top shelf, whistling.

Suddenly, as JJ stretches the stool shakes and tips onto two legs, threatening to skid away on the smooth floor. Gently, on the toes of his cleats, JJ steadies himself against the second-highest shelf and pushes the stool back to rest on all four legs.

He climbs down holding onto a tin of Planters deluxe mixed nuts and scoots the stool back out of the way with a foot. Popping off the plastic lid, he fishes three cashews from the tin, and flips the nuts into his mouth. Chewing, he notices the sheet of yellow paper on the marble counter beside the little black-and-white TV.

JJ takes the paper between his hands, leaning his forearms on the marble edge of the counter, and holds it within one of the strips of angled sunlight so he can see what is written on the yellow paper in blue-ink letters. As he reads, JJ knocks the tin with his elbow and scatters deluxe mixed nuts all over the floor.

The house is silent again. Upstairs, JJ’s father Jeremy lies blue and unbreathing, in the stone-and-tile tub in the master bath.

“If only I had applied myself more. If only I got a classical education. If only I had learned Latin and Greek. If only I took my baseball more seriously,” JJ reads. “Don’t think I’m a coward or a chicken. Don’t think I wimped out. As a matter of fact, it’s the bravest thing I’m ever going to do. The only thing left for me to do that has any bravery in it at all. The last best thing. If only I had the chance to fight a war. I love you. Do not go upstairs.”

The yellow paper slips from JJ’s fingers, back to the marble countertop. He raises himself up and utters a soft whimper. Then he stands blinking against a bar of sunlight that is wrapped across his face.

JJ goes out, chopping cashews and filberts and brazils all over the faux-hardwood floor with his soccer cleats. JJ is named for his dad: Jeremy Junior.

DECONSTRUCTING CHOCOLATE:
A Student’s Farewell

“I got your Other

right here,”

I told Jacques Derrida,

The night he died,

Pushing aside his book

Which flapped like a wounded pigeon

to the ground.

“Why should the academy keep the keys?

You old Frog;

You fool.

Revolution is everything

But it isn’t a word,

Or a sign,

Like Tree or Grass or Post.

That needs

Only freeing.”

Later,

Much later indeed,

A chunk of chocolate melting in my mouth,

In my hands:

I pondered Milk

Incas

The African Slave Trade,

And realized the old, dead Frog had hit on something.

His book hadn’t moved,

So I picked it up,

Cream-sweetness on my tongue,

And buried it

Beneath my favorite tree,

A half-dead Poplar, by the way,

Which doesn’t have a word

For Anything.

It’s a long way from Port Huron to Park City.

Tom Hayden, the guru of the New Left appeared among America’s patrician class for the massive self love festival known as Sundance. Predictably, America’s bo-tox elite fawned all over Hayden, a man who performed heroic deeds during the Freedom Rides of the 1960s, and later in Chicago in 1968.

But Hayden’s knack for rubbing elbows with the country’s culture snobs exposes an inherent flaw in the version of American liberalism he helped articulate while a student in Michigan. And it helps explain the left’s utter failure since then – a disaster evinced by the fact that the country’s political center has moved so far to the right in the 45 years since Hayden and his fellow Students for a Democratic Society crafted the Port Huron Statement.

Back then, it was cute. A bunch of white college kids, awash in privilege, linking arms with America’s most truly oppressed and excluded. Their efforts helped kill Jim Crow in the South. They coherently argued against America’s “ruling myths,” and the hypocrisy of her liberty. They decried “power rooted in possession, privilege and circumstance.”

Then, sometime around Woodstock, they sold out.

They made heroes of rock stars. Turned mediocrities to millionaires. And their “counterculture” became just one more commodity at the grocery store.

Now, the America those pie-eyed students helped create is so far right that Dick Nixon looks something like Eugene Debs.

And still the left just doesn’t get it: You can’t rail against excess while sipping Moët et Chandon; you can’t argue environmentalism while guzzling megawatt after megawatt for your “film festival,” and you can’t deride American Imperialism if it’s the only reason you have a job.

Maybe someday the elitists of Sundance and Malibu will realize that they perpetuate the system they abhor, that they benefit the most from cultural imperialism and the global consumerism that has institutionalized world poverty. Maybe someday there will be a chance for real change.

But don’t expect a Park City Statement anytime soon.