> Write this off as Mellow Yellow (quite rightly) if you wish, Doug, but I
> think RWE's transparent eyeball could see the way to a socialistic future
> for the U.S.
Egads no. Emerson was reciting a classic trope of Enlightenment ideology: the idealized nature of yeoman capitalism (the US frontier), conveniently shorn of the grisly social history of the extermination of indigenous peoples, commercial exploitation, indentured servitude, the slave labor which financed New England's industrialization, or even anything as mundane as mosquitoes.
The I of the total system is the Eye of $auron -- devouring all it sees, seeing only that which it wishes to devour.
-- DRR