I'm about to do something I have never done before. And here it goes. If you read, or tried to read, yesterday's too long, too needlessly complex post, give it another read. I just spent a rather good deal of time chopping well more than 200 words from it and cleaning up much of the remaining.
Here's something else I've not done before. I hereby swear I shall never again raise the awful ghost of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in one my posts. I heard about that. The complaint was more than valid; it was commonsensical.
The indecipherable, unreadable German philosopher of 200 years past is not really the best source for any contemporary political column to go running to. To today's sensible readers, dear old Friedrich is dead and that's where he should stay.
So he be gone from the revised version below, along with a lot of other unnecessary Hegelian verbiage (ha! I just wanted to work him in one last time).
The funniest sitcom in US television history is "Frasier," and in one of its episode, he turns what should have been a new little "jingle" for his radio show into a full-blown operatic monstrosity. Later, Frasier almost tearfully tells his father (I may be paraphrasing): "Maybe I just can't do simple." But he could. And he did.
I'm learning the same lesson. But hey, guys, be understanding. I've only been doing this writing thing for 25 years.