I never got to Paris, but I did make it back to America. That's a feat, I think, when everything in me was working against it. Like the last time, I felt more free where the paper didn't say it, but life actually gave it. We can have a law suit all we want over here, but it won't give us more liberty.

The last time I was in Italy. I didn't make it there this time, just like I never made it to Paris, but the effect on me was the same. The air was freer and I was alone but not lonely. That makes all the difference. I always love the idea of something but face the facts (I'm a realist after all) that sometimes wishes can never come true. Or if they do, it's always a different interpretation, because this wasn't just my wish and it wasn't just my life, but a wish logically thought out and presented to the world in a miracle in Philadelphia in 1789. Here we are, 218 years later, and that wish has been battered and twisted and misconstrued.
Has it ever been granted? Yes. But not in full.

But when it comes to wishes, although I believe them unfulfillable, I never cease to hope that I may just be wrong. It's not only the wish of a country, but of millions of individuals. It's funny because we all work for the same dream, and that dream means something different to each and every one of us. That makes us a miracle and a tragedy, it makes us tolerant and bigoted and lovely and grotesque all at once.

So I work to fulfill what I interpret that dream of the Founding Fathers to be for myself. I work for an ideal. Call me a fool, but nothing great was ever achieved by anyone less. I keep myself in check like this, playing the fool against myself as well as the logician. I see from a wider perspective if I am farther away. In this way I become closer. I can't stand being around the places I love, because I'm closer to them in my head. I fight for them from a distance. And so I would like to return to Europe, to be far from the Land of the Free, so that I can see it from every angle, so that I can work to keep it alive and to mold it and to hold it and to live it as I have always dreamed.

I cannot be a demagogue. But I can be the force behind one.