Haters gonna hate, I guess.

So, apparently there are some people out there accusing me of being a gasp! poser. Seriously? Seriously. I'm the derivative one? You're kidding, right? Would the people of Salem have even heard about daguerreotypy without me? I was the first one to join that Fourierist commune, and then when it became too mainstream, I dropped out before everyone else did, too. I mean, come on. Who was the one who told Hepzibah she should start selling that artisanal gingerbread?

All right, all right, all right. I am aware that Papa Hawthorne said that I "might fitly enough stand forth as the representative of many compeers in his native land" [1]. But he only said that because obvs, I was the original one and everybody else just copied me.

And then there's this Daniel Barnes fellow going on about how I stole my whole act from Orestes Brownson. Look, I have nothing against Brownson--I mean, Orestes is a wicked name--but come on. Really? Really.

• "For one thing, Holgrave's earlier theory of property sounds remarkably like the one Brownson advanced in his essay on 'The Laboring Classes'" [2]. I'mma go into that whole thing in a later blog post, but I will just say in my defense that we were all hanging out a lot at that time, drinking a lot of organic chicory, it's no surprise that we both hold similar political beliefs. I don't know when he sat down to write that essay, but I know we had a lot of conversations about this stuff, so who knows who really came up with it first, you know?
• "Now it is true that ideas of such radical stamp were in the air by 1851--and had been at least since the depression of 1837" [3]. Thank you. Wait--I was 7 in 1837. But I still totally knew all about that stuff then. I was a precocious kid.
• "Like [Holgrave], Brownson typified perhaps in the extreme the virtues and defects of the reformers of the 1840s" [4]. Yeah, I have "extreme defects." Whatever. Moving on.
• Now this is where it gets ridiculous. "Brownson too had passed successively through phases--as a Calvinist, Universalist, Unitarian, Transcendentalist, and proto-Marxist--much to the delight of his enemies. And more important, he too had undergone and abrupt conversion...to Roman Catholicism" [5]. I mean, that's fine, I respect everybody's opinions and their freedom to change their minds and stuff, but I'm pretty, pretty sure I'm not going to just up and do a 180 on my beliefs anytime soon.

All I can say, Mr. Barnes, is: whatever, man.  



[1] Hawthorne 125 
[2] Barnes 272
[3] ibid 274 
[4] "  "
[5] ibid 275