Colonial Leaders Blog from Beyond the Grave

Wired drove me nuts back in 1995 with an essay on Thomas Paine that championed the Revolutionary-era scribbler as a patron saint of new media; that didn’t bug me so much as the use of the lazy “if So-and-So were alive today” device, wherein “cyberspace, not mainstream media, would be Paine’s home now.” Fast-forward eleven years, and National Review editor Richard Brookhiser is pretending to blog as the Founding Fathers to promote his new book, What Would the Fathers Do?, in which he imagines the reactions of early American leaders to today’s modern world. Ironically, he doesn’t include Paine in the ranks—just Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Washington and Franklin. (Not coincidentally, perhaps, Brookhiser has written bios of Adams, Hamilton, and Washington.)

If there’s anybody among you readers old enough to remember that special Bicentennial issue of Time, imagine that, but somehow set in 2006 A.D. So far, though, the gimmick seems to work for about a minute before all the mock-colonialism starts to blur together.

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