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Ed Goldstein’s
‘Tools’ are fossils of an America founded in
revolution, built from fire and steel. Ethics of
colonial frontiersmen funneled down valleys, over
arching mountains displacing, enslaving, indenturing
and embracing the poor and huddled in a work ethic
built upon principles of competition. Settled upon a
wilderness of toppled forests, weathered hands of
generations of immigrant workers formed phallic
skyscrapers into jutting metropolis. The kings of
burgeoning industry, balanced upon towering pinions
of steel, now collapse, consumed in a conflagration
of paper currency, a fallen giant, whose past
virtues are extolled by conservative radio criers,
like the demented grandfathers of once virginal
daughters, now mothers to three hundred million. An
ethic canonized in human hands and metal, built by
migrants from an ice age crossing frozen straits to
hunt bison and mammoth, or crossing turgid oceans in
wooden ships with fabric sails; the bones of a
thousand tools, now become petroglyphs in an
encrypted story of our nation’s origins.
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