Hm. Okay, I'll trust that at this point the universe is aware that I'd much rather be back in the world of six months ago, reliably nomading through the Balkans. And, not to overdo the Touchstone-in-the-forest soliloquy, it was clearly a mistake to think that I could simply crash back into the city and slog out the winter when the academic publishing house reduced my freelancing daily bread-source.
But, as there really wasn't any other choice, it's more of a mistaken belief without an effect in the world than anything else. (Even in my travails, I argue against philosophical pragmatism.)
The classic doctrine holds that in tragedy, everyone needs to be acting sive necessitatis, according to their beliefs and in such a way that they could do no other. And neither side is right or wrong. If Antigone is the hero and Creon is simply a blockhead, you're watching a bad production of the play. The point of tragedy is that when people do the right thing by their own lights, bad things are inevitable. This is why poverty was (pre Arthur Miller) generally held not to be a tragic condition, as it could easily be ameliorated. The depth of commitment to the necessity of the situation on both (all) sides needs to be strong.
So if this is tragedy, it's not because the winter has been an amazingly difficult, death-defying slog, buoyed by memories of Bulgarian mountains, Balkan coffees, and Transylvanian theatre. It's because this slog was made inevitable by my past difficulties in the academy. And it's very important to realize that the other side of things had a claim of right, one rooted not in moral right, but in pragmatic right, despite the corrupt practices. And part of the reason that I'm spending so much time working on Dewey et al. (other than the Rorty/Brandom recommendation) is that this pragmatic claim of right against the claims of morality is actually a deeply running stream in the American mind.
One afternoon at Illinois, I wandered over to the law school to hear a talk by one of the long-time advocates at the SG's office in DC. Afterwards, in the Q&A, I asked him what the biggest mistake novice advocates usually made was. His answer: not taking their opponents' arguments seriously enough. It would be easy, in the current difficulties just to, in the manner of a G&S captain, "d-mme all" and say that everyone else was simply a blockhead. But then your difficulties and pain are simply meaningless. The point is that the blockheads had a point -- and part of my present work is about beginning to argue against it.