it is in a sense a love letter to your son, tommy and it's also a sort of letter full of love and despair about the current state of american democracy. just to stick with tommy and you speak so movingly and beautiful about them it strikes me that tommy wasn't just your smart, talented, beautiful son, he also had become something of a moral compass for you, a sort of conscious and adviser and somebody that you did discuss politics with a great deal. that's right. tommy was kind of a political savant, a natural kind of a thoroughbred. they were so many political influences in his life. but he was disenchanted, i'd say at a very early age with conventional electoral parliamentary politics, the kind of politics that i do.