BROOKLYN, NY, Sept. 20 - There is another party going on in Greenwich Village and everyone is trying to get me to come.

Instead, in the city that never sleeps, on my third night here, I've finally caught a few quiet moments to think in front of the laptop with a little jazz in the background and a 12-pack of Yuengling on ice.

As is often the case in the time of our lord and king George W. Bush, I'm thinking about revolutionary stuff.

Camped out here in the place where the first major battle of the American Revolution was fought, the "Battle of Brooklyn," I'm wondering what the people here think about it all.

But since they are speaking in Yiddish, I am having a hard time understanding them as their melodic language floats out the windows on a cool September night and blends right in with the jazz.

They are having a hard time understanding me, too, I'm sure, since I must sound to them like every dumbass redneck they have ever seen on TV when some horrible crime is reported from the American South, a major hurricane hits the Gulf Coast - or some football coach gets run off from some big college for hanging out in nudie bars cavorting with strippers.

I haven't talked to a single soul here yet who likes George Bush or his policies, so it must be a fine neighborhood, although I'm fully aware of the fact that General George Washington's Continental Army got its ass whipped their very first time on a battlefield by the well-trained British "Redcoats" here that day on August 27, 1776. The British burned down a quarter of New York then, but somehow, Washington and his army escaped to fight another day.

And that's a good thing. Otherwise, the war could have all been over and we would still all be British subjects, living in an Old Country monarchy despised by the world.

Now we're just a New World quasi-monarchy despised by the world and ruled at the will of the descendents of the British Loyalists, who don't mind at all mixing their religion and politics.

It was the Dutch who were smart enough to first settle this western edge of Long Island, although they had to convince the Canarsie Native American tribe - and the Mohawks - to let them take it over. Gunpowder played a role in that, of course, although they ostensibly did pay for some of the land in the 1630s.

The Dutch West India Company "authorized' it in 1644, and the Village of Breuckelen became the first municipality in what is now New York State, according to the Wikipedia online encyclopedia.

Perhaps due to its location and climate, Brooklyn has been the setting for some key figures in American letters since Washington's Army finally sent the crown's Navy into escape across the Atlantic Ocean.

In the classic poem "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," Walt Whitman wrote of the Brooklyn waterfront. In the novel Sophie's Choice, William Styron writes from Flatbush, just off Prospect Park. The 1955 play A View From the Bridge by Arthur Miller is set here.

Many writers make their home in the Park Slope neighborhood and are sometimes referred to as the "Park Slope intelligentsia."

We didn't meet any of them on this trip, although we did tour the new New York Times building today thanks to a certain editorial writer who used to be a copy editor on the national desk. We won't name him, because we're not sure he would like that. But he is a super nice guy and we enjoyed the short and gracious tour.

Too bad I didn't make it up here in time to see the old newsroom for the Old Gray Lady, but that also happened to me in Chicago when they cubicalized that newsroom on the week of my visit for an academic conference in 1999.

Photo by Glynn Wilson

I was struck by this Woman in White, painted by Picasso in 1923. It's one of the more straight, realistic pieces in Picasso's modern work. But he was so prolific, we can't run all the one's we liked here. It's more than worth the trip if you get a chance to catch them at The Met

We also managed to make it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art today - before it closed - and caught the Picassos, a Van Gough or two and three famous paintings by Henri Matisse.

Since old Pablo was such a hero to my old friend Spider Martin of Civil Rights photography fame, I had to see what Picasso was all about. And where else but "The Met," right next to Central Park, where we managed to catch some jazz in the trees and a green moment on a grassy knoll.

Yesterday, we got the tour of The Nation Institute and visited ground zero. And Tuesday night, I met with a certain crusading lawyer/writer associated with Harpers.org I like to call "Superman" at the Grand Central Station Oyster bar.

It shouldn't be too hard to figure out why I call him Superman, considering the mission to preserve "truth, justice and the American way" in Bush's America. I figured out on this trip, to interject a bit of humility, that I am only Superboy.

We haven't heard anything out of the House Judiciary Committee yet, or the Eleventh Circuit, on the Siegelman investigation. But we understand there's a little controversy going on in Alabama between Gov. Bob "Cowboy boots" Riley and Rep. Artur Davis, although we've been too busy riding subway trains and walking the streets of New York - like a bataan death march - to keep up with all the local details from here.

It looks like once again, it was all started by the Birmingham Ruse Newhouse newspaper anyway, so its likely nothing to get all riled up about.

They say New Yorkers walk an average of five miles a day. No wonder they look so thin on TV. In Birmingham, hell we have to drive to get anywhere.

Since Karl Rove has packed up his White House office and moved back to Texas, where they know him as "Turd Blossom," and since it looks like the justice train is whistling a different tune down in Washington for now, we can have a little fun. Maybe we'll make it to that party after all.

You know what I always say.

"The party's more fun when the work is done."