Staggeringly intense forces direct strain upon it on all sides. It is thrust upwards, only to be battered down. It is built up, only to be ground down and eroded. Seismic upheavals violently cleave it into parts, and carry them along along deep and jagged fault lines.

From a safe distance it thrills and fascinates—beckons towards further exploration. But to be up close to it is to confront impracticable steepness, harshness, and unpredictability. This is not something to be tamed, to be wrapped up in a bow. Slippery and strong, it will resist being mapped onto anyone’s agenda. It will always refuse to entirely bend to one’s personal will.

What am I talking about?

The San Gabriel Mountain Range, of course. Some of the world’s youngest mountains, they rise, crumble, and not infrequently burn out the windows where I work and write.

Yet how I have described those mountains—complex, constantly under pressure from within and without, enticing yet intimidating, bleak as desert here, lush as Eden there—applies just as readily to Alexander Hamilton.

For by all accounts our nation’s Revolutionary War hero turned Secretary of the Treasury (turned latter day matinee idol) could be as fiery, stubborn, and hard to deal with as he could be winning with erudition and charm. And like those mountains, Alexander Hamilton’s name and prestige refuse to stand still.

In life, Hamilton became a hyper-contentious figure practically the moment he achieved national attention. In 1792 a friend in relatively far-off Virginia wrote Hamilton he heard his name come up in conversation every single day. “[You are] commended by some,” the friend attested, “condemned by others. Sometimes you are mounted to the skies on the wings of fame, [only to be] again whisked into the infernal pit.”

By the turn of the 20th Century, though, things had changed mightily. In 1900 New York University decided to erect a marble “Hall of Fame for Great Americans.” It invited the public to nominate who should be immortalized within.

Alexander Hamilton did not even make the list. In fact he was beat out by such unforgettable luminaries as painter William Morris Hunt, botanist Asa Gray, and Unitarian preacher William Ellery Channing. (Agitation by Hamilton’s apologists, though, managed to get him included fifteen years later)

Today, Hamilton’s reputation is undergoing an intense and sped-up period of instability and dynamism to rival earth’s most unstable landscapes. While the San Gabriels, as one writer frames it, are being put “through a tectonic meat grinder” of simultaneous uplift and compression, Hamilton’s memory just as swiftly and transformatively being altered by the stage musical that bears his name.

Hamilton: An American Musical, which volcanically exploded onto the theater scene from modest (if not unpedigreed) off-Broadway origins, has taken a man once spoken of as the “forgotten founding father” and all but granted him household name status.

There now exists—thanks to Lin Manuel-Miranda’s epiphany while reading a doorstop-heavy biography on a beach vacation—a cultural bloom of latter-day Hamiltonia. There are references in the news: think the recent post-2016 election “Hamilton electors.” The social media feeds won’t quit. Renditions of the song “My Shot” from another TV show cast or “flyover country” middle-school chorus, anyone?

As great and accomplished as Hamilton the musical is—and I would say it is both things abundantly—the show and much of its accompanying phenomenon have a simplifying effect. They obscure quite a lot about the actual historical figure. For anyone after more than the side dish of knowledge that comes with the entrée of entertainment, the musical is inadequate to begin your real understanding of the man and the age in which he lived.

The musical’s many omissions, tweaks, streamlinings, and misrepresentations are to Hamilton’s life and times what the rockfalls, mudflows, and katabatic winds are to the San Gabriels. They are phenomena that smooth edges, relieve zones of pressure, wear away at sharp peaks, and fill in valleys.

For example, entirely left out of Hamilton is the historical figure’s Machiavellian role in the 1783 so-called Newburgh Conspiracy. There is a strong case to be made that Hamilton colluded to allow a set of disgruntled Revolutionary War officers stage a military coup of sorts in the fledgling American republic. He wanted to set a low bar for the central government to robustly enforce its own laws. And he may very well have been setting those disgruntled officers and their followers up—setting them up to be violently brought to heel by troops under George Washington. (Washington not only refused to take the bait, but rebuked Hamilton for using the army as a toy). Pointedly, this is the very scenario that did play out over a decade later during what is remembered as the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania. That crushing of federal law-breakers Hamilton personally oversaw, with quite thuggish machismo.

That the Hamilton musical left these and other episodes out, it is no crime per se. In fact, it would impossible not to make a great many editorial omissions, tweaks, streamlinings, and misrepresentations (if not overt counterfactuals) in the pursuit of a workable stage play, film, or other work of art. A creator—even a book author—cannot possibly include everything that happened in a life. Especially not a complex and important one. But in the case of someone like Alexander Hamilton, that simplifying effect can be dangerous.

Why? Pay close attention to our national politics, and the life and death choices that officials make every day. And I believe you will see that American history is a dicey thing to trifle with.

Our political past, our political heroes—especially the Founding Fathers—are regularly deployed as weapons in the battles to influence the people and course of our country.

Pundits invoke the founders, commandeering their gravitational pull to shape public opinion. Elected officials channel Jefferson or Madison to lend legitimacy to policies they are crafting. Lawyers arguing before the Supreme Court of the United States cite quotations and make inferences from the precedents they established.

The Founding Fathers—what they said, what they did, who they are—remain the raw materials, the bare elements, out of which sometimes crushingly intimate and earth-shaking decisions about our lives, politics, freedoms, wallets, and even bodies are made. If law and public policy was not position papers and oral debate between grappling partisans but instead magic wielded in battle by mighty sorcerers, the legacy of the Founding Fathers would be the eyes of newt and tongue of frog needed to cast spells.

Take one of the most momentous issues we currently face: how much power an American president should be able to constitutionally wield. This debate plays directly into the legacy of Alexander Hamilton.

Former George W. Bush Department of Justice official John Yoo—perhaps best well known for authoring the controversial 2002 “Torture Memos”—wielded Hamilton to justify his vision of a “unitary executive” with vast influence over both foreign and domestic power.

Yoo’s unitary executive model, which he presents as minted with Hamilton’s posthumous endorsement, has been key to every presidential administration since. The influence of the idea of a unitary executive shows no signs of depletion. And I would say it has done real injury to our constitutional doctrine of separation of powers.

Similarly, an extensive exhibit of Hamilton artifacts that began at the New York Historical Society in 2004 and went on to tour the nation effectively proclaimed Hamilton as the originator of our modern military-industrial complex. The exhibit utterly lacked any critique whatsoever of how American military might has been applied through the centuries, such as in the controversial cases of Cuba, the Middle East, or Southeast Asia.

It’s fine to be entertained and even, to a degree, informed by a work of art like Hamilton: An American Musical. But the stakes are far too high to allow such a personal, interpretive vision and immersive music- and stagecraft-experience make us decide we “get” someone like Alexander Hamilton.

We cannot afford to be gullible about the Founding Fathers. We cannot afford to yield an inch of ground to those who in the great halls of government and the blustery jetstreams of opinion would caricature them (and what they supposedly represented) in order to sabotage the public interest.