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Wednesday, August 25, 2004
In reference to the email quoting a Professor Alexander Tyler on the Athenian Republic, this entire post is built on an urban legend that has been circulating since just after the 2000 election. In fact, the count of states won by Gore and Bush indicates that it was begun before the results were finally determined for Florida and New Mexico. The total in the email comes out to 48 states. The final count was 30 for Bush and 20 for Gore. Even the long quote about the fall of the democracy of Athens cannot be verified. The "Alexander Tyler" in the message is likely suppose to be Lord Woodhouselee, Alexander Fraser Tytler, born in Edinburgh in 1747. Many of the other "facts" in this email are wrong and you can sift through one person's attempt to research the whole piece at: As for the general idea that Democrats are the ones on the downward side of the demise of Democracy, I think we have allowed this lie to exist way too long. The modern conservative movement has been demonizing liberals and sanctifying conservatives for decades. It angered the rich and powerful that our country came to the rescue of the victims of the Great Depression on the backs of the few remaining elite who rode above the damage. The elite in this country weren't able to formulate the message they needed for many years. Once the middle class was built back where they could appeal to a large number of people who dreamed of wealth and power from their precarious positions of moderate success, they found the message they needed. The message they crafted, targeted to these Americans rising on the ladder of wealth, was a claim that government programs serving the less fortunate were dragging their rise to places of success and security. They stuck programs of assistance with labels like "entitlements." They gave the word entitlement a whole host of bad connotations. In reality, entitlement is what the elite live on. They feel entitled to their successes and resent any drain on their wealth or power. An online columnist and friend of mine recently published a great essay on the difference between a culture of obligation and a culture of entitlement. You can read it at: The issue is titled "This Week's Clue: Obligation." The culture of obligation is one in which each member feels an obligation to each other and to the overall organization (or society in this case). In a business it accounts for strong, long-running companies like IBM and even Wal-Mart. These companies find a way to produce a sense of obligation to the whole. Companies and societies fail when that sense of obligation is replaced by a sense of entitlement (as in the cases of Enron and Tyco). This is the theme we Democrats need to adopt and preach like evangelists on a hot summer night inside the revival tent. We have allowed the Republicans (and some other twisted groups that preach individualism) to destroy this sense of obligation. They have been preaching a message of every man, woman and child for himself or herself. They have been saying we have no obligation beyond our obligation to achieve whatever success we wish to have. The Republican Party is the party of entitlements. Republicans feel entitled to live as if nobody else matters. They feel entitled to clutch every dime they make in total disregard for the needs of others or even the general needs of all. In the process they fight for careless tax reduction while at the same time spending what tax revenue is left to wage immoral wars, and to buy influence into the decisions of corporations and countries. We are back to the issue of framing. Maybe we need to start our own think tank here in Oklahoma (like George Lakoff did in California). We certainly need to find a way to bring clever message makers together to reframe our messages and move people from this culture of entitlement to one of obligation to society as a whole. Sunday, August 22, 2004
I live in a wonderful community. First, the Dean campaign brought out a hidden group of progressives who, like me, have for years tried to maintain normal lives apart from politics. We have been disappointed in the directions of our various governments at time, but other than complaining to family or friends (the few who would listen) we tried to remain private citizens and simply vote our conscience. The 2000 election changed that for most of us, and by the primary campaigns for this year's election we were looking for someone who would stand in strong opposition to the mean-spirited sense of individual entitlement embodied by our current Presidential administration. Dean's campaign brought us together. As this has evolved into a movement from a campaign it has create a most interesting community. We are a mix of professionals, laborers, artists and researchers. In Norman, OK this means some significant numbers of academic researchers who keep our rhetoric honest by their constant scrutiny of our claims and methodologies. Here is tribute I recently posted to our Yahoo Group, DFA Cleveland County. Margaret and Laura (and at other times Mary Beth and others),
I hope I speak for others in DFA Cleveland County when I say that one of the single greatest values in being a part of this group is the sanity and academic rigor you bring to our activism. I'm amazed not only at the reality you inject into the rhetoric on these discussions but the honesty you bring as well. I'm not sure if groups outside a community blessed with a research university could understand the value of your participation. Political arguments are always taken skeptically. Bias is assumed. Often we even see so-called academic research used to promote an idea. In fact, this happens so often that I think many people have given up on trying to tell when science is enlightening the discussion and when it is being abused to cloud or distort the truth. It is refreshing when researchers refuse to dumb down their arguments in a disrespect for the general public. To discern the truth in any claim some detail must be given on the science as well as on the methodology and sources. In all this talk about depleted uranium (DU) weapons, Margaret was the first to explain why DU is used. I had no idea DU is "nearly twice as dense as lead." (statement made at http://www.ngwrc.org/Issues.cfm?NewsTopicID=8) That explains the trade off even if it doesn't justify it. Modern methods of warfare (and I include as far back as Agent Orange in Vietnam) certainly should give us pause before using military solutions. Just because we can do a great deal of killing from a console far away doesn't mean we are engaging in "clean" warfare. We may be poisoning vast parts of our planet, whether by use of radioactive material, or by stripping vegetation, or by releasing massive amounts of crude oil at ground level, or even by spreading deadly mines that aren't easily removed. Can you imagine how often we'd use preemptive rather than defensive military action if we had to do an environmental impact statement first? |