Election Day has come and . . .
the results are a bit less than expected but still favorable for breaking out of some of the arrogance and idiocy of the past six years. Now the process of politics (in the best sense of the word) may get back on track.
On my first class day in my freshman Political Science class, the professor, a Republican with state and national standing in the then Nixon' White House, said, "Politics is the art of creating a sense of fairness and balance in the national polity." That is the noble job of politics. There are many subfunctions of the grand plan and sometimes methods are used to create outcomes that are inimical to the greater process.
Radical departures from the classic liberal center of American politics (of which there are two wings, Democrat and Republican) as displayed by the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, may achieve a new overlay of fairness to the national experience but there is a price to pay. The Eisenhower years nurtured a new level of intervention and military adventurism, not so much by Ike's leadership, but rather by whom he allowed access to the national resources. In so doing he nurtured the idealist and operatives of military adventurism in Iraq. The lessons of history are not on that side of the equation. The current "leadership" (read enamblers) have allowed a whole new level of privateering and racketeering to prevail for the moment. Some of that will go unpunished, but the dockets and committees will have criminal fodder to chew on for several years.
The American experience is by design a construct of the best of the western Christian moral tradition as cast through the prism of the Enlightenment. The American experience is a process of trial and error. It has been messy but the order of tyranny has never had a lasting run.
The greater work is now just ahead. the errors of the last six years have to be addressed. The trickery and the empty words of alliance with particular groups of malleable interests will become exposed.
As a nation, in the world, we have a lot of water to carry and a lot of places to visit officially with hat in hand and a plan to serve rather than to kill. After all, it is the tradition on which we are established.
Please do be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible.
On my first class day in my freshman Political Science class, the professor, a Republican with state and national standing in the then Nixon' White House, said, "Politics is the art of creating a sense of fairness and balance in the national polity." That is the noble job of politics. There are many subfunctions of the grand plan and sometimes methods are used to create outcomes that are inimical to the greater process.
Radical departures from the classic liberal center of American politics (of which there are two wings, Democrat and Republican) as displayed by the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, may achieve a new overlay of fairness to the national experience but there is a price to pay. The Eisenhower years nurtured a new level of intervention and military adventurism, not so much by Ike's leadership, but rather by whom he allowed access to the national resources. In so doing he nurtured the idealist and operatives of military adventurism in Iraq. The lessons of history are not on that side of the equation. The current "leadership" (read enamblers) have allowed a whole new level of privateering and racketeering to prevail for the moment. Some of that will go unpunished, but the dockets and committees will have criminal fodder to chew on for several years.
The American experience is by design a construct of the best of the western Christian moral tradition as cast through the prism of the Enlightenment. The American experience is a process of trial and error. It has been messy but the order of tyranny has never had a lasting run.
The greater work is now just ahead. the errors of the last six years have to be addressed. The trickery and the empty words of alliance with particular groups of malleable interests will become exposed.
As a nation, in the world, we have a lot of water to carry and a lot of places to visit officially with hat in hand and a plan to serve rather than to kill. After all, it is the tradition on which we are established.
Please do be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible.
posted by Lantern Bearer @ 12:40 PM
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