Denmark Vesey: My President's Got Soul

Saturday, November 08, 2008

My President's Got Soul

Crankster from Malaysia said...

Interesting that you mention soul, Denmark Vesey. I think you Americans have had your intellectuals (and your movie celebrities) as president.

Things are changing. I think a president with soul is not a bad idea at all. A president can't be brilliance and charisma and everything else rolled into one.

But if he has intellectual advisors with sound knowledge, it's the soul that will lead the country ahead.

1 comment:

Crankster said...: Close guess - most of my countrywomen do look like that, but I'm ethnic Indian.

When I'm not out fighting the government (which is hell bent on screwing us), I look like this.; Nov 8, 2008, 11:03:00 PM

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"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."

The founders of the American state understood that the proper functioning of a democracy required an educated electorate. It is this understanding that justifies a system of public education and that led slaveholders to resist the spread of literacy among their chattels. But the meaning of "educated" has changed beyond recognition in two hundred years. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are no longer sufficient to decide on public policy. Now we need quantum mechanics and molecular biology. The knowledge required for political rationality, once available to the masses, is now in the possession of a specially educated elite, a situation that creates a series of tensions and contradictions in the operation of representative democracy.

Margaret Sanger. Woman, Morality, and Birth Control. New York: New York Publishing Company, 1922. P

Lord Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science On Society (Routledge Press: New York, 1951).

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