The end of a democracy comes when participants start gaming the rules to ensure particular outcomes, rather than following the rules and allowing voters an honest chance to influence government. We have reached and, I would say, starting wading across that Rubicon.
Today, another madness has been added to the sad litany of rules-gaming and partisan manipulation.
Today, at least, nothing. In a curiously intense summer primary contest for the state Board of Education, the day was won by people who believe that the science standards should reflect, you know, actual science. Their opponents were a cabal of Intelligent Design boosters. There’s a nice wrap-up at Forbes.com and a more gung-ho, in-your-face summary at Thoughts from Kansas.
The Forbes piece quotes a Kansan named Ryan Cole, “I feel like if you give two sides of something, most people are intelligent enough to make up their own minds.” I wonder how many ID proponents would be OK if the history course started teaching Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code version of early Christianity, because after all, millions of people have invested in it.
Yay for the good guys that will put Kansas back into the mainstream on science education. But boo for all of us that we, a supposedly advanced and enlightened nation, need to fight this same battle over and over again.
A lot of attention lately has been focused on “presidential signing statements” — declarations by the President as to how he intends to interpret the statutues he signs into law. Though the signing statement has existed for the history of the Republic, the current President has grotesquely expanded its use. In a report by the American Bar Association, it is noted that, from the founding of the Republic through the inauguration of President George Walker Bush, the signing statement had been used fewer than 600 times. In President Bush’s six years, he has issued over 800 such signing statements. Moreover, he has aggressively used these statements to stake out his political position, to override Congressional intent, and to establish himself as the only arbiter of the constitutionality of his actions.
What are the implications for the Republic?
A week or so ago (2006 July 23), the New York Times had an article (“Conspiracy Theories 101” by Stanley Fish) detailing a brouhaha surrounding Kevin Barrett. Mr. Barrett is a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin who has gotten into hot water because he shared with his students his strong conviction that the World Trade Centers were destroyed not by Islamic terrorists but by the American government itself. Mr. Fish uses the occasion of Mr. Barrett’s controversy to expound the “correct” view of academic freedom, which Mr. Fish thinks both sides have gotten wrong in the Barrett debate. I think he misses the point.
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So there’s been some buzz about the unscripted, undiplomatic, and somewhat profane remarks of President Bush in Russia, when he didn’t know a microphone was “hot”. (Bush’s Policy Chit-Chat: Undiplomatic Prose – New York Times). Or did he? I don’t want to get all tinfoil-hat, but…
It’s a truism that’s become so trite it hardly rises to the level of a bumper sticker: Freedom isn’t free. You see it slapped across the back of SUVs, taped to the windows in Circle-K’s. Some days, it seems everyone can mouth the words but nobody understands them. Freedom isn’t free. It has always carried a cost, demanded a sacrifice. In any society that claims to be free, that liberty must be purchased.
Here I am not talking about, say, taxes. Taxes are not the price of liberty. I am not an anti-tax nut. I recognize, as Justice Holmes did, that “taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society”. Taxes pay for the police and the courts, the schools and the hospitals, for sanitation and water and roads. But that’s true for any civilization. Taxes make the modern American civilization possible. They do not make it free. One of the staggering lessons of history, quite unwelcome at the moment of triumph of global capitalism, is that the price of freedom is not set in dollars, or in yuan, or in barrels of petroleum, or in bullion.
The price of freedom is blood.
OK, nominally this blog is supposedly about education. But school’s out, I don’t have any urgent education-think to lay out there, and there are other issues that speak to me. Today it’s about the so-called “flag burning amendment”. For those who object to political content bleeding into “neutral” areas, I’ll quarantine it behind a “Read the rest of this entry…” link.
I saw this piece on slashdot. It’s about a librarian (Michele Reuty) who is coming under fire for — gasp! — insisting that police follow the laws of New Jersey and obtain a warrant before rifling through the records of a public library. Despite following the policies of the library and, you know, the law, she is being accused of being soft on criminals and of putting the library ahead of the needs of the police. The suspect sought had allegedly threatened a young girl, so the predictable cries — Think of the children! Oh, dear God, won’t somebody think of the children! — have sprung up. (more…)