Reagan Revolution 2.0?

Repetition of history is often a given. The question is not so much whether, but how and when. To the latter, our accelerated technology driven world might answer: “Sooner than you think.”

Of particular interest is the similarity between today’s pattern of economic-political events and those of the 1970’s and 80’s: Both involved broad Republican power leading to their by overreach and loss of power; the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression; England's return to conservatism. In the late 1970's, the last event preceded America's return to the Right as well. We've yet to see if the same shoe will drop today.

In 1974 Nixon left office on the heels of the largest political scandal in American history. He left the economy in sharp recession, and although you can’t blame a recession on any one person, his poor economic policy certainly didn’t help. Bitter aftertaste from Watergate allowed the Democratic Party to take charge with Jimmy Carter. The economy continued to slump over Carter’s term, while England grew restless and the conservatives took charge. Thatcher was elected prime minister in 1979, and shortly thereafter Reagan was elected in 1980 – their combination sparking the “Reagan revolution”.

Today’s sequence of events, although not the exact same, shares some uncanny similarities: W Bush left office in 2009 widely unpopular. It was not due to scandal per se, but there was a palpable sense that, similar to what occurred under Nixon, the Republican Party had gained a whole lot of power and under his lead shot itself in the foot, a blow from which it’s still recovering. Similar to Nixon, Bush also left the economy in a state of disrepair; and although you can’t blame a recession on any one person, Bush’s previous policies (particularly on housing) certainly didn’t help.

England is also witnessing a hard and abrupt shift towards Conservatism, one of historic proportion. The immediate cause of this is the expenses scandal, but that can only explain for so much. It is important to view such developments as non-coincidental, particularly in a democracy: Sometimes people need a reason to turn against a party on a dime. Sometimes parties in power become complacent. In following sequence, it is worth asking whether, similar to the late 1970's, England's conservative shift will precede the same in America.

Although one shouldn’t jump to conclusions, it’s difficult not to compare today’s events with those of the 1970’s and ‘80’s. The speculative implication, of course, is that a conservative Reagan-like personality will emerge come next presidential election.

Avoiding such fantastical speculation, the analogy further likens Obama to Carter, a president who is frequently conceptualized as a failed idealist: Perhaps one with the right mind, but in the wrong place at the wrong time to use it to address crisis after crisis.



It is still too soon to judge Obama – and the public, likewise, is giving him his due time to perform. But emerging recently – and well written in a series of Economist articles focusing on areas in which his efforts have been stifled by poor execution and lack of detail and foresight – is a lingering suspicion that Obama will leave the country in no better shape than when he entered office.

This seed of lingering suspicion grows much bigger in light of the soaring popularity with which he entered office, particularly among young people. Such a failure should it occur would be seen as widely symbolic as his election. And such a failure should it occur would no doubt leave the Oval Office wide open for a rising Republican star (perhaps along the likes of Bobby Jindal).

At present Obama’s legacy remains to be written in stone. But time is running out. Much of it will rest on his performance over this upcoming year: “Crunch Time” as The Economist puts it. In the meanwhile Americans continue to hold their breath.

Judging from output alone, it took over 10 years for the US economy to return to pre-1974 levels. These sorts of recessions have a way of working themselves out but only in the very long run. Such is often the time required for an economy to unwind and reposition itself, a process which arguably took the whole of Reagan’s first presidential term. That the rate of job and capital loss will slow down is a given, but it’s very unlikely that we’ll see the economy prop itself back up over the next few years. The speculative implication is that the recovery won’t begin until at least the next presidential term.

The worst of the crisis is likely over. And yet we still find ourselves at a crossroads with little indication of where we might be heading. Only history will be able to tell us if we’ve been here before.


-KJ
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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1)Richard Nixon; (2)Jimmy Carter; (3)Ronald Reagan; (4)The Economist, April 1st 2009 Cover; (5)Hazy Trees, Katwingz20.

Video: (1)Carter Crisis in Confidence Excerpt from 1979 speech, 11/11/2008, metbans. Sphere: Related Content

Honing Capitalism - BAC vs. Fed

Political rhetoric has moved beyond socialism vs. capitalism. Instead, it centers on how to best hone capitalism for the common good. This insight comes directly from Barrack Obama’s autobiography. And in that context, it might just be semantics, replacing the term “socialism” with “honing capitalism for the common good”. The main difference, however, is that people will often have a definitive stance on socialism; but no one quite knows how to hone capitalism for the common good. This is why the Bank of America / Federal Bank scandal has emerged as bar none the most fascinating subplot of the financial collapse.

The basics of the scandal have been unfolding for some time: In September, BAC announced plans to acquire Merrill Lynch (ML). As the crisis worsened in the winter, BAC considered backing out based on ML’s projected 4th quarter losses. Paulson (previous US Treasury Secretary) and Bernanke (current Fed Chairman) pressured BAC to go through with the deal, threatening to withhold bailout should the economy worsen. BAC complied completing the deal around New Years. 2 weeks later, ML announced astronomical quarterly losses of about $20 billion. This outraged BAC shareholders who blamed CEO Ken Lewis, and Lewis in turn blamed Paulson and Bernanke. On top of all this, recently uncovered emails from the Fed show that they applied much more pressure to BAC than was previously thought, going so far as to threaten to remove Lewis. In the meanwhile, BAC, unsurprisingly, has received upwards of $50 billion in bailout funds, along with guarantees of twice that should they face future losses.

Bernanke and Pualson justified their actions as necessary to avoid widescale financial collapse. Afterall the failure of The Bank of the United States catalyzed the Great Depression in 1930. And it is thought that in order to avoid another Great Depression, we must prevent such large scale failures.

There is one view of history that says it’s determined by large-scale historical events. If you could’ve prevented the event, this line of thought goes, you’d have prevented its consequences. A more subtle view sees large historical events as the effect, rather than cause, of underlying social movement. Going by the latter, it doesn’t matter which large scale events you might prevent, because the underlying problem stays the same.

The BAC/ML merger didn't benefit the greater good at BAC's expense. In some ways, it has made the whole system worse. Going into the crisis, BAC was not only the healthiest bank in America, it belonged to a rare breed of successful commercial banks doing business with tens of millions of everyday people. Loading it up with ML's debt was the equivalent of further dragging down our banking system's best fruits with its worst apples. (Ironically, in 1933 the Glass Stegal act attempted to hone capitalism by doing the opposite, forcing the separation of commercial and investment banking.)

The underlying story of the financial crisis is that institutions which were too big to fail misread their risks and were too interconnected to each other. Fair enough. But to the degree that separate institutions are indeed separate, forcing BAC to merge with ML is simply perpetuating the original problem (of interrelated systemic risk) albeit to the nth degree. Instead of cutting our losses with ML and maintaining one great bank, we have a formerly great bank forced to remain on life-support from the government.

Public bewilderment towards the financial crisis stems partly from the fact that no one quite knows what to do. It makes one nostalgic for the 1980’s when things were as simple – at least in retrospect - as Reaganism and Thatcherism vs. Socialsim. Current economic debate - in contrast to the public’s partisan divide on Obama approval ratings - has become less polarized and ideological, more ambiguous and murky, and more important all at the same time. As Greenspan – a self-described Republican-libertarian - pointed out, his job was similar to those of communist central planners, only he was controlling a relatively smaller piece of the economy.

It’s a point worth repeating that the current depression is more complex than most of us can wrap our minds around. And it reveals one of democracy’s flaws, which is that running a country requires more detailed knowledge than is commonly held by the public. Our successful economic recovery - similar to the post-WWII recovery following the Great Depression - is likely to leave the public with few lasting insights about the economy or how the world works. It’s in this panicked context that we see such strange behavior as the Fed’s pressure to force the BAC/ML merger – a scandal occurring at the main nerve of the crisis, the lasting effects of which are unlikely to be well known by the public and experts alike.

What makes this scandal unique is that it's not quite a financial one, and it is a political scandal but not in the regular sense. What, in the end, did Paulson and Bernanke have to gain by forcing the merger? It wasn't money, votes, or even popularity. It didn't spark public outrage like the Madoff or AIG bonus scandals. And the perpetrators weren't guided by partisan or ideological grounds as in the case of Acorn's voter fraud. Unlike any of the previous examples, the perpetrators' motives are not immediately obvious; you have to sit back and think about it before understanding why Paulson and Bernanke felt the need pressure BAC into the merger. And you also have to sit back and think about it before understanding why Paulson and Bernanke's actions were wrong.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1)Obama at the Texas book festival, 10/28/2006, by Mr. Wright; (2)Bank of America Logo, 08/19/2007, by Neubie; (3)fail, 09/29/2008, by rin3y; (4)Joan of Arc, 08/23/2006, by dbking;(5)Aghast, 08/28/2008, by Daveness98. Sphere: Related Content

"How can you have any pudding if you don't eat yer meat?": On Teaching Evolution in Public Schools

“See the trees outside the window,” my high school English teacher once told us. “Aren’t they just so…beautiful? Trees are good for the environment. But I think they’re just pretty to look at. If people cut down trees then our city would look so …dreary.” She went on to tell us that our city had been named Tree City USA for a number of consecutive years. “I feel honored to live in Tree City USA,” she concluded.

I attended public high school in a liberal area. In English class we learned about the virtues of planting trees and recycling. In biology we learned about compost piles. In government we learned how Hoover’s lassiz-faire philosophy worsened the Great Depression, while FDR’s New Deal brought down unemployment through public works programs like the massive Hoover Dam.

It was a secular and tolerant area of the country, so we were never told that evolution was just a theory. But since then the debate over how to teach evolution in public schools has grown exponentially. As evolution becomes more ingrained in mainstream science, there's a stronger push to teach it at lower levels of education. Just recently the Texas education board narrowly decided that teachers of evolution didn’t have to present the theory’s weakness. The debate is cast as a strange hybrid of science versus religion meets separation of church and state. The real problem lies not with science or religion, but with the state. The debate is borne out of the awkward institution of public education.

Public education is argued to be a lofty institution. And as with most lofty endeavors, its proponents use all sorts of arguments to back it: It’s a human right. It leads to social mobility. It’s a foundation of democracy – how are the people supposed to vote on issues when they’re uninformed? The truth afterall will set you free. How can we have a country where people are ignorant of the truth?

Pink Floyd - New Music - More Music Videos

These principles might sound good in theory, but they don’t translate into practice. Our government is good at supplying everyone with the same services, but it’s dreadful when it needs to tailor services to individuals with different needs. Nowhere is this more evident than in public education, where you have some parents arguing that they don’t want their children to learn about evolution, others arguing that their children need to know about evolution in order to compete among the world's intellectual elite, while inner-city schools continue to fall apart regardless.


Evolutionists and creationists each think that they can solve the debate by debunking the other side – that the debate is somehow about evolution versus creationism. Personally I strongly suspect that the evolution-side is "right" in every meaningful sense of the word, but that's not what's fueling the debate. It’s not about who’s right and wrong, because neither side should have to pay for the others’ education.

The argument is sometimes made that evolution shouldn't be seen as stepping on religion's toes. But it does. If it didn't, then religious parents wouldn't feel like their values are threatened by it. Creationist parents are then pressured to use scientific arguments against evolution. But since they're not scientists, those arguments always fall flat, and then scientists mock creationists as both wrong and stupid. But scientists fail to see that it's not about science, it's about values. It's one thing for a scientist - after years of higher education - to call someone else with only a bachelor's, or God forbid, just a high school degree, as ignorant of science. But it's another thing for the scientist to then take control over how their children are educated. The scientist might know more about science, but what does he know about raising a child?

The strain, once again, falls on the fact that most of our schools are public. If more areas transitioned to a voucher system, then the debate would cool down; and if all schools were private, it would be a moot point on the national scene. The flaw in the current system is that everyone’s education becomes everyone’s businesses.

The evolution debate continually brings me back to my liberal high school lessons. Of course, being biased is no crime. But the notion that public education is this pure untouchable right which produces well-informed democratic citizens doesn’t match up with reality. Rather, public education leads to national conflicts of interest about how to best mold the minds of our youth. The debate over evolution is just one of many manifestations of the problems inherent in a public school system.

-KJ
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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1)Tree City USA, 04/22/2005, by Tracy Lee; (2) Hoover Dam, 10/22/2007, by chalkie_colour_circles; (3)Bryan Adams High School Hallway, 06/10/2005, by Dean Terry; (4)E, Brobee and Dino, 10/10/2007, by Shawn Anderson;

Video: (1)Music video of the song "Another Brick in the Wall" by Pink Floyd from their 1979 album The Wall. Sphere: Related Content

Judge not, that ye be judged

“Who are these losers?” I asked myself 15 minutes into the 2007 documentary, Confessions of a Superhero. The film tracks the lives of a rare breed of pan handlers crossed with superheroes located on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Dressed as superheroes of their choosing, they coax passersby into getting a picture with them in return for a tip. The film focuses on four of these faux-heroes' backgrounds. Each has the cliché background of moving to Hollywood with hopes to hit it big, only to get stuck there with an undesirable job. The catch is that the occupation is in one sense so close to the dream – getting into costume and playing a role – but in another sense, so far – begging pedestrians for spare change.



Confessions of a Superhero is a great film in how it digs into these characters rather than skimming the surface with high profile interviews and related late-night talk show items. In their own individual ways, each character has a yearning that we can all relate to. They each have failings that we can all relate to as well. They’ve dreamed so large, yet hit reality so hard. Perhaps, at the least, they’re not losers after all.

“Judge not, that ye be judged” – This is the only thing I really got out of the Bible, but it stuck hard. It’s easy to judge and to cast off. Yet it fosters an attitude of arrogance. A state where no one feels that they should listen to the other. It’s impossible to truly withhold judgment, but acting heavily upon such judgments, I find, confines my mind into a corner. Why should I bother with other people if so many of them are below me? We're influenced heavily by those around us. We're built that way. To shut your mind off from those around you is to block yourself from a human essential. To shut your mind off mentally from those around you, you might as well shut your body off physically from those around you.

One of many products after millions of years of evolution, most people are not so different from one another, and they may not be so different from one another as to warrant judgment, at least, judgment in any grand sense. Looking from the outside-in, we have similar characteristics, builds, purposes, mechanisms. Surely one individual isn’t universally better than another. Any such judgments made are just on a trivial subjective scale, be it in terms of preferences, personality, money, education, colored heavily by culture. People from cultures other than your own often look alike because you don't have the cultural tools to pick them apart. So are people across all cultures: similar.

This is what democracy is built upon. “That all men are created equal.”

People are an economy’s best asset – particularly in their most free and unbridled form possible. It’s telling that Einstein escaped persecution as a Jew in Nazi Germany (his work ridiculed as Jewish Physics) in order to eventually help America defeat the Axis. Perhaps if Nazi Germany had been more welcoming to Jews, he could have helped them defeat America. But then again, had Nazi Germany been more welcoming to Jews, it wouldn’t have been Nazi Germany, and we’d be talking about something else not World War II.

-KJ
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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1) Confessions of a Superhero movie poster; (2) Einstein portrait.

Video: (1) Trailer for the 2007 documentary Confessions of a Superhero, 10/10/2007, from Arts Alliance America channel. Sphere: Related Content

"Epidemic of Civic Illiteracy", Arrogance

I didn’t make up those words, they come from a Josiah Bunting III: "There is an epidemic of economic, political, and historical ignorance in our country.” According to his institution’s new study: Only half of American adults know what all of the branches in US government are. Almost four tenths of them falsely think that the president has the right to declare war. And a whopping %43 percent don’t even know what the electoral college is for. Incredible news - not in terms of its content, but in terms of its broad coverage, its blatant superficiality, and its downright arrogance.

What is civic literacy? If you're asking, clearly you don’t have any.

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute conducts annual surveys to gauge our citizens' basic knowledge about America. They’ve been doing this for the past 3 years, and after every survey they emit a minor public outcry about our nation’s growing ignorance.

Before discussing the outcry, a word on the research techniques: The latest survey was a telephone interview with 139 multiple choice questions covering civic knowledge, public philosophy, and household demographics. Even at this point, the logistics of answering factual multiple choice questions over the phone are beyond me: Audible presentation of the multiple choices is a tax on short-term memory, while you’re being asked to retrieve facts from long-term memory, while under the duress of talking to a stranger on the phone, most likely after returning home from work.

2,508 adults were called. Responses were averaged across relatively small demographic groups: Those who’d earned a Ph.D, for instance, scored a C in civic literacy, while baby boomers with a college degree earned a D, and most everyone else failed. Despite reporting group averages, the institute reported no statistical tests for group differences, and we’re given averages which are relatively useless without standard deviations (for instance, it’s possible that a few people who scored extremely low brought down the whole average). But these are minor qualms relative to the overarching message, which is that most people got an F. Shame on us.

The conclusion: We have another cause to be taken up by the American people. After all, isn’t education priceless? And how can you be an American citizen without any civic literacy? There’s poverty, world starvation and warfare, AIDS, plain old illiteracy, and now we can add civic illiteracy.

I'm reminded of my old high school civics teacher. Every week we had to memorize 10 new facts about the government. We would then be quizzed with multiple choice questions that were randomly selected from our accumulated bag o' facts. By the end of the end of year, we worked up to some 500 facts. I wince upon the memory of all the time I spent sweating over those useless inane facts, especially as there are so many richer ways to learn about government. Increasing civic literacy is not only a stupid cause, it’s a harmful one.

The face of American education is changing and it’s wonderful. Teachers at both the high school and college level are downplaying rote factual memorization in place for better educational techniques. Each new generation of kids are exponentially smarter than the last. What new generations lack in their ability to recite random facts they gain in fluid thinking, particularly when it comes to technological wizardry. Thanks to society’s plethora of scientific advances, my old high school science classes would be too rudimentary for the kids of today, just as my professors’ old classes would have been too rudimentary for me. These are points for celebration, not scorn.

Society’s ability to respond to causes is limited, and focusing on civic literacy is as arbitrary as lending federal money to banks, bailing out GM, improving health care, fighting drugs, sending a man to the moon, or focusing on any other knowledge base, be it chemistry or grammar. If more teachers were physicists than policymakers, then they'd decry physics illiteracy instead. And with good reason, as our present existence is tied just as much to physics - or maybe even moreso - than it is to civility. If the bulk of teachers happened to be grammar gurus, we might have more attempts to keep the English language pure like French.

Like most proposed causes, focusing on civil literacy is arrogant in its narrowed perspective. Being able to name our government's 3 branches might be basic for your average news-addict, but not everyone follows politics daily; and the truth is unless you're directly tied to the government the number of federal branches is not important in most people's day-to-day preoccupations - an inference that is supported by the result (questionable in and of itself) that not many people know about these facts. Indeed, from a democratic perspective, the importance of such knowledge is measured by how widespread it is rather than by some scholars at an institution.

Arrogance is truly one of America’s greatest problems. I’m not referring selfishness or the like, but to blinding arrogance. It underlies the argument of authority. It’s a core piece of racial tensions when manifested as the inability to tolerate the different. It holds back science, manifested as the inability to question one own’s measurement and line of thought. It’s wasteful, manifested as the inability to consider alternative problem-solutions. And its petty, manifested in the cause of civic literacy.

-KJ
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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1) Getting it done, 07/12/2005, by jamacdonald; grandmother's report card, 02/24/2008, by Victoria Bernal; "6 weeks of dedication" or "why I could never be a doctor", 10/08/2008, by Ben Golub; img_6154, 03/02/2008, by C.M.; (5) kids & computers, 01/13/2007, by shapeshift.

Upcoming ideas:

• it's too easy to just be critical & point out what's wrong with the world
  
• but still, it's easier to see when things go wrong than when things go right, & there's a good reason for that, b/c we have more to learn from when things go wrong than when they go right
  
• "negative" news is more useful than "positive" news
• specific implications for positive psychology, preventative medicine (if ain't broken...)
  
• broader connections to the economy, evolution by means of natural selection

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Existentialism (nowhere to be found) in America

Democracy, freedom of speech, protected privacy…what next? Revolution’s won. Freedom. Independence. What do you do now? Oddly enough, these questions formed the core of Tocqueville’s fascination with America.



His treatise, Democracy in America, is not so much a well-documented historical work as it’s an essay about the changing face of humanity - about an era which may later be seen as a tipping point, so to speak, when more than a handful of people started leading themselves, rather than being fed noble lies. But after those wishes are granted, then what? What do you do with your free time when it’s finally yours?

This question fascinated – and irritated – Europe to no end. It was all quite new. Wrote Tocqueville, “Individualism is a novel expression, to which a novel idea has given birth.” What do you do when you’re not being told what to do? In America this was just daily life. But in Europe it was a mindfuck.

Europe’s attempt to answer this seemingly simple question gave birth to existentialism, to completely new notions of the truth (now with a lowercase t); it underscored the French notion of ennui.


For obvious reasons these philosophical insights fell deaf on American ears. It’s no mystery to us, it’s just the life we lead. Yet even in modern times Europe seems at times blindsided by America's embodiment of progress and change. Ironically, France - the biggest ally in our fight for independence - most embodies the continent’s old spirit. Their government even obsesses over keeping their language authentic – or, at least, by the government’s interpretation of authentic.

Keeping with such policy, in 2003 the French government tried to ban the word "email" from their language. It seems silly - at least to an American mind, who’s immediate response is:

"Isn’t language determined by the majority of people who speak it? Doesn’t it change with the times? Doesn’t it change with technology?"

To these questions the French government emphatically answers, no.

To which the American would reply, “That’s just ridiculous.”

Well, in a sense it is and in a sense it’s not. Certainly there was a time when that type of authority was widely accepted. The French just still feel that way. However the absurdity of the whole situation - the government’s obviously futile efforts to keep their language pure - shines favorably upon the American argument: yes, language is determined by the majority of people who speak it; yes, it is changing with the times; and more broadly, yes, the masses don’t all have to be told what to do.

New terms and emerging slang - these are the sorts of things that we take for granted, a natural byproduct of democracy in America. But they're surely not universal. Even an ally as close to us as France looks down upon such social change as pedestrian, degrading, dirty.

Underlying these subtle differences, Tocqueville saw shades of America that were industrious, practical, superficial, passionate. He observed our apathy towards purely theoretical questions in life. We had our Mark Twain while Europe had its Immanuel Kant - two authors who are actually quite similar - that is, if any American could ever understand Kant, whose sentences today would surely qualify for the worst sentence contest…or, for that matter, if any European ever really got Twain.

Every day, the question - what is one to do when obeying his own will? - is answered through daily action.

What do you do everyday?

Watch TV? Read paperbacks? Check out blogs? Go hiking? Follow football?



America's restaurants and its movies tell all about us - they're two industries with a distinct American twist. I enjoy all these things to no end.

But I still do wonder what a more controlled life would feel like - a simpler one, with less choices, perhaps a more "pure" language. Would it feel less hollow? Our neon lights and entertainment and technology - are these just distracting us from life's real meaning?

The answer seems to come from existentialist literature.

The answer is no.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1) Photograph of Alberto Giacometti (used) by Henri artier-Bresson; fair use rationale: An artistic depiction of the nature of European philosophy in the 20th century; (2) "Femme aux Bras Croises", by Pablo Picasso, 1902, fair use rationale: An artistic depiction of the nature of European philosophy in the 20th century; (3) official logo of the French government; (4) Mark Twain; (5) Immanuel Kant

Video: (1) Sigur Ros, "Njosnavelin", live in Paris; (2) Ratatat, "Seventeen Years", from Ratatat, 2004

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Upcoming ideas:

• Freedom through the eyes of Pascal
• "Distractions"
  
• Concept of flow

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The Internet, conceptually

Ever wonder what it’d be like to view the world for the first time, as a complete stranger? So did Tocqueville view America.

He saw it through the eyes of a skeptic. Yet he was immensely drawn to it – the “experiment of democracy”, its citizens’ buzzing political fervor, freedom at a level that the world had not yet known. America somehow reflected the good, the bad, and the ugly of humanity, all at the same time, and to a new extreme. But Tocqueville knew for sure that the rest of the world was to follow its trend with an unrelenting inevitability.

It wasn’t just “democracy”. It was freedom of the press. It was the rising of masses over the few and powerful. It was liberation. The world was getting bigger. It was becoming impossible to contain it all. In America was a group of people who had broken through their shackles to lead themselves. It was a new world to say the least – filled with exotic differences from the old world, equal parts raw potential and unbridled danger.

By all means the experiment now appears to be a success. But Tocqueville’s observations – a, perhaps giddy, excitement strung along a sliver of dark foreshadows – remains acutely relevant today.

It wasn’t just America. The whole world was changing, it can’t be stopped. Like evolution. Capitalism. Like the image of Coke bottles being passed through the Berlin wall – which goes beyond smart PR, it speaks to the inevitability of progress.

It’s no accident that the world's first democracy also guaranteed freedom of the press. To Tocqueville Americans appeared hungry for knowledge. The newspapers seemed to bring out the best and worst in them. Unlike the pristine press in France, American newspapers were littered with advertisements, gossip, and scandal. But sprinkled in were also small journalistic gems – brought, hand-in-hand with all the noise and dirt, through pure public demand.

For the first time, newspapers were controlled by readers – their interests, desires, curiosities – rather than by authorities. Just as ruling authority was spread thin across the people and through additional checks and balances, an authority of intellect was also spread thin over thought. Independence became virtue. All of which you can see reflected in their newspapers. The whole country was littered with them. And they weren’t the same one or two or three publications, they were all different – cities all had at least one local paper, many had more.

Communication of information has driven America ever since. The progression of its history can be measured in related technological advances, from railroad and Morse-code to the telephone, radio, television, and cable television, movies, new methods of transportation – and finally to the world wide web. Parallel to such advances is an exponential increase in man's capacity. If measured by the number of significant world events, time is certainly speeding up, hurdling us through the boundaries of the unkown.

But at the same time, the internet is just the next step in this forward march. Like the first American newspapers, it offers a reflection of mankind that's sometimes flattering and sometimes wretched. This blog, I hope, will portray the former, as if it were through the eyes of a stranger.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1) Alexis de Tocqueville; (2) Coke Bottle; (3) newspaper vendor; (4) Internet Map by Matt Britt, created 11/2006 based on interconnecting IP Addresses using data depicting the internet on 01/15/2005

Video: (1) Underworld, "Born Slippy", 1995, featured in the 1996 movie Trainspotting

________________

Upcoming ideas:

• How Americans handle freedom
• Differences between democracy in America & attitudes in Europe, particularly France
• European existentialism/ennui vs. American practicality
  

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