Tyranny Rarely Announces Itself

"Usurpers always choose troubled times to enact, in the atmosphere of general panic, laws which the public would never adopt when passions were cool. One of the surest ways of distinguishing the work of a law giver from that of a tyrant is to note the moment he chooses to give a people its constitution."

~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

Free Speech and Education

To insist that I must be denied the venue to question someone else's beliefs is an infringement of my rights to free speech. To demand that I refrain from asking questions - however challenging or vexing - in my own classroom demonstrates a basic misunderstanding of education.

The teacher's job is not to tell the student how to see the world. The teacher's job is to stimulate the student to question how she sees the world.

Balance and Fairness

Let us, for a moment, pull back and consider what fairness and balance might actually involve.
BALANCE requires patience, as any acrobat - or server waiting tables - will tell you.
FAIRNESS requires completeness; "equal time" is only fair if each side's argument is equally simple.
Are either of these to be found in current news coverage? If so, where?

A Practical Reflection

When over 50 million people try to fire you,
you can't exactly claim a mandate.

The Next Draft

Stop-loss programs = "all-volunteer" army ?
The next draft won't be called a draft.

Have I Been Blind?

have I been wrong?
have I been wise
to shut my eyes
and play along?
hypnotized ...
paralyzed ...
by what my eyes have seen?

Natalie Merchant, "Carnival"

(from Tigerlily, 1995)

Poetic Political Strategy

Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wond'red at
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapors that did seem to strangle him.

Prince Hal (Henry V)

1 Henry IV, I.ii.197-203

Theatre's Appeal

He had been wondering why persons ... bothered to go to plays at all, when every day at Whitehall provided more spectacle - now he sensed that they did so because the stories in the theatre were simple, and arrived at fixed conclusions after an hour or two.

Daniel Waterhouse muses to himself,

in Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson (239)

Let Us Meet & Question

And when we have our naked frailties hid,
That suffer in exposure, let us meet
And question this most bloody piece of work,
To know it further. Fears and scruples shake us.
In the great hand of God I stand, and thence
Against the undivulged pretense I fight
Of treasonous malice.

Banquo, in Macbeth, II.iii.122-128

Bewildered?

Bewildered, in its ancient and literal sense of being cast away in a trackless wild, was the lot of the explorer ...

Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver (47)

Spinning Coins

Imagine two minor characters, rendered famous by Tom Stoppard, standing in a deceptive void. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern await their entrance on Denmark's stage - or Denmark's entrance on their stage (it all depends on your point of view). They pass the time by spinning coins: a simple game of chance, in which one player flips a coin and the other calls it (heads or tails), winner take all.

Upon them creeps the dawning realization that their coins have spun "heads" more than sixty times in a row. "Enough to make one doubt the laws of probability," one ventures. At any rate, sufficient to impart the dawning notion that something is happening, even though the action appears invisible or absent. Something is happening, the winds are changing direction, and our two unheroic heroes cannot tell which way those winds are blowing.

Imagine ourselves, unfamous or otherwise, standing in a deceptive void, assured in the knowledge (if you can call it that) that change is upon us, but unable to discern direction or source - like those two expendable courtiers, unable to tell a hawk from a handsaw or even if the wind is southerly. We need weathervanes.

Hawks and Handsaws

The appurtenance of welcome is fashion and ceremony. Let me comply with you in this garb, lest my extent to the players (which I tell you must show fairly outwards) should more appear like entertainment than yours. You are welcome. But my uncle-father and aunt-mother are deceived. ... I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.

Hamlet, II.ii.362-370