Benjamin Franklin...
Gore Vidal... I love the man...
I've selected this quote mainly to embed in this blog that famous comment by Benjamin Franklin about the limitations of the American Constitution (and therefore American "democracy"):
I've selected this quote mainly to embed in this blog that famous comment by Benjamin Franklin about the limitations of the American Constitution (and therefore American "democracy"):
It was Benjamin Franklin, of all people, who saw our future most clearly back in 1787, when, as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia, he read for the first time the proposed Constitution. He was old; he was dying; he was not well enough to speak but he had prepared a text that a friend read. It is so dark a statement that most school history books omit his key words.
Franklin urged the convention to accept the Constitution despite what he took to be its great faults, because it might, he said, provide good government in the short term. "There is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and I believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other."
posted by The Editor at
10:16 PM
3 Comments:
I find it interesting that this quote, one of the most mature and insightful in american political history and from one of my most revered sages, had never come to my attention before you put it up here.
Better go get me a Gore Vidal book of quotes.
Yeah, I wish we had more historians like Gore Vidal.
I wonder how history will be written in this new age of Total Information Management.
I think we have entered the most corrupt period in the world's history, but because it puts bread (and bling bling) on people's tables, we won't look too hard at what's wrong with it or how to change it.
I think we will be entering the next Dark Ages if we don't take America down.
Sorry Greenie, but I blame the American people, and therefore it's educators and social commentators, for the fact that America now seems incapable of sorting itself out and that it will therefore fall to the rest of the world to sort America out.
We here in Australia are too sycophantic towards America to take an assertive position in any of this. Isn't it funny how control-freaks and bullies tend to breed sycophants?
Ok, that was a bit of a conversation stopper... :-)
What did I mean about "taking America down" or "sorting America out"? (I'm sure the CIA and ASIO are already here hanging on my every word... :-)
I meant this: Sidelining America politically and economically until they indicate to the rest of the world that they would be happy to rejoin the global community as a humble equal and not as the tyrant of the world.
America seems to be behaving like a brat with ADHD and should be treated this way. Starting with putting Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld and Cheney on very high doses of Ritilin.
There... Alles klaar, Herr Kommissar?
Now bugger off, ya spook misfits!
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