11.03.2004
America: The Book
I just think everyone should buy this book.At the very least you ought to read it. I'll happily lend out my copy. I also enjoy reading aloud, come on over for storytime, we'll make popcorn and eat candy and I'll read it to you. Enjoy this excerpt:
It is often said that America "invented" democracy. This view is, of course, an understatement; America invented not only democracy, but freedom, justice, liberty, and "time-sharing." But representative democracy is unquestionably our proudest achievement, the creation most uniquely our own, even if the rest of the Western world would have come up with the idea themselves by the 1820s. So why, then, has participation in this most wondrous system withered?
As heirs to a legacy more than two centuries old, it is understandable why present-day Americans would take their own democracy for granted. A president freely chosen from a wide-open field of two men every four years; a Congress with a 99% incumbency rate; a Supreme Court comprised of nine politically appointed judges whose only oversight is the icy scythe of Death— all these reveal a system fully capable of maintaining itself. But our perfect democracy, which neither needs nor particularly wants voters, is a rarity. It is important to remember there still exist many other forms of government in the world today, and that dozens of foreign countries still long for a democracy such as ours to be imposed on them.