Diane Duane points us at the following fairly-timely quotation from The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis.
What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence – moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how “democracy†(in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods? You remember how one of the Greek Dictators (they called them “tyrants†then) sent an envoy to another Dictator to ask his advice about the principles of government. The second Dictator led the envoy into a field of grain, and there he snicked off with his cane the top of every stalk that rose an inch or so above the general level. The moral was plain. Allow no preeminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser or better or more famous or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level: all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals.* Thus Tyrants could practise, in a sense, “democracy.†But now “democracy†can do the same work without any tyranny other than her own. No one need now go through the field with a cane. The little stalks will now of themselves bite the tops off the big ones. The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their desire to Be Like Stalks….
We, in Hell, would welcome the disappearance of democracy in the strict sense of that word, the political arrangement so called. Like all forms of government, it often works to our advantage, but on the whole less often than other forms. And what we must realize is that “democracy†in the diabolical sense (I’m as good as you, Being Like Folks, Togetherness) is the fittest instrument we could possibly have for extirpating political democracies from the face of the earth.
For “democracy†or the “democratic spirit†(diabolical sense) leads to a nation without great men, a nation mainly of subliterates, full of the cocksureness which flattery breeds on ignorance, and quick to snarl or whimper at the first sign of criticism. And that is what Hell wishes every democratic people to be.
Edit: sorry, the quote actually dates from an article post-dating The Screwtape Letters by about 20 years. Screwtape is the speaker, though.
Ok, now I feel better about my own debts. :-)
A divorced Navy officer who testified this week that she moonlighted for an alleged prostitution ring while stationed at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., was nearly $300,000 in debt at the time despite a Navy income of more than $93,000, court records show.
Lt. Cmdr. Rebecca Dickinson, 38, owed more than $58,000 on 20 credit cards and $177,000 in three mortgages on a house in Georgia, according to records from a bankruptcy filing in December 2006. She also reported spending $700 a month on travel to see her three children, who reportedly live with their father in Georgia.
Once again, it’s 3.14! What’s your favorite pie? Mine is Boston Cream, especially as made by Brown’s University Food Services.
My mom’s apple pie is no longer in the running, unfortunately, since it’s a long time since the apple tree in the backyard was even there, never mind generating enough fruit for a pie. :-(
And may your 2008 be all you hope. :-)
Erin and I went down to the celebration in Bangor — I have a bunch of pictures posted to my Flickr account.
I finally got around to clicking through to Matt Mullenweg’s blog, and found an article on Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder. That’s way too accurate to be amusing…
Hey, Laura, thanks for the pointer to Slankets. I may have to get one of those for myself…
…but you have to admire his driving skills.
I know just how not-fun this is, so it was good to see members of Congress go a week under the same constraints. They blogged their experiences as they went along.
Mark@BoingBoing tell us about books which used to be considered perfectly acceptable, but would raise eyebrows if they were offered today.
…Dangerous projects include: War kites with broken glass on the strings, mole-trapping techniques, hot air balloons with fireworks, blow guns, and a spring shot-gun (“Although the shot cast from the tube will have sufficient force to stun a small bird, it will not injure the specimen by making ugly holes in the skin and staining the feathers with blood.”)
Almost 120 years old, The American Boy’s Handy Book offers a glimpse of what life was like (or what boys of that era fantasized about) in the late 19th century. Children in those days wanted to emulate Lewis and Clarke, pioneers, trappers, and settlers — people who could be airdropped naked into the wilderness with nothing but a buck knife and a coonskin cap, and six months later be whittling happily in a rocking chair on the front porch of their newly-built log cabin, a curl of smoke rising from the chimney, and a half dozen rabbits waiting to be collected from snares and added to the stewpot simmering over the fire.
200705100956 The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments (1960)
Dangerous projects include: making chlorine, ammonia, hydrogen, and ethanol.
The book is long out of print, and used copies are very expensive (Amazon.com has used copies for over $100). Of course, in today’s litigious environment, no major publisher would dare republish a book that had actual chemistry experiments in it, for fear getting sued.
