From: Eirikur Hallgrimsson (eh@mad.scientist.com)
Date: Sun Nov 12 2000 - 23:13:12 PST
Thanks, Sophie, for the Jefferson link. There's so much heat and
little light shed these days.
My own take is that we are in the throes of trying to administer
something that Jefferson could only have envisioned in a pipe-dream,
with the specific mechanisms intended to function practically in his
day. Jefferson was concerned about a professional political class
developing in Washington, but obviously he didn't take the problem
seriously enough to take steps to control it. Exactly how things
would scale as the country grew just wasn't foreseeable, in my
opinion.
I forget who said this, but it's one of my favorite quotes: "The U.S.
Constitution is a deeply flawed document, but the system it describes
would surely be a lot better than the one we have now."
Can't we just go on like this? I ask in the voice of a small child.
We are formally (and informally) in the state of being undecided.
This really suggests that the bulk of the nation's life and business
can go on without knowing which team of politicians garnered the
deciding handful of votes.
Eirikur
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