Fun Facts

Jefferson in a letter written 40 years after the Declaration of Independence:
“Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too scared to be touched. They ascribe to men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew this age well; I belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading; and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead. I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in the laws and constitutions . . . . But I know also, that laws and institutions much go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind” (qtd. in Morgan 47).
Morgan, Edmund. “Back to Basics.” New York Review of Books, 20 July 2000: 47-49.

“[An] act of terrorism, means any activity that [A] involves a violent act or an act dangerous to human life that is a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any State, and [B] appears to be intended [i] to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; [ii] to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or [iii] to affect the conduct of a government by assassination or kidnapping.”
United States Code Congressional and Administrative News, 98PthP Congress, Second Session, 1984, Oct. 19, volume 2; par. 3077, 98 STAT. 2707

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are ‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil.
One cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognizes the overwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty. In certain circumstances it can break down, at certain levels of civilization it does not exist, but as a positive force there is nothing to set beside it.

Wal-Mart’s low wages and inadequate benefits for its employees in a hypothetical store with at least 200 employees would cost taxpayers an estimated $420,750 annually in social services such as housing subsidies, children’s health insurance, and reduced-cost or free lunches, according to a report from the House Education and Workforce Committee.
You can read more from the report, Everyday Low Wages: The Hidden Price We All Pay for Wal-Mart at the House Democrat’s Web page at http://edworkforce.house.gov/democrats/ .
Both from the NEA Higher Education Advocate, April 2004: 9.

TEACHER/GRADUATE STUDENT/NANNY – for 2 Rumson Middle Schoolers, help out after school w/ driving, homework and occasional evening babysitting. Some sleepovers when parents travel. Must be free to travel on school vacations to Aspen & Caribbean. Must have clean driving record & recent ref’s. Live in is a possibility, but not req’d.
Asbury Park Press 20 August 2000: D37.

[T]the military is the only generously funded institution in American public life. Over recent decades just about every other form of discretionary public spending has been allowed to lag – for education and health care, for environmental and social programs, for parks, schools, libraries, museums, and symphony halls. Only the military seems able to squeeze from congress funds for the newest, the most sophisticated, the most expensive, and the best of everything, in generous quantity and pretty much on demand (Powers 20).

Powers, Thomas, “War and Its Consequences.” New York Review of Books. 27 March 2003: 19-22.

Lee Iacocca, former CEO of Chrysler (who loves to talk about personal responsibility but conveniently forgets that without a US government loan his car company would have gone bankrupt) speaking at a press conference in Buenos Aires in 1993:
The problem of unemployment is a tough one. Today we can make twice as many cars with the same number of people. When they talk about improving people’s educational levels as a solution to the problem of unemployment, I’m always bothered by the memory of what happened in Germany. Education was put forward as the solution to unemployment, and the result was hundreds of thousands of frustrated professionals who then turned to socialism and rebellion. It’s not easy for me to admit, but I wonder if it wouldn’t be better for the unemployed to smarten up and go straight to McDonald’s to find a job (qtd. in Galeano 34).
Galeano, Eduardo. “Economics for Children.” The Nation. 1 January 2001: 34.

Commercial television has changed since the days when I was hired as chief correspondent for CBS Reports, the documentary unit. A big part of the problem is ratings. It’s not easy, as John Dewey said, to interest the public in the public interest. In fact, I’d say that apart from all the technology, the biggest change in my thirty years in broadcasting has been the shift of content from news about government to consumer-driven information and celebrity features. The Project for Excellence in Journalism conducted a study of the front pages of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, the nightly news programs of ABC, CBS and NBC, and Time and Newsweek. They found that from 1977 to 1997 the number of stories about government dropped from one in three to one in five, while the number of stories about celebrities rose from one in every fifty stories to one in every fourteen.

Does it matter? Well, as we learned in the 1960s but seem to have forgotten, government is about who wins and who loses in the vast bazaar of democracy. Government can send us to war, pick our pockets, slap us in jail, run a highway through our garden, ~ look the other way as polluters do their dirty work, take care of the people who are already well cared for at the expense of those who can’t afford lawyers, lobbyists or time to be vigilant. It matters who’s pulling the strings. It also matters who defines the news and decides what to cover. It matters whether we’re over at the Puffy Combs trial, checking out what Jennifer Lopez was wearing \ the night she ditched him, or whether we’re on the Hill, seeing who’s writing the new bankruptcy law, or overturning workplace safety rules, or buying back standards for allowable levels of arsenic in our drinking water.

I need to declare a bias here. It’s true that I worked for two Democratic Presidents, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. But I did so more for reasons of opportunity than ideology. My worldview was really shaped by Theodore Roosevelt, who got it right about power in America. Roosevelt thought the central fact of his era was that economic power had become so centralized and dominant it could chew up democracy and spit it out. The power of corporations, he said, had to be balanced in the interest of the general public. Otherwise, America would undergo a class war, the rich would win it, and we wouldn’t recognize our country anymore. Shades of déjà vu. Big money and big business, corporations and commerce, are again the undisputed overlords of politics and government. The White House, the Congress and, increasingly, the judiciary reflect their interests. We appear to have a government run by remote control from the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute. To hell with everyone else.

What’s the role of journalism in all this? The founders of our nation were pretty explicit on this point. The First Amendment is the first for a reason. It’s needed to keep our leaders honest and to arm the powerless with the information they need to protect themselves against the tyranny of the powerful, whether that tyranny is political or commercial. At least that’s my bias. A college student once asked the journalist Richard Reeves to define “real news.” He answered: “The news you and I need to keep our freedoms.” Senator John McCain echoed this in an interview I did with him a couple of years ago for a documentary called “Free Speech for Sale.” It was about the Telecommunications Act of 1996, when some of America’s most powerful corporations were picking the taxpayers’ pocket of $70 billion. That’s the estimated value of the digital spectrum that Congress was giving away to the big media giants.

From Bill Moyers’s “Journalism and Democracy: On the Importance of Being a ‘Public Nuisance’.” The Nation 7 May 2001: 11-17.

Nightline, the paragon of television journalism, devoted five nights to a wrap-up of the Clinton presidency. Virtually all of the first four nights were devoted to scandals (Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, and Monica Lewinsky), a policy failure (universal health care), and a budget battle (the closing down of the government). A portion of the fifth night dealt with the bombing of Yugoslavia and subsequent capitulation by Slobodan Milosevic. All were hot topics, with personal anecdotes from White House insiders (“When I heard the Flowers audio tape my heart sank,” says George Stephanopolous.) in all five nights there was nothing on Clinton’s decision to reject a comprise thus destroying federal habeas corpus, nothing on the draconian immigration act he signed into law, nothing on his instant recognition that globalization was now the driving force behind foreign policy, nothing on his willingness to fight his own part on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), nothing on putting teeth in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) by backing the World Trade Organization, nothing on his bailout of the Mexican economy, nothing on his efforts to bring peace to Northing Ireland, nothing on his overtures to reduce tensions with North Korea, nothing on his gamble to back Boris Yeltsin – a move that may have thwarted a return of the Communists to power – and nothing on his fight against the evisceration of the clean water act. I could go on. Why? You may ask. After all, they had five nights and Ted Koppel and his executive producer, Tom Bettag, are without question the two brightest minds in our business. The answer is Jay Leno and David Letterman. Even at Nightline information goes begging when ratings are at stake. There’s a reason why they aired over forty broadcasts on Jim and Tammy Faye Baker, and it had nothing to do with the public’s need to know.
Pages 81-82

From Maurice Murad “Shouting at the Crocodile” in Into the Buzzsaw Ed. By Kristina Borjesson

The abuses that US troops routinely commit in the field, and their responsibility for the deaths of many thousands of innocent Iraqis, are viewed by the American press as too sensitive for most Americans to see or read about. When NBC cameraman Kevin Sites filmed a US soldier fatally shooting a wounded Iraqi man in Fallujah, he was harassed, denounced as an antiwar activist, and sent death threats. Such incidents feed the deep-seated fear that many US journalists have of being accused of being anti-American, of not supporting the troops in the field. These subjects remain off-limits.

Of course, if the situation in Iraq were further to unravel, or if President Bush were to become more unpopular, the boundaries of the acceptable might expand further, and subjects such as these might begin appearing on our front pages. It's regrettable, though, that editors and reporters have to wait for such developments. Of all the internal problems confronting the press, the reluctance to venture into politically sensitive matters, to report disturbing truths that might unsettle and provoke, remains by far the most troubling.

On November 8, I turned on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 to see how the host was doing in his new job. It was Election Day, and I was hoping to find some analysis of the results. Instead, I found Cooper leading a discussion on a new sex survey conducted by Men's Fitness and Shape magazines. I learned that 82 percent of men think they're good or excellent in bed, and that New Yorkers report they have more sex than the residents of any other state. At that moment, New Orleans and Katrina seemed to be in a galaxy far, far away.
From Michael Massing’s “The Press: the Enemy Within” New York Review of Books. 15 December 2005. 9 January 2006 <http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18555 >.

Nazi leader Hermann Goering, interviewed by Gustave Gilbert during the Easter recess of the Nuremberg trials, 1946 April 18, quoted in Gilbert's book Nuremberg Diary.

Goering: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece.

Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.

Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Goering: Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

George Santyana
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"

Justice William O. Douglas
"The press has a preferred position in our constitutional scheme, not to enable it to make money, not to set newsmen apart as a favored class, but to bring to
fulfillment the public's right to know."

Thomas Jefferson
"I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical"

Voltaire (attributed)
"I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write"

Socrates
"The unexamined life is not worth living"

Henry David Thoreau
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” Walden

“Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine” “Civil Disobedience”

“the State never intentionally confronts a man’s sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.”
“Civil Disobedience”

Martin Luther King
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that really matter.

Theodore Roosevelt
Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

Frederich Engels
"Everything must justify its existence before the judgment seat of Reason, or give up existence"

Bertrand Russell
Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.

Abraham Lincoln
Corporations have been enthroned. An era of corruption in high places will follow and the money power will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people...until wealth is aggregated in a few hands...and the Republic is destroyed.

Hannah Arendt
The amount of violence at the disposal of a given country may no longer be a reliable indication of that country’s strength or a reliable guarantee against destruction by a substantially smaller and weaker power. This again bears an ominous similarity to one of the oldest insights of political science, namely that power cannot be measured by wealth, that an abundance of wealth may erode power, that riches are particularly dangerous for the power and well-being of republics. (From NYRB Anthology 1963/93 –1969)

Samuel Adams
“It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brushfires in people’s minds”

Joseph Goebbels
There was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and this will always be “the man in the street.” Arguments must therefore be crude, clear, and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology.

Alexander Hamilton
"The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and, however generally the maxim has been studied and believed, it is not true to fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge to determine right"

Justice William O. Douglas
A function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purposes when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger.

Barbara Tuchman
"Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change, windows on the world. . . . They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print."

Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Knowledge is the antidote to fear"

Heraclitus
"All is flux, nothing is stationary. There is nothing permanent except change."

Chinese Fortune Cookie
Don’t expect romantic attachments to be strictly logical or
rational!

Bertrand Russell
“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.”

Fun Facts

Dr. Bordelon's English I On-Campus