Jalopy was a word I first read in a Hardy Boys book and I thought it was a brand name of a car. Funny how a word can awaken a memory from fifty plus years ago!
I help a Chinese student with conversational English. I was explaining to him how in the U.S. anyone can be in the government without any relevant education or experience. He was shocked because in China with its Confucian heritage, government service is highly revered and one has to prepare and be tested by peers before entering government service and assuming power.
He was also shocked when I explained that many Americans do not trust nor respect their government to the point of electing political leaders tasked with destroying it. Selfish libertarianism is a totally foreign concept to collective Confucian cultures. Perhaps the founding fathers doomed us from the start by using the populist revolution as our national foundation.
Confusion v. Confucian? Thanks, John. Our Founding Fathers weren't really populists, IMO, but a tightly knit club of highly educated, motivated white males, who viewed equality as equally educated, motivated, and funded. It never occurred to them we'd revise our democracy to the point that any dope could vote. Our politics has devolved to playing to the stupid, with predictable results. Liars are better at the game because they've loads more leeway. Lucky for America (maybe) that the party of plutocrats opted for ineptitude so blatant that even dummies will realize they've got to wake up to protect themselves! If the Nameless One were better, he'd be worse.
Yes, our founding fathers were not populists but they were rebelling against the feudal aristocracy of the times. "We hold these truths that all men were created equal..." was the rallying cry and probably an overreaction to the sins of rigid class and privilege of their times. From the beginning, there was a clash between Alexander Hamilton's pragmatic desire for the federal government to provide a foundation of order for commerce to thrive against Thomas Jefferson's more libertarian utopia vision of a loose confederation of agrarian self-sufficiency. In the 18th century, that worked pretty well, but things started falling apart with the Civil War between the industrial North and the agrarian South in the 19th century.
We had two World Wars in the 20th century which finally drove a stake in the heart of the lingering aristocracy and racist imperialism. A dream of liberal democracy and the UN Charter updated the European liberal vision with an optimistic view that the world would rise from the ashes of insanity and naturally chose to embrace a logical orderliness over the bloody law-of-the-jungle clashes of feral realist desires for power dominance. In the West, we're just now struggling with the concept of the requirement of order rather than anarchy. We destroyed our old feudal system of order, but our experiment of unconstrained popularism is descending into chaos as the pressure builds on our 18th-century experiment. Yes, we have come to the pragmatic realization of confusion vs. Confucianism. Well said, sir.
Jalopy was a word I first read in a Hardy Boys book and I thought it was a brand name of a car. Funny how a word can awaken a memory from fifty plus years ago!
Few satisfactions sweeter than a quirky word that lights up a paragraph. Thanks, David.
I help a Chinese student with conversational English. I was explaining to him how in the U.S. anyone can be in the government without any relevant education or experience. He was shocked because in China with its Confucian heritage, government service is highly revered and one has to prepare and be tested by peers before entering government service and assuming power.
He was also shocked when I explained that many Americans do not trust nor respect their government to the point of electing political leaders tasked with destroying it. Selfish libertarianism is a totally foreign concept to collective Confucian cultures. Perhaps the founding fathers doomed us from the start by using the populist revolution as our national foundation.
Confusion v. Confucian? Thanks, John. Our Founding Fathers weren't really populists, IMO, but a tightly knit club of highly educated, motivated white males, who viewed equality as equally educated, motivated, and funded. It never occurred to them we'd revise our democracy to the point that any dope could vote. Our politics has devolved to playing to the stupid, with predictable results. Liars are better at the game because they've loads more leeway. Lucky for America (maybe) that the party of plutocrats opted for ineptitude so blatant that even dummies will realize they've got to wake up to protect themselves! If the Nameless One were better, he'd be worse.
Fight the fight. Love, C
Yes, our founding fathers were not populists but they were rebelling against the feudal aristocracy of the times. "We hold these truths that all men were created equal..." was the rallying cry and probably an overreaction to the sins of rigid class and privilege of their times. From the beginning, there was a clash between Alexander Hamilton's pragmatic desire for the federal government to provide a foundation of order for commerce to thrive against Thomas Jefferson's more libertarian utopia vision of a loose confederation of agrarian self-sufficiency. In the 18th century, that worked pretty well, but things started falling apart with the Civil War between the industrial North and the agrarian South in the 19th century.
We had two World Wars in the 20th century which finally drove a stake in the heart of the lingering aristocracy and racist imperialism. A dream of liberal democracy and the UN Charter updated the European liberal vision with an optimistic view that the world would rise from the ashes of insanity and naturally chose to embrace a logical orderliness over the bloody law-of-the-jungle clashes of feral realist desires for power dominance. In the West, we're just now struggling with the concept of the requirement of order rather than anarchy. We destroyed our old feudal system of order, but our experiment of unconstrained popularism is descending into chaos as the pressure builds on our 18th-century experiment. Yes, we have come to the pragmatic realization of confusion vs. Confucianism. Well said, sir.