Some serious thinking about our basic values left over from the holiday weekend

"We praise our Founders annually for revolting against royal rule and for creating an exceptionally durable system of self-government. We can wreck that system if we forget our Founders’ purpose of creating a representative form of national authority robust enough to secure the public good."

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in his WaPo column
"What our Declaration really said"

"[W]hat we deserve is what's going to happen: war and revolution, famine and drought, climate change on a scale we truly don't understand."

-- Ian Welsh, in the blogpost "Deserve: the deadliest word"

by Ken

There are important new pieces to talk about by E. J. Dionne Jr. and Ian Welsh, but for now we'll have to make do with the above teases. All weekend I've been meaning to re-call everyone's attention to two remarkable documents Howie flagged for us from Asia, which directly address the question of our basic democratic values.

There was, first, the "postcard" Arianna Huffington wrote based on her recent visit to Greece, where she observed the remarkable spirit and well of the Greek people, even in the face of the relentless beating down being rained down on them by the greedy oligarchs of the international financial elite; and the speech Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders delivered last week on the Senate floor, about the betrayal of basic American values by the American branch of that international financial elite, so confident that it can get away with having the tab for its greed and screwing up passed on to the people it screwed.

Here's just a snippet of Arianna:

Given that the Greeks have always been all about connection, expansiveness and intimacy, it's no surprise that social media have combined with the Greek personality to create a perfect storm of expression, engagement and democracy. . . .

Everywhere I went I was stunned by the level of engagement -- it's not just those physically at [Syntagma] Square who are all in. . . . [T]here's a lot of anger and resentment in the square -- most of it very justified -- but there's also an incredible amount of hope, and, considering how hard things are for millions of people in Greece, an incredible lack of cynicism. This isn't just an "anti" protest -- there's a lot of "pro" in it, as well.

And here's a snatch of Bernie:

Mr. President, this is a lot of pain that the Republicans are tossing out while they want to protect their rich and powerful friends. In my view, the president has got to stand tall, take the case to the American people, and hold the Republicans responsible if the debt ceiling is not raised and the repercussions of that.

That, Mr. President, is what's going on in the real world. People fighting to keep their homes from falling into foreclosure; struggling with credit card debt; marriages have been postponed; lives have been derailed; and retirement savings have been raided to pay for college tuition, to keep their businesses afloat, or simply to keep gas in their car and pay their bills. That is what is going on in the real world.

And, Mr. President, while the middle class disappears and poverty is increasing, there is another reality and that is that the gap between the very rich and everyone else is growing wider and wider. The United States now has, by far, the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on earth. . . .

It's about time that Washington listened to the American people. Let's reduce the deficit. But, let's do it in a fair and responsible way that requires shared sacrifice from the wealthiest Americans and most profitable corporations.

AND IF I MIGHT FLOG A PIECE OF MY OWN . . .

Saturday I used the occasion of a recent NYRB review-reminiscence by the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson about his mentor-colleague-friend Richard Feynman to recall the great physicist's heroic performance as a member of the Rogers Commission appointed (almost certainly) to whitewash the causes of the Challenger space-shuttle disaster, with the added detail supplied by Dyson that Feynman at the time was fighting an apparently gruesome and exhausting battle with the cancer that indeed killed him ("I don't have many heroes, but Richard Feynman is one of them, even though I understand hardly anything about his work in physics").

Feynman, I ventured, is a prime candidate for hero status to "anyone who values the quest for truth, especially at a time when a cancerously ferocious ideology has put truth at the top of its hit list, anyone who believes that without that commitment to truth we're pretty much lost as a species." Feel free to skip my sketching to go directly to the Dyson NYRB piece at the above link. He also gives us a better impression than I've previously had of the sort of scientist Feynman was, driven by that same obsessive regard for the discovery of truth, and the sort of person he was (ditto).

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