Quote of Note

An excellent description of life in my house growing up, by Garrison Keillor of Salon magazine:

A college graduate just sent me an e-mail asking about a band that
"one" a contest, wishing she had been "their" to see it. Misspelling
drives me nuts. You young people learned spelling by the Close Enough
method. As long as we know what you mean, you think it’s OK. And nobody
corrects you. And you go along on your merry way, and the dark clouds
of Error build up in the rain forest and the ground shakes.

People accuse us liberals
of permissiveness — no no no no no. We liberals are oppressive, not
permissive, working day and night to take your guns away and make you
apply for a permit every time you spit. In my heart, I belong to the
Correctness Party, the party of good spellers, of people who pay
attention to details. The Current Occupant
is not one of us. He is not a man who puts pen to paper with any
confidence. Intellectually he has been a charity case all his life. He
is one of those men who are lucky that their fathers were born before
they were.

Read the whole article here.

"Americans too often teach their children to despise those
who hold unpopular opinions. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in
aversion and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, and so here in our
democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it and
out of place – the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else’s
keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan."

— Mark Twain

I admire Richard Dawkins’ mind very much.  His delivery, well, not as much. That said, this observation is sheer brilliance:

"We are going to die and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are
never going to die because they’re never going to be born. The
potential people who could have been here in my place, but who will, in
fact, never see the light of day, outnumber the sand grains of Sahara.
…In the face of these stupefying odds, it is you and I, in our
ordinariness, that are here. Here’s another respect in which we are
lucky. The universe is older than a hundred million centuries. Within a
comparable time, the sun will swell to a red giant and engulf the
earth. Every century of hundreds of millions has been in its time, or
will be when its time comes, the present century. The present moves
from the past to the future like a tiny spotlight inching its way along
a gigantic ruler of time. Everything behind the spotlight is in
darkness, the darkness of the dead past. Everything ahead of the
spotlight is in the darkness of the unknown future. The odds of your
century being the one in the spotlight are the same as the odds that a
penny, tossed down at random, will land on a particular ant crawling
somewhere on the road from New York to San Francisco. You are lucky to
be alive and so am I."

Read the interview here.

Something else I found while looking at the past posts on Andy’s website:

What Democrats will Do In Their First 100 Hours in Congress.

To paraphrase, they say they would:

· Put
new rules in place to "break the link between lobbyists and legislation."

· Enact
all the recommendations made by the commission that investigated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

· Raise
the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour, maybe in one step.

·   Cut
the interest rate on student loans in half.

· Allow
the government to negotiate directly with the pharmaceutical companies for lower drug prices for Medicare patients.

· All
the days after that: "Pay as you go," meaning no increasing the
deficit

These plan points, if enacted, would be good for all of us who are not personal friends of the Bush family.

We’re not even going to discuss the fact that the United States Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines Times have called for Donald Rumsfeld’s removal as Secretary of Defense (nobody else in the mainstream media is, either).

Vote for something completely different tomorrow.

For today’s most instructive Quotes of Note, I refer you to the Treasurer of the DNC.  Yes, I can speak more plainly that this, but I think the point is well made.  Vote tomorrow for something completely different.  You’ll be glad you did.

"One way to see the difference between schoolbooks and real books like Moby Dick is to examine different procedures which separate librarians, the custodians of real books, from schoolteachers, the custodians of schoolbooks. To begin with, libraries are usually comfortable, clean, and quiet. They are orderly places where you can actually read instead of just pretending to read.

"For some reason libraries are never age-segregated, nor do they presume to segregate readers by questionable tests of ability any more than farms or forests or oceans do. The librarian doesn’t tell me what to read, doesn’t tell me what sequence of reading I have to follow, doesn’t grade my reading. The librarian trusts me to have a worthwhile purpose of my own. I appreciate that and trust the library in return.

"Some other significant differences between libraries and schools: the librarian lets me ask my own questions and helps me when I want help, not when she decides I need it. If I feel like reading all day long, that’s okay with the librarian, who doesn’t compel me to stop at intervals by ringing a bell in my ear. The library keeps its nose out of my home. It doesn’t send letters to my family, nor does it issue orders on how I should use my reading time at home.

"The library doesn’t play favorites; it’s a democratic place as seems proper in a democracy. If the books I want are available, I get them, even if that decision deprives someone more gifted and talented than I am. The library never humiliates me by posting ranked lists of good readers. It presumes good reading is its own reward and doesn’t need to be held up as an object lesson to bad readers. One of the strangest differences between a library and a school is that you almost never see a kid behaving badly in a library.

"The library never makes predictions about my future based on my past reading habits. It tolerates eccentric reading because it realizes free men and women are often very eccentric. Finally, the library has real books, not schoolbooks. I know the Moby Dick I find in the library won’t have questions at the end of the chapter or be scientifically bowdlerized. Library books are not written by collective pens. At least not yet.

"Real books conform to the private curriculum of each author, not to the invisible curriculum of a corporate bureaucracy. Real books transport us to an inner realm of solitude and unmonitored mental reflection in a way schoolbooks and computer programs can’t. If they were not devoid of such capacity, they would jeopardize school routines devised to control behavior. Real books conform to the private curriculum of particular authors, not to the demands of bureaucracy."

—From "An Underground History of American Education", by John Taylor Gatto