a good man is hard to find

i had a wonderful weekend, beginning and ending with good friends, with some gourmet frito pie thrown in for good measure. kate is well. olive is well. no complaints can be heard from apartment 48. when i started this blog again, i was hoping it would force me to write about, synthesize, contemplate what the hell is going on in this world. i failed to factor in how truly depressing the state of the world is at this moment. staying informed has turned out to be a masochistic effort. i need some inspiration this monday morning. i immediately thought of sarah vowell, one because i missed her for the bazillionth time this weekend, and two because when i think of people with the most impassioned love/hate relationships with this country, i think of her. at one point, the full text of my favorite sarah essay "the nerd voice" was online, and i'm failing to find it right now. i found an excerpt i quoted in a blog years ago and it goes something like this: "I wish that in order to secure his party's nomination, a presidential candidate would be re­quired to point at the sky and name all the stars; have the peri­odic table of the elements memorized; rattle off the kings and queens of Spain; define the significance of the Gatling gun; joke around in Latin; interpret the symbolism in seventeenth­-century Dutch painting; explain photosynthesis to a six-year­-old; recite Emily Dickinson; bake a perfect popover; build a shortwave radio out of a coconut; and know all the words to Hoagy Carmichael's "Two Sleepy People," Johnny Cash's "Five Feet High and Rising," and "You Got the Silver" by the Rolling Stones. After all, the United States is the greatest country on earth dealing with the most complicated problems in the his­tory of the world-poverty, pollution, justice, Jerusalem. What we need is a president who is at least twelve kinds of nerd, a nerd messiah to come along every four years, acquire the Se­cret Service code name Poindexter, install a Revenge of the Nerds screen saver on the Oval Office computer, and one by one decrypt our woes." in my search for that, however, i ran across this again. and thought i'd share. it's lengthy and slightly dated, but if you strip off the time-specific bits, the meat of it will make your heart hurt. you can hardly believe it came from the mouth of a politician. for the lazies of you, this: "'We the people are--collectively--still the key to the survival of America's democracy. We--as Lincoln put it, "[e]ven we here"--must examine our own role as citizens in allowing and not preventing the shocking decay and degradation of our democracy. Thomas Jefferson said: "An informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will." The revolutionary departure on which the idea of America was based was the audacious belief that people can govern themselves and responsibly exercise the ultimate authority in self-government. This insight proceeded inevitably from the bedrock principle articulated by the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke: "All just power is derived from the consent of the governed." The intricate and carefully balanced constitutional system that is now in such danger was created with the full and widespread participation of the population as a whole. The Federalist Papers were, back in the day, widely-read newspaper essays, and they represented only one of twenty-four series of essays that crowded the vibrant marketplace of ideas in which farmers and shopkeepers recapitulated the debates that played out so fruitfully in Philadelphia. Indeed, when the Convention had done its best, it was the people - in their various States - that refused to confirm the result until, at their insistence, the Bill of Rights was made integral to the document sent forward for ratification. And it is "We the people" who must now find once again the ability we once had to play an integral role in saving our Constitution. And here there is cause for both concern and great hope. The age of printed pamphlets and political essays has long since been replaced by television - a distracting and absorbing medium which sees determined to entertain and sell more than it informs and educates. Lincoln's memorable call during the Civil War is applicable in a new way to our dilemma today: "We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.'" i didn't link those two pieces by accident. say what you will about celebrity al and his oscar, but don't ever tell me the man doesn't have a great mind.