So unfair
Tuesday, February 17, 2026
It always amazes me. No mater how low we have sunk we can always go lower.
James Burke did two series for the BBC back in the 90s. One was called Connections and looked at how what appear to be disparate discoveries helped one or the other to achieve something greater. How the Jacquard Loom cards helped bring about the punch cards of the modern computers for instance. The other show was about America, specifically the United States. At the end of the series he quoted from de Tocqueville, who wrote that America was in a race between its greatness and its decadence. Not much has changed since the two hundred years that de Tocqueville wrote that.
I think about the cautionary tales about republics and how they give way to authoritarian regimes. Historians give democracies about two hundred years then something happens. It appears that powerful interests figure out how to rig the system. That and the common folk think the system of government will stay around because, well, it’s always been there. And what they mean by that is they grew up with it and don’t expect it to change. Tell that to the people of the Roman Republic.
Or there’s technology and complacency. Constantinople had withstood many attacks from without and within. It had always withstood them so there was no reason to believe they wouldn’t withstand this one, right? The one they couldn’t withstand came in the form of a 1200 pound ball of rock hurled at their walls via a new weapon called a cannon.
Our forefathers never envisioned political parties. They envisioned men of good character guiding the country. If someone got out of line these good fellows would throw the rascal out. How wrong they were. Or in more modern times it was said that it takes a carpenter to build a barn but a jackass to knock it down. No one envisioned a whole party of jackasses.
