Well, It Has Almost Been Forever

How does one know when the job has taken over?  Maybe not blogging for half a year?  It's not that I haven't relaxed.  Over these months I have completed upwards of ten or so thousand piece jig saw puzzles.  It has been my equivalent of shifting from one side of my brain to the other.  Coming home from work and not wanting to look at another written word, or worse yet, write anything more, not only wrecks your leisure but makes you a most unbalanced person.

So even though I have 1,000 shades of blue in the form of Niagara Falls tempting me to become a whole image, I will write.  I will read.

Can't say I completely finished On Tocqueville - Democracy and America by Alan Ryan but I read the interpretative parts, 103 pages, but this is a tiny 5 by 7 book.  I must have mentioned somewhere sometime in this blog of mine, that Democracy in America is a touchstone to me and for years, it was one of my coffee table books.  (Another indication that all is not well in the land of work is, rather than skimming through the high-minded and inspiring socio-political analysis of de Tocqueville, I prominently display and refer to The Prince at work.)

Ryan is a "warden" at Oxford and most definitely this little book sounds like a seminar lecture; he even goes so far as to encourage the reading of the sources, of the kids these days, wanting Cliff notes and Wiki summaries!  So two-thirds of the book are selected chapters from Democracy, so there you collegiate slackers.

This time as I reconsider Alexis' observation, I overlay them on a completely adversarial Congress, an apathetic electorate, a Huey Long-like mayor in NYC, and a country uncomfortable on a crumbling world stage.  Ryan squarely places the influences of others, in particular Rousseau and Montesquieu, on deTocqueville, and in turn, his impact on Mill.   All this context time travels me back to Saybrook, listening to the political history majors their try to order their readings and my realizing I was not similarly intellectually challenged by any confusion between Pope and Carlyle.

So I will quote because Democracy's observations became bedrock theories, theories that sometimes today seem aligned on the San Andreas fault:

"Equality of condition was not equality of income, education, or anything in particular; it consisted in the absence of social obstacles to whatever ambitions an American entertained."

"Tocqueville thought that Americans understood that in the absence of an interfering and omnicompetent state, they must manage their own affairs ... This is self-interest with an eye to long-run, shared interests.  The danger was that individuals would eventually give in to the temptation to have the state do everything for them; it was the natural path of a democracy to look for uniform solutions and centralize power ..."

I tried to edit Ryan's interpretation of de Tocqueville's analysis of how people compare themselves with other classes since it devolves from the quote about obstacles.  But instead I will give an even further from the source precis:  a lower class, aspiring to move up the economic and social ladder, is more frustrated when they begin to ascend and get stymied than if they never began the effort.  Now as I write that, I recognize not only the frustration of falling back, but more insidiously, I overlay a political conscious intent to make a class "fat and happy and lazy," dependent on governmental assistance to subsist but not excel.   When I stopped reading yesterday, I again said to myself keep those local charter schools growing.  A leg up not a hand out.