This began with a few thoughts about professors and their graduate assistants, and wound up thinking about Jefferson. Interesting mix; from February 1995.

How many professors view their graduate students as handy slave labor, ready to be used at the drop of a hat? Under the guise of the student's "learning" something, the student winds up doing a lot of the professor's dirty-work research, or even winds up doing the professor's assigned contract work for him so that professor can go off and do something else.

Then there was the archetype of the ignorant, bad teacher, Wackford Squeers in Nicholas Nickleby. Teaching by example as he would say: "Winder. W-I-N-D-E-R, noun substantive, a casement." And then off the boys go to clean all the windows. Abusive as hell. Then at the end of the novel comes the moment of truth when Nicholas, Frank, and their party return to Yorkshire, to Dotheboys Hall, trash the joint and the boys all get out. But they wind up roaming the countryside, hopeless, helpless, starving and freezing, no better off than they were before, possibly worse. One particular hell replaced by another. Dickens didn't have an answer, either, so he didn't try to take the easy way out.

A static society is a dead society so reform and change must happen in order to keep it alive. Yet reform without careful thought to the consequences is not to my mind preferable to stasis. Some of my biggest personal objections to "reform" administrations is the rush in which they are trying to change things just to make it seem as they are doing something. First Clinton was making these moves, and now the newly empowered (sort of) Republicans are making the same kinds of moves, just on slightly different topics. There is quite possibly too much power in the hands of the electorate; instead of government we seem to be heading into mob rule.

That sounds odd. At least it sounds odd to me. Having been raised by teachers telling most proudly and insistently about the virtues of living in a pure democracy, I find that as an adult I am more and more uncomfortable with the idea of pure democracy. As the ability to communicate with elected representatives becomes instantaneous, less and less are elected representatives able to act from their own conscience and beliefs, and more and more do they have to show a quick response to the dictates of the electorate. An angry electorate slaps them harshly, voting them out of office and voting in term limits. But who exactly is to blame in all of this?

At this point I am beginning to wonder if I need to start reading Jefferson much more carefully. I suffer under no delusion that I really know what I'm talking about. I am not a student of political science nor of political history. Towards the end of his life he began to have fears about democracy. This isn't surprising; he wasn't at all in favor of common-man democracy in the first place, and the Jacksonian revolution must have horrified him. As a wealthy landowner he seems to have viewed a country in which only the property owners could vote, and even then primarily for elected representatives who then were pretty much free to act upon their own beliefs. So the common man was by and large cut out of the governmental process outside of some slightly better than token participatory actions.

I can't trust purely participatory democracy because of its willingness to bow to the winds of current fashion. So much of that sort of attitude seems to have governed the thoughts of lawmakers over the last twenty years, with even more such thinking lately. But what exactly do I want? Plutocracy? Senators and representatives absolutely free from any responsibility once we vote them into office? Monarchy? Isn't this trusting human nature far too much? On the other hand, isn't handing over the reins of government to the general population trusting human nature far too much? No answers, only questions. Town meetings are nice ways for people to blow off steam and let their feelings be known. But I don't think they are the proper place for the actual taxes to be set or the laws made. That big, overbearing man with the loudest voice will manage to get his way about it most of the time, by convincing those who are more passive that his ideas are the right ones--even if they don't really agree with him.