A Confederacy of Dunces

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/08/opinion/08collins.html?scp=1&sq=confederacy%20of%20dunces&st=cse

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 10:39 AM
Subject: re: A Confederacy of Dunces
To: letters@nytimes.com


To the Editor:

  In 1974, president Gerald Ford--in order to end the nation's long nightmare of Watergate--pardoned Richard Nixon for crimes unenumerated. A nation weary of scandal largely accepted this. The infection was never cleaned out, and it festered. Under the Cheney/Bush administration, we relapsed into the imperial presidency, complete with illegal wiretaps at home and an illegal war abroad. Just not talking about it didn't work.  The issue of secession has been festering far longer than that.

    Theorists of democracy had demonstrated by the time of the formation of the United States that a democracy can be legitimate only when the members have in large measure similar values and means.  A citizen who is out-voted on one issue will accept the majority position only if she/he can expect to be in the majority on another issue on another day.  If there exists a permanent minority holding different values, that will be out-voted on all issues, participation in the democracy is empty, and illegitimate. Anyone who has compared the Bush v. Gore electoral map of 2000 to the Slave v. Free state map of 1860 should ask if "one nation, indivisible" is not a pious fiction.  If there is still a Confederacy 150 yrs after our war, they deserve self rule and we deserve to be free of them. Let them legislate against healthcare and research and birth control. But let them do it among a polity who shares their values, and let us get on with moving the US into the 21st century.

Barry Levine