State of the Union Address

Tonight I watched, along with my family, the State of the Union address given by President Bush. Actually, I only watched about a little more than a half of the full address, as we have no TV and I forgot about it anyway. I had to load up to a live stream on CNN, and the speech was already in progress.

I have maintained for years that if the dim-witted politicians who attend the address (and of course I'm being very ironic and untruthful here) would stop clapping after every third word the speech would only last 20 minutes, plus or minus a few for introductions, etc. I'm waiting for the President who announces, "please hold your applause until the end of my address this evening". Then I'll know we've found a top-notch President.

I found President Bush's speech talking a lot about "empowerment", and I agree. I am more inclined to be in favor of more of a government where the government just empowers private businesses and entrepreneurs and scientists. I like that idea. However, in my viewing of the last half of the speech I noticed that the President kept talking about increasing the budget for this and allocating double for that. How will we keep from deficit spending?

I found the democratic response to the State of the Union to be void of any real content. It was full of platitudes; she was just like Hamlet. "Join with us, and we can do great things. We can end all of these problems, just like the majority of Americans wants to do!" She never presented any alternative plans or anything with real substance, just trite, vapid comments in a monotone voice.

I have a great respect for President Bush. I have a great respect for anyone who is capable of uniting the multifarious diversity of this great nation in order to win the office, and I have a great respect for those that continue in the office and do their duty.

I find it interesting that one of President Bush's main points was that we must trust in the American people. I find that interesting because in AP Government we have been reading about how the Founding Fathers (at least according to Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition) distrusted the people and the masses, but concluded that popular sovereignty was the best option anyway because they could place the "rapacious self-interest" of man in another man's way to keep the playing field level.

President Hinckley Dies

I apologize for the disorganized pastiche that follows, but I am in kind of a state of tumultuous thoughts right now.

I was caught totally off guard this evening when I found out that President Hinckley died tonight at about 7:00 MST. Right now news sources are swamped and no news page will connect...they all time out. It is such a shock! I didn't expect President Hinckley to live forever in this mortal life but I devoutly wish'd he could have.

I loved President Hinckley, and I'm not ashamed to say it proudly. I know that he was a Prophet of God here upon the earth, and I sustain him. He did so many great things! He built over half the temples now existing upon the earth. At general conference sometimes my family would get a bit lax and a bit too relaxed, and maybe even sleep. However, at the end of every session when he would speak, at some unspoken feeling/prompt, we would all sit up and listen attentively to the words that our beloved prophet had to say. He was so powerful in the Spirit. You could just feel that what he said was true. I will always have a significant attachment to this great man, who in my opinion was as close to perfect as anybody could ever wish to be in this life.

I cannot convey my lachrymose thoughts. I can only hope to tell I have much sadness, and doubtless as this tremendous event sinks in more I will have even more. However, I have faith that the church will go on, and the next President (presumably President Monson), will be inspired as well. I trust that the Lord is doing what is best for his church on the earth right now in these trying times. I trust that the Lord is directing this church, and I know that everything will be alright, and that I will be able to meet President Hinckley after I die. I never got to fulfill that great dream of mine to shake his hand or even see him in person just once, but I know I can later.

Perhaps my favorite addresses of his came in the general Priesthood sessions. I particularly enjoyed his enjoining the church to read the Book of Mormon in the year of '06. It was from this reading that I gained the strongest testimony of the Book of Mormon, and in turn, the church, that I have ever had. I know that book is the word of God.

Here is the original news article, quoted from the Deseret News at http://www.deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695247765,00.html

President Gordon B. Hinckley dies at age 97
Published: Sunday, Jan. 27, 2008 8:08 p.m. MST


President Gordon B. Hinckley, who led The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints through explosive growth during his more than 12 years as president, died at 7 p.m. today of causes incident to age, surrounded by family. He was 97.

He traveled the world during his tenure, which was marked by a number of significant milestones, including the "Proclamation to the World on the Family," construction of dozens of small temples and the creation of several new quorums of the Seventy. He called for increased fellowshipping of new converts and reaching out to other faiths. Church membership has grown from 9 million to more than 13 million members during his administration.

His ministry was characterized by a strong desire to be out among the people. He traveled more than half a million miles and spoke to hundreds of thousands of members in more than 60 nations, employing his mastery of electronic media to bring unprecedented press attention to the church.

Under his leadership, the 21,000-seat Conference Center, north of the Salt Lake Tabernacle, was built and dedicated, and the portion of Main Street between Temple Square and the Joseph Smith Memorial Building was turned into a plaza. Online computer access to church information as well as online and CD access to family history resources grew exponentially.

A young man of 25 and just home from his mission when he went to work for the church in 1935, he remained an employee, administrator and general authority for almost seven decades, an eyewitness — and key contributor — to what he called, with the approach of the 21st century, "a great season in the history of the world and a great season in the history of the church."

His proposal to build small temples launched what some have termed the most ambitious temple-building program in world history. Some 122 temples are now in use and nine more have been announced, or are under construction. His goal of having at least 100 temples in use, authorized or under construction by Jan. 1, 2000, was accomplished with the dedication of the church's 100th temple in Boston on Oct. 1, 2000.

Three of the temples were at major sites in church history. The Nauvoo Temple was rebuilt to 21st-century standards, a temple was dedicated at Palmyra, N.Y., and another was dedicated at Winter Quarters, Neb.

Area Authority Seventies, essentially replacing regional representatives, were called in the late 1990s to help handle the church's growing leadership burden at the local level. The First and Second Quorums of the Seventy also grew.

At the 171st Annual General Conference in the spring of 2001, he announced creation of the Perpetual Education Fund, a loan program to help young Latter-day Saints in Third World countries.

President Hinckley, who spent nearly 14 years as a counselor in the First Presidency, was set apart as 15th church president on March 12, 1995, three months before his 85th birthday. He was sustained in solemn assembly at the 165th Annual General Conference that April 1.

He then set out to visit as many church members as possible in their homelands. He continued an ambitious travel schedule throughout his stewardship, urged the members to get their houses in order and warned against pornography and maltreatment of spouses and children. The "Proclamation to the World on the Family," that he announced in September 1995 gave Latter-day Saints a ready reference for their beliefs on family life, and has been used as a model by international organizations seeking to preserve the traditional family.

With the death of President Hinckley, the First Presidency was dissolved and the Quorum of the Twelve became the governing body of the church. President Hinckley's counselors, Presidents Thomas S. Monson and Henry B. Eyring, took their places — first and 11th — within the 14-member quorum. Until his death in August 2007, President James E. Faust served as President Hinckley's second counselor for 12 years.

Sometime soon, following President Hinckley's funeral, quorum members will sustain a new church president. If historical precedent holds, the quorum's senior apostle and president, President Monson, will succeed President Hinckley.

President Hinckley's initial call to the First Presidency came July 23, 1981, as a counselor to President Spencer W. Kimball. He was set apart as second counselor to President Kimball on Dec. 2, 1982, following the death of President N. Eldon Tanner. In November 1985, following the death of President Kimball, he was called as first counselor in the First Presidency, serving with President Ezra Taft Benson and President Monson, the second counselor. Presidents Hinckley and Monson continued in those positions under President Howard W. Hunter.

Cybercorps and More

Today after school we had Cybercorps (a computer club where we fix the school's computers). It was perhaps our longest session, because we were there until close to 6:00 p.m. from when school gets out at 2:40 p.m. I've been at the school until 10:00 p.m. before working on our FBLA website (the week before it's due and it's not done we pretty much enter into the server room at 8:00 a.m. and leave there at 10:00 p.m....it's a lot of hard, hard, long, work, but it paid off with two 1st place wins in State and two awesomely exciting trips to Nationals in Nashville and Chicago - I never thought I would travel to those places in my life, let alone in high school).

So anyway, the UBSCT is coming up and we had to install a bunch of new software on the computers to facilitate the testing...we wrote a batch file that installed Acrobat Reader, Adobe Flash player, turned off automatic Windows Updates, installed Java, and then installed a proprietary program for the testing. It took a while. Then I had to come home and read four Lanahan readings for government tomorrow, and finish memorizing Hamlet's To Be or Not to Be...let's see if I can do it from memory here (I don't have the punctuation memorized, but I'll give it my best shot):

To be, or not to be, that is the question.
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to endure
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them? To die, to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep; perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause; There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,


And that's all we're required to memorize, so that's all I did.

Now I've got to go read a chapter in our Government textbook.

Lanahan Readings for AP Government Tomorrow

Round 2 from the Lanahan readings:

Lani Guinier, The Tyranny of the Majority:

The Tyranny of the Majority is an apt title for this work. This reading appears to be the introduction to a collection of law review articles. In it Guinier defines the difference between a majority rule and a majority tyranny. She argues that in our society, the minority groups are not given a voice when the majority group feels secure in it's position. As soon as defectors transition to the minority, the majority must give the minority a voice because sooner or later the minority will turn into the majority, and if the majority does not apply the Golden Rule, neither will the minority when it is their turn for power. As soon as the majority becomes a permanent majority, and doesn't have to worry about a constantly shifting majority, the minority voice goes out the window.

To solve this problem Guinier suggests a procedural rule for voting in which the minority is still given rights. I agree with this idea. It is called cumulative voting. Each person is given the same number of votes as the number of issues they are to vote on. They are then free to "stack" their votes all on one item, or to spread them out however they wish. By forming coalitions, minority groups can stack votes and win at least one of the items on the ballet. By doing this they sacrifice the other items, which are then won by the majority. The majority of the items is won by the majority, which is as it should be, in my opinion. However, she has a valid point. The minority is often overrun in a society like ours, where our strict majoritarianism viewpoint is dominated by a winner-take-all attitude.

C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite:

Mills begins this excerpt by declaring that the majority of individuals living in the United States today has doubts as the efficacy of their lives, their work, and their effect on the government. The government is ruled instead by a "power elite", who occupy such pivotal positions such that their inaction has far more drastic consequences then what they actually decide. He doesn't actually place Congress in the power elite. They are the second sub level of the elite, controlled by their heads. He writes much about hierarchies of power and of institutions that compose the elite. One would think that institutions of learning or powerful families compose the elite, but Mills names "the big three": the economic, the political, and the military domains. These three areas effectively influence all of the other sidelined institutions because their decisions have immediate, powerful consequences. As Mills puts it, "religious, educational, and family institutions are not autonomous centers of national power; on the contrary, these decentralized areas are increasingly shaped by the big three, in which developments of decisive and immediate consequence now occur."

Every thing has become centralized. I tend to agree with this pronouncement. Mills seems to be describing a process in this paper, more so than a state of things as they are currently. He would have to be describing this process in order for his ideas to bear any relevance to our world today (the book was written in the 1950s). If what Mills says is true about how the larger corporations are increasingly affecting the political system and the political system acts to intervene in the economy, the triangle of power becomes an unchangeable matrix that are so intertwined one cannot be disavowed without huge ramifications. I don't like it. I would rather have a system where each component of the government was as autonomous as it could be, either succeeding or failing without too much of an impact on the government. I can foresee problems arising from this type of a system.

Mills goes on to say that the power elite of America is formed from the "warlords, the corporation chieftains, [and] the political directorate". Mills remarks that these power elite are not part of a conspiracy, not part of any plan, but are just part of the system which has grown up and they continue to use their positions to consolidate them even more.

Richard Zweigenhaft/G. William Domhoff, Diversity in the Power Elite:

Building on Mills's thesis, Zweigenhaft and Domhoff talk about the non-traditional power elite (Jews, women, blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans, etc). Their main point is how centuries of multiculturalism has affected the power elite and what effect it has had on the power elite's relation to the rest of society. Side note: They called Mills iconoclastic. The authors go on to examine how the chances of minorities getting past the "glass ceiling" in the corporate world has been examined by several big wigs and even been examined by sociologists studying how sports has affected development of skills deemed essential in the business world. I just came across one of the most humorous lines I have read today: "Many women managers are convinced that their careers suffer because of discrimination against them by golf clubs". I think that's a bit extreme! A lady named Sally was applying to be a manager at Microsoft. She thought she did well in the interview, had an excellent resume, and had impeccable references. Unfortunately, she was contacted a week later by a harried executive apologizing for her failure to be hired. "Those awful golf clubs!" She exploded. "They're the entire reason I wasn't hired!" As you can see, this situation seems a bit ludicrous to me at the moment. Maybe I'll read on and see what the authors mean!

The authors then begin to talk about African Americans in the power elite. It is their opinion, and I agree, that multicultural diversity has strengthened the power elite.

In conclusion, the authors say that the diversification of the power elite has not changed the nation's economic differences a bit.

Robert Dahl, Who Governs? and A Preface to Democratic Theory:

Dahl begins by talking about political inequalities, and how in a patrician oligarchy the inequalities were all collected into a single group. If you were better than somebody else politically, you were also better then them socially, materially, etc. However, now, it is more diversified, lending our government to be a plurally governed society. He is essentially refuting Mills's argument that there is a power elite by saying many groups rule the government because of their dispersed inequalities.

There are two strata. A political stratum and a apolitical stratum. The ideas and skills of those in the political stratum are diffused into the general population. To me, if the political stratum were removed, and those from the apolitical stratum had to step in and fill their place, then if there was a difference in the major decisions and procedures of the time I would consider the rule to be based in the political stratum, as responsible as those politicians might be to their constituents. However, if there was little or no difference, the power would seem to me to be in the apolitical stratum, and the political ideas are diffused into the political stratum the same way in which the ideas from the politicians are diffused into the hoi polloi. As I read through some of the differences in here between the two strata, I cannot help but want to be included in the political stratum, as time-consuming as it sounds. Dahl gives some of his own ideas on the subject: he believes that "when movement into the political stratum is easy, the stratum embodies many of the most widely shared values and goals in the society". I agree, and contend that in this case, due to the nature of the system, the government is run more by the people than most would assume. Dahl also says, "the political stratum does not constitute a homogeneous class with well-defined class interests". It is this split, this heterogeneity, that allows the paradoxes that Hartz and Kammen talked about. It is these paradoxes that allows our government to be such a compromising nation. I imagine a tug-of-war rope with both sides walking horizontally as well as pulling. You notice that the middle of the rope, the measure of our nation's public policy, slowly moves in the direction of the majority. It is these paradoxes, combined with Guinier's tyranny of the majority, that defines our government.

In the excerpt from A Preface to Democratic Theory, Dahl alleges that "the making of governmental decisions is not a majestic march of great majorities united upon certain matters of basic policy. It is the steady appeasement of relatively small groups".

I really like this quote about our country from Dahl:

It is not a static system. The normal American system has evolved, and by evolving it has survived. It has evolved and survived from aristocracy to mass democracy, through slavery, civil war, the tentative uneasy reconciliation of North and South, the repression of Negroes and their halting liberation; through two great wars of worldwide scope, mobilization, far-flung military enterprise, and return to hazardous peace; through numerous periods of economic instability and one prolonged depression with mass unemployment, farm "holidays," veterans' marches, tear gas, and even bullets; through two periods of postwar cynicism, demagogic excesses, invasions of traditional liberties, and the groping, awkward, often savage, attempt to cope with problems of subversion, fear, and civil tension.

Study Habits

One thing I've learned is that in order for me to learn information I have to really get a good grasp of the material. I can't just memorize things; I have to understand the big picture and synthesize information somehow.

Ann G. Serow and Everett C. Ladd compiled an excellent book called The Lanahan Readings in the American Polity. It sounds boring, and in some cases it is. It is, however, a required reading for AP Government. I'm going to organize kind of what I get out of it so far in today's readings.

We have to read four excerpts for tomorrow:

1. #8 - Richard Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition
2. #10 - Michael Kammen's A Machine That Would Go of Itself
   
3. #9 - James Madison's The Federalist 10
   
4. #15 - James Madison's The Federalist 51

1. To me it seems that Hofstadter's driving impetus in this essay is his view of the Founding Fathers as attempting to create a government that is based on the view of the masses while at the same time distrusting those same masses. The Founding Fathers viewed man as a "rapacious self-interest, and yet they wanted him to be free". In subscribing to this philosophy, the Fathers stood in the middle of two extremes. It reminds me of Hartz's essay (although written seven years earlier), and Michael Kammen later capitalized on this same idea in 1972. That is, the idea of paradoxes in government. How can a government be derived from the people and the liberties they innately have, but be at the same time be ordained to control the inordinate self-interest of the people? Hofstadter argues that the Founding Fathers thought that democracy was the most menacing thing to liberty; that is, the ability to own property, to protect that property, and bestow upon every man the same liberties as another to do with that property what he will, dependent upon his own inpinging upon the rights of others. It is only when combined with Locke's view of property that we received our inalienable rights guaranteed by the Constitution today. I enjoyed when Hofstadter brought up the point that, "it was the opponents of the Constitution who were most active in demanding such vital liberties as freedom of religion, freedom of speech..." In the end, the Founding Fathers, according to Hofstadter, established the government to effectively umpire their continual strife with property, because they agreed with Hobbes that mankind is inherently brutish. However, in order to control that brutish nature they necessarily had to place the nature of man against itself to keep one party from gaining too much control.

I had planned to write more on each of the essays, but I'm afraid I'm out of time. Until next time, this is S. Fisher, signing off.

Photography Club Field Trip

The photography club field trip is pretty much the most exciting thing that has happened all weekend. Today, Monday January 21st, which was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the photography club traveled to Zion National Park and took loads of cool photographs at 6:00 A.M. Yep, it was early.

Here are some poor samples of what the others most certainly captured quite well. As I am yet an amateur photographer, and don't quite always know how to compose a shot, these are the best I can offer up.

We ate at a delicious, albeit expensive, restaurant in Springdale called something like the "Pioneer Restaurant", and engaged in a lively discussion about gratuity and how restaurants expect you to tip the server in addition to to the 18% gratuity already added on to your bill for you. Isn't that convenient?

Anyway, the trip was fun (we were snowed on).