Hi Karen, At 06:29 04/02/03 -0800, you wrote: <<<< Do you mean that Mitch Daniels might take a summer off to work in the fields picking fruit with migrant workers? Rumsfeld might work as a janitor at Wal-Mart? Wolfowitz arise in the middle of the night to bake bread for the morning rush hour? Eliot Abrams work in a retirement home, changing beds and bringing food trays? John Poindexter work as a receiving clerk in a county jail? Condi Rice to stand in a factory sorting tomatoes for canning all day? Dick Cheney pump gas, check tires, wash the windshield? George Bush, as fit as he is, haul garbage cans and throw them onto a truck? Wonderful idea. - Karen >>>>
Yes, a wonderful idea and wonderfully expressed! That made me chuckle all day. But in the world of reality Ed Weick was dead right when he subsequently wrote: <<<< The Chinese tried something like that in the Cultural Revolution. While it may have been humbling, it had no staying power. >>>> And, as a result, the memory of Mao Zedung who caused the deaths of at least 30 million of starvation by stupid policies and set back China economically by 10 years, is now despised by the Chinese elite (according to "China's New Rulers" by Nathan and Gilley [New York Review Books]). No, we have to return to the mechanisms that did, in fact, produce homo sapiens -- the survival of the fittest or, more specifically in our case, the survival of the mentally ablest. Whether we like the present product or not, the fact remains that we are the consequence of a line of evolution during which our brain expanded enormously relative to the other primates. If we legislate our intelligentsia away in a tide of egalitarianism then we are doomed. The Chinese know this. Some of those who survived the Cultural Revolution did so by eating grass, bark from the trees and even their own children. They will not forget what Mao Zedung's egalitarianism produced for a long time to come. Let's not kid ourselves. We are now living in bonanza times produced by the accident of massive quantities of cheap oil and natural gas. When these easily-tapped resources peter out in the next 20/30 years or so, our descendants are going to have to live by their wits again -- as we've always done, except briefly during the last century. Keith ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------ Keith Hudson, General Editor, Handlo Music, http://www.handlo.com 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England Tel: +44 1225 312622; Fax: +44 1225 447727; mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
