The people who embrace this new notion of personal worth, who embrace the idea of giving their best without expectation or demand, these people will prosper in all the ways which count. That's not idealism any more -- it's reality.
All of these stories were publicly available from the moment they were published, and could have been used (or checked) by any media outlet, yet no TV network did, instead using the charge and (sometimes) a Lamont denial, as though the charge and denial carried equal weight.
Members of the Internet Generation don't understand why government can't work better based on these values. They sign up for classes online, they even take some of those classes online, they do their research online. This is how government should work as well. And politics. And business.
So conservatives don't read Hofstadter because it's uncomfortable. Liberals don't read him because they're living in what he considers a foreign land, where Christianity has become an armored fist, where questioning authority is considered treasonous by those in power, and where the liberal values Hofstadter assumed as universal have been, on the whole, repudiated.
Everything Bernanke has learned will tell him to maintain liquidity in the face of inflation. He won't raise interest rates to maintain asset values. He will see the housing crash as deflation, and in time lower rates. The result will be a collapse of the dollar.
Conservativism is always the same. It never has new tales to tell. It seeks to replicate the past, always. That is its nature.
A lot of our childhood heroes, it turns out, have feet of clay. Sports stars fade or go down in flames. Politicians likewise. Entertainers may lose touch with the studios, become has-beens. Everyone disappoints. Not Jimmy Breslin.
The time has come, in other words, to teach, to mentor, and to pass on what we know so our children can save this wretched Earth from the mess we have made of it.
Rather than arguing against what a fool believes, wise men will seize the power to reason a way out, a new political thesis that answers the concerns of our time -- energy, the environment, science -- based on the value of this medium.
The ideals and values of the Internet, in other words, work. They're ideals, but they're not just ideals.
