From: hooker@aristotle.ils.mwu.edu ( BOB HOOKER)
Subject: Re: Suburbs swing to Clinton (Goose Liver)
Organization: ILS
Date: Thu, 10 Sep 1992 19:21:40 GMT

In article <aaiken.716135322@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>,
aaiken@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (Andrew C. Aiken) writes:
> 

> 	I would argue that there is no such thing as a good poll.  Polls
> are interesting, but they have become instruments by which the effectiveness
> of policy is measured, the result being ineffective policy and an $11
> trillion debt.

Blaming the Nation Debt and Federal Deficit on Polls is alittle strange. 
After all the polls constantly show that most people want a balanced
budget.  


>  Christopher Hitchens wrote an article in Harper's several
> months back about how the American political process has been debased by
> polls.  He pointed out that polls were first used by the opponents of
> the early twentieth century Progressive Movement -- as propaganda.  
> 	Behind every poll there is the implicit assumption about the
> correctness of democratic ideology.  That is, a poll states, in numbers    
> rather than in words, that if a "people" desire say, a nationalized health 
> care system, then its rulers are remiss or cruel for not providing it.  This
> manifestation of direct democracy undermines, as did the populist 	>Savaronola,the edifice of liberty.

Governement to my knowledge, seems to have no problem conducting policy
which flies in the face of polls;  gun control, tax increases, family
leave, foriegn aid, pay increases etc.  If anything our government is more
like the Politburo then mas democracy.  

Our declines may be more at the hands of detached members of elite cliches
then made popularists living by the latest numbers. 

>  	In an earlier day, when Opinion reigned with a lighter hand, we
> had better candidates than now.  Coke or Pepsi?  Bush or Clinton?  Who
> shall be the steward of our nation's decline into yet more elaborate
> (and elaborately justified) barbarisms?  

Well I think if anything the American has been cultivated to an almost
sheep like state of unhealthy civility.  Alittle barbarism (little is the
important term here) might be just what our culture needs to be reborn. 
Like Bacchus dancing into tired Greece,  bringing with his drunken masses
the birth of the highest art form; tragedy,  Chaos must nightly wed with
his lover Order inorder to produce the new born child Culture.    If you
fear Choas, instability,  if you prize tradition,  if your idea of culture,
of society is a perpetual motion machine visit the Despotic nations of the
east,  the poor Chatolic societies of the West,  the Islamic, the Tribal. 
Order is no greater enemy then Chaos.  

> But what is to be expected, man
> being but one of many animals.  There is an animal named Goose:
> with its wings it glides with a certain majesty.  The old wives' tale tells
> that if a chalk circle is drawn around it, it will stay therein, and starve,
> or fatten if fed.  Its legs and wings atrophy, and it becomes.......
> Pate de Foie Gras, much prized by some!  


Very good with crackers and white wine.  Though it has fallen out of
fashion in these health aware days,  the dish remains the highest mark of
culinary culture.