Voices in my head: The genius of America
Posted: Monday, November 26, 2007 9:31 PM by Will Femia
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Voices in my head
I saw this book as an opportunity to ask all of those otherwise rhetorical Constitution questions. I tried to recall every time I've thought to myself, "Surely this is not what the founders intended." And I tried to think of complaints I've heard about the Constitutionality of some of the actions by the Bush administration. The authors, Eric Lane and Michael Oreskes, found hope in the Constitution and it's principles but lately I've been feeling pretty pessimistic about the viability of our system. It's nice that the Constitution has a rule for how wars are declared except that we just go to war without technically declaring it so the Constitution doesn't seem very relevant. It's nice that the Congress is meant to check the power of the executive branch, except when they're a bunch of sheep too afraid of coming out on the wrong side of the latest buzzy legis-trend that they can't muster enough spine to do their Constitutional duty. And it's nice that the government is answerable to the electorate except that most Americans don't vote and it's questionable how many of those who do vote really know what they're doing.
Lane and Oreskes addressed these and other questions with intelligence and aplomb.
The mp3 audio can be downloaded here or else this page has a video link so you can listen through the video player with not very much load time (but with an ad at the beginning). And with the video player option you can check out my latest masterful videography with the critically acclaimed sitting-in-a-chair intro/outro.
