March 16, 2008

I read a brilliant article in the Village Voice, dated March 11, 2008 (http://www.villagevoice.com/generic/show_print.php?id=374064&p...), by the Pulitzer Prize winning play write David Mamet. He summed up pretty much what I have gone through in my political thinking. Like him, I am a child of the 60s, meaning that I grew up with negative feelings about government, business and positive feelings about human beings. I have learned that while the usual human vices hold sway throughout the world, in my life things are not always wrong, neither are they wrong in the community in which I live or in my country. Mamet's comparison of George W. Bush and JFK is pretty much right-on, except that JFK had charisma and Bush doesn’t. For me, the person occupying the White House, or the party controlling the Congress, makes little difference in the long run. What makes our country so great is the U.S. Constitution, which created a form of government so brilliant that no single person or party can fuck it up for very long. Sure, we have ups and downs (like right now is a down), but I am sure this will not last. I really don’t think the next presidential election is going fundamentally change anything in America. I like Obama because he is charismatic, like JFK, in form if not in substance.

I really liked the Mamet piece, especially, when he called Thomas Sowell “our greatest contemporary philosopher”. I have been reading Sowell’s columns for years and could not agree more. My only question is why he is never seen or heard of in the MSM? You want to know how smart Thomas Sowell is, just read this article. http://townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2008/03/12/non-judgmental_nonsense.

Sowell was born in North Carolina, where, he recounts, his encounters with white people were so limited that he didn't believe that "yellow" was a possible color for human hair (A Personal Odyssey). He later moved with his mother's sister (whom he thought to be his mother; his father died before he was born) and siblings to Harlem, New York City. He dropped out of high school when he moved out on his own at the age of 17 because of money problems and a deteriorating home environment.^[2] Soon after, he served in the US Marine Corps.

After his service, Sowell passed a GED and enrolled at Howard University. His top-notch grades enabled him to transfer and completed a B.A. in Economics from Harvard College, magna cum laude, an M.A. in Economics from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago. He chose University of Chicago, he has said, because he wanted to study under George Stigler. Stigler's achievements were recognized when in 1982 he won the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Sowell has taught at prominent American universities including Howard University, Cornell University, Brandeis University, and UCLA. Since 1980 he has been a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he holds the fellowship named after Rose and Milton Friedman.