You rule the world

"Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child"

Lewis Lapham said that.

However, there are many in positions of power, like the current goon sqaud pool of Republican presidential candidates, who don't even know what happened yesterday or the day before or the day before that--or pretend not to--and there are many many more earnest well-meaning citizens who listen to these people and believe what they say about the past and the present and make important decisions about the future based upon misrepresentations, distortions, outright lies.

(See James Stewart's column in the New York Times, 'Business Day' Saturday, September 3, 2001, on the animus directed toward the Fed and Ben Bernanke, a small taste of the above, hopefully just a phase we're going through...)

I.F Stone maintained that the truth is not necessarily hidden--the journalistic truth, that is (it should also be noted that Stone was an amateur classicist who wrote a good book on the trial of Socrates)--and right in front of us in such places as The Times. And the federal budget is available and free to US citizens should they wish to peruse its hefty contents. And the Fed is not a 'secret organization' as stated with such conviction by your sister-in-law at a family picnic last weekend, and seconded by her brother...

...it is no wonder those who know, often those hip enough to cop to not knowing but willing to do the research, throw their hands up in the air or pass by such uninformed sentiments in silence.

It's very difficult being free; the hardest thing to do in the world is to govern the self. But once free, no one dares put words in your mouth. You rule the world, though the world may be in need of another Big Idea on the scale of Socrates or Christ, having exhausted them both, as informed citizens such as Lewis Lapham have suggested.

Let us read again the first lines of Pound's poem "Cantico del Sole":

The thought of what America would be like
If the Classics had a wide circulation
Troubles my sleep