He was using the magic marker seemingly to highlight every second paragraph.

I reckon he is what they call a prodigy in Texas.

That’s one LOUD “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” for Prussian government educators and their current intellectual heirs.

And they ask me why I drink.

John Lowell

Actually, I don’t know if the kid’s views were the result of Calvinism large or small. I think triumphalism may have been more of it - there was a sense (especially among the people who attended the inauguration) that Bush was rightfully ruling the world.

I asked the kid what he read, where he got his political information. His reply indicated that he read almost nothing. I think talk radio was his primary source of info.

He was in seventh heaven after his first visit to Washington and said he was thinking about going into politics.

I asked if he would like to be a congressman.

“Yes, I would like that” - I believe he said he had been thinking about.

“Who is your congressman now?”

Uh-oh.

Blank stare.

The kid struggled briefly and then said that he didn’t know.

A facinating encounter, eh?

I’m struck with the youngster’s understanding of the need for government: To control people. Reflecting on this response, it betrays, of course, a fundamentally negative impression of the human being, one almost certainly informed by a kind of Calvinism, consciously or unconsciously. Here we have the need for a divine impulse to compel sanctity, not simply to tempt one with it. It is odd though that the outcropping of this underlying pessimism expresses itself in an authoritarian impulse. If one is suspicious enough of human beings to see the role of government solely in terms of its supervising behaviour - a kind of parentalism noticable in not a few of our Christian Zionist friends - why might it be that your antagonist would exempt the persons running government from the same criticism?

John Lowell