The Ex-Prez-to-be conflates Texas, Tennessee, what may or may not be an ancient Chinese proverb, and a Who song…all in 16 seconds. Steve Forbes would have known better.
While the monumental Forbes Scrapbook of Thoughts on the Business of Life drops a mighty load of style in claiming that “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” is an old Chinese proverb, the saying goes so far back, we really can’t nail its origin. Maybe the very forces of nature themselves mandated the venerable meme thousands of years ago,, implanting it like little wads of self-replicating, electric spores in random brains all over the planet.
“Demons at Your Doorstep” author Peter Popoff: adept at fooling some of the people, some of the time.
Luckily for everybody, we know exactly who first said, “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely:” eminent historian, prominent liberal, and (by our standards) total conundrum John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, aka Lord Acton. Part of a 19th Century snail-mail bout with colleague Mandell Creighton over a schism in Catholicism, the quote merits a glance in its original context.*
“I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.
Acton’s last sentence has no fresher exemplar, than our own bumbling Blago, who ran as a reformer only to become another line item in Illinois’s endless cavalcade of corrupt officials. Regardless, China has the state whipped in the corruption department by simple dint of experience—as well as the absoluteness of its government’s power.
And you thought last year’s RNC was bad? The Red Army discourages pro-democracy demonstrators in 1989. (Try finding this online in China!)
Despite all their bogus egalitarianism, the nations’ ostensibly Commie-pants rulers (including People’s Republic emperor founder and monumental hypocrite Mao Zedong) have pretty much maintained the iron-fistedness and strict social hierarchies favored by every dynasty before them, offering citizens precious little freedom and less transparency than a lump of coal. They’ve also been mightily tight with the Triads–the country’s homegrown international crime syndicate–for more than a decade. While the latter have their fingers in countless pies, pornography ranks high among their bread-and-butter interests.
The incomparable Chow-Yun Fat battles the Triads back before they had so many friends in high places. No wonder he lives here now.
Which brings us to why we should be wracked with shame. Time and time again, we, the world’s regular folks, get thoroughly bamboozled by the clowns in charge. The WMD fiasco makes a ducky example, as did our failure to connect any dots whatsoever when, a couple decades ago, lawmakers started calling for the tougher sentencing guidelines that have since helped put a ridiculous number of younger African-American males behind bars. (Turns out some of those lawmakers had ties to the thriving private prison industry.) We certainly can’t omit the Reichstag Fire. Jeepers! Given world enough and time, we could find at least as many examples as poor Acton–a devout Catholic whose penchant for historical research made him all too aware of how many Popes had been murderers, crooks, or worse–was sitting on when he wrote Creighton.
Even Acton’s beard was ahead of its time.
Instead, let’s focus on the present, while one-dimensional media outlets so used to playing lapdog as to automatically do it for any country’s government are still trumpeting “China’s crackdown on porn.” Let’s see… One of the planet’s most notoriously corrupt totalitarian governments in lucrative cahoots with porn-making thugs. Porn-making thugs troubled by flood of competitors. Why not blame the likes of Google–already bending over in every direction to accomodate the Jintao regime–and Baidu for aiding the spread of “low-class, crude and even vulgar contents, which severely corrupted the public mentality”–and then use the crackdown to eliminate...the competition (along with any dissident bloggers still at large).
Still alive and working, David Frost interviews silenced Chinese blogger Michael Anti.
Can I prove it? Not from Minneapolis. And in China, the simple fact of an attempt would almost surely make me a dead person within 72 hours. What I’m suggesting is pure conjecture. The only support I can offer comes from reason and an awareness of Acton’s “historical responsibility.” As with Illinois, corruption seems an integral part of the Chinese government’s fabric. Still, for all its shysters and con artists, Illinois has produced a few public figures endowed with greatness and goodness: Abe Lincoln, my homie Bob Ingersoll, and naturally (“Rod Smith writes the history of the future” alert!), Barack Obama. Unlike our departing emperor President and his minions, the Prez-elect at least gets his old sayings right. He might even know a few of the Acton gems you’ll find below, right after the Sa Ding Ding video.
Half Mongolian, half Han, fluent in Mandarin, Sanskrit, and Tibetan (currently mastering English, too)–If 26 year-old Sa Ding Ding were running China–or Illinois–we’d all be a lot better off.
Acton Rocks Reality
“The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks.”
“Learn as much by writing as by reading.”
“The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.”
“Be not content with the best book; seek sidelights from the others; have no favourites.”
“The science of politics is the one science that is deposited by the streams of history, like the grains of gold in the sand of a river; and the knowledge of the past, the record of truths revealed by experience, is eminently practical, as an instrument of action and a power that goes to making the future.
“[History is] not a burden on the memory but an illumination of the soul.”
“And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that. All power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
“The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern: every class is unfit to govern.”
“Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end. “
“Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right to do what we ought.”
“There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men.”
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*As always, special thanks to Wikipedia.
*As always, thanks to Google and Wikipedia.
