Word: boorstins
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...both major political parties, include Vice President Gerald Ford; Sol Linowitz, chairman of the National Urban Coalition; Patrick Moynihan, U.S. Ambassador to India; Ivan Allen, former mayor of Atlanta; Nancy Hanks, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts; William Paley, chairman of the board of CBS; Historian Daniel Boorstin; Physicist Edward Teller and Clare Boothe Luce...
...question remains why Americans put up with the perversion of the democratic ideal, who or whatever is responsible for that perversion. For Boorstin, the answer is sheer inertia. Not living up to the ideal was simply easier than living up to it. Americans had more important things to do than to worry about abstract notions like democracy. It was the moment's profit and not the ideal that counted...
...AGAIN, BOORSTIN APPEARS to be right in his interpertation but short on his explanation. But perhaps there is no clear way to explain Americans' failure to pursue whole-heatedly the ideal of democracy; all one can do is to excuse this failure with reference to "human nature...
...that human nature is educable, one would do well to keep the lessons of the American democratic experiences, as Boorstin draws them, in mind. We have taken something beautiful and turned it into a hamburger stand for sheer lack of determination to do otherwise. We have forgotten what democracy was supposed to be about, forgotten that it is a means to a self-realized humanity, and accepted an ugly parody of it in its place...
...Boorstin concludes his trilogy--which was 25 years in the works--by saying that the American sense of mission has dwindled into an unwilling sense of momentum. We, he concludes, have lost our grasp over things while things continue to exert their influence on us. It is time to turn this around. It is time to abandon our democracy of things and to concentrate our attention on finally becoming a democracy of people in hopes of attaining true human freedom...