by Whether you agree with his sentiment or not, you have to admire his courage, writing and passion.
This is an example of what makes America great. You can watch the above video clip on television without the secret police busting down your door, declaring you an enemy combatant and detaining you in an undisclosed location – for now.
Veteran educator Gary Stager, Ph.D. is the author of Twenty Things to Do with a Computer – Forward 50, co-author of Invent To Learn — Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom, publisher at Constructing Modern Knowledge Press, and the founder of the Constructing Modern Knowledge summer institute. He led professional development in the world’s first 1:1 laptop schools thirty years ago and designed one of the oldest online graduate school programs. Gary is also the curator of The Seymour Papert archives at DailyPapert.com. Learn more about Gary here.
Thanks, Gary, for sharing this video. I limp along behind you in this blog entry:
http://www.mguhlin.net/archives/2007/12/entry_4013.htm
Wishing you well,
Miguel Guhlin
It’s too bad more people in the media aren’t taking this kind of critical approach to what the leadership of this country is saying.
And even worse that more people in the audience aren’t critically listening to what is being said.
Hm.
One would think that the thing that ‘makes America great’ would be something that is unique to America.
If so, free speech is not it. Freespeech is practised widely throughout the world. Many people, not just Americans, can be as bitingly critical as they wish.
Of course, for the last seven years, people in such countries have been using their freedoms to launch scathing attacks against Bush, attacks quite similar to the one posted here.
All the while, Americans were hearing untruths from their own media, and were consequently re-electing the incompetent president.
What has ‘made America great’ has been its relative insulation from invasion by virtue of ocean boundaries, and an abundant supply of natural resources at a time when Europe’s and Asia’s were largely depleted.
Being able to capitalize on an era in which the great colonial powers had written themselves out of the picture by constant warfare, Americans have benefited from a colonial empire based in Latin America and reaching into Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
It goes without saying that in these client American states, speech such as we see here was punishable by torture and death. As can be attested by the disappeared in places like Chile and Guatemala, and in current client states such as Iraq.
It may now be fashionable to criticize Bush – but it is important to regard without blinkers the political environment that made his election inevitable.
My slightly ironic use of a cliché is in no means exclusionary or an assertion of American superiority.