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POPSAre Governments more Trustworthy than Corporations? But while there's no question that corporations are often corrupt, monopolistic and abusive-- so is government. There's a simple reason for that, guns don't kill people, and corporations don't steal from or abuse people. Only people do. And people will take those human failings with them into the boardroom as much as they will into the halls of government.
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POPSThe Test The next Presidency has within its reach at least two generation-spanning causes: the need to jump-start a new energy economy, and, in so doing, help to contain climate change; and the need to enact a plan to provide quality health care to all Americans, and, in so doing, complete the project of social insurance that Roosevelt described in 1935. Each of these projects is urgent, but it is health-care reform that speaks more directly to the economic and human dimensions of the present downturn. The accumulating failures in the country’s health-care system are a cause of profound weakness in the American economy ; unaddressed, this weakness will exacerbate the coming recession and crimp its aftermath. Add to this the system’s moral failings: about twenty-two thousand people die in this country annually because they lack health insurance.
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POPSWasted Intelligence It is a matter of the judicious use of praise and condemnation (particularly directed towards children) we can promote a love of learning and an aversion to being an ignorant fool. In particular, we can promote a love of learning and the wonder and awe of the real world, and a simple aversion to wasting one’s day. I'm guilty, guilty, guilty.
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POPSPersonal Failings and the Public Conscience
Arthur Miller was complex, contradictory, fallible, and imperfect, in other words, human to the highest degree. We shouldn't forget that somewhere in the byzantine labyrinth of the human psyche, there is the curious fact that our public conscience and whatever it is that guides our private actions seem to develop completely independently. There are those who scrupulously live their personal lives, but nevertheless are responsible for some of the worst oppression, brutality and crimes against humanity. On the other hand, we have what Morris Dickstein describes here as the "killers" artists and public figures who's keen outward humanism went unmatched in private life. That humans have the capacity for both is far more marvelous to me than if we were simply 1-dimensional distillations of our most obvious traits. I'd imagine a man of constant moral perfection would live a very lonely and tormented life. He would be unable to take part in human society.
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