If I have seen further,
it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants.
– Sir Isaac Newton
I remember when I was in junior high school, we had to read a book called Flatland. It wasn’t a very long book – more like a novella, really – certainly not a weighty tome like The Iliad, or a classic work of literature like Great Expectations, both of which we also read. It was a small book, paperback, not much bigger than The Elements of Style, a book you could read in one sitting easily, if you stayed focused. I took two or three sittings, as I recall.
As I say, Flatland was no Iliad. But while Edwin A. Abbott’s opus didn’t carry the physical or cultural heft of Homer or Dickens, I remember to this day its lesson, a lesson about perspective, ignorance and arrogance.
Which brings me, unavoidably, to the Democratic Party.