I really miss Winne the Pooh, you know? It's part of the family lore, primarily because of some old cassette tapes of Peter Dennis reading the stories. He had the best voices I've ever heard. And they had little songs and poems and tales interspersed.

Getting all nostalgic for cassette tapes now. They inspired some of Dad's best hand-puppet voices. Maybe when I go back home I can get him to pull out Reedy Jo the Rooster again.

Our Ruling Class

I read a month-old column from the NY Times about the ruling classes throughout our history. With a few modifications, I think Edmund Burke pretty much had it right on the ethos of the aristocrats:

"To be bred in a place of estimation; to see nothing low and sordid from one’s
infancy; to be taught to respect one’s self; to be habituated to the censorial
inspection of the public eye; to look early to public opinion; to stand upon
such elevated ground as to be enabled to take a large view of the widespread and
infinitely diversified combinations of men and affairs in a large society; to
have leisure to read, to reflect, to converse; to be enabled to draw and court
the attention of the wise and learned, wherever they are to be found; to be
habituated in armies to command and to obey; to be taught to despise danger in
the pursuit of honor and duty; to be formed to the greatest degree of vigilance,
foresight, and circumspection, in a state of things in which no fault is
committed with impunity and the slightest mistakes draw on the most ruinous
consequences; to be led to a guarded and regulated conduct, from a sense that
you are considered as an instructor of your fellow-citizens in their highest
concerns, and that you act as a reconciler between God and man; to be employed
as an administrator of law and justice, and to be thereby amongst the first
benefactors to mankind; to be a professor of high science, or of liberal and
ingenious art; to be amongst rich traders, who from their success are presumed
to have sharp and vigorous understandings, and to possess the virtues of
diligence, order, constancy, and regularity, and to have cultivated an habitual
regard to commutative justice: these are the circumstances of men that form what
I should call a natural aristocracy, without which there is no nation."

As the columnist Gail Collins points out, however, "Being a leader of people who are mirrors of yourself is way different from having to develop the grace and imagination and humility that comes with answering to a huge mix of folks with whom you might have little or nothing in common."

Living in a fairly meritocratic society, we naturally rebel against the idea of aristocrats, so how can Burke's definition of the ideal aristocrat be reconciled to the modern era? I believe that his ideas do not mean that we should bring up the upper classes in these certain ways (although perhaps that was the point back then), but that all Americans should be given the opportunity to become so cultivated. Being tested, as Burke says, "in a state of things in which no fault is committed with impunity and the slightest mistakes draw on the most ruinous consequences" is the heart of a meritocracy - those who can make difficult, high-stakes decisions and accept the consequences, positive or negative, are those who we desire to have governing us. There are poor children who live in such circumstances that their decisions are so vital, but their lack of education and valuable role models can leave them in the dust in terms of becoming part of the "best and brightest". Then there are children from comfortable families who are given all the opportunites to become well-educated, to cultivate ambition, and then go nowhere because they are never tested. And yet these people disproportionately become a de facto part of the ruling class, while the hardest workers among the economically disadvantaged cannot rise above their circumstances. We will not be a true meritocracy until these conditions are rectified. Education - not rote learning but intellectual challenge - seems to be the factor that will most easily and thoroughly tip the scales.

The Title

I have named this place Asteiriks, after myself. Asteiriks refers to very little - not the French comic book, as is often assumed. It contains an obvious spelling error, which could certainly be interpreted as a pretentious nod to what can pass as creative flair. If it is derived from anything at all, it would be the asterisk. I wonder if, in a slight reference to the punctuation mark, I am trying to something about my conception of my internet presence. If so, I am here as a link. A pointer-outer. A little visual traffic director. Or perhaps the condition, the qualifier, the slight limitation that people don't want to mention but must. The self-interruption, the aside to the audience masquerading as an honest voice.