a new thought for cynical Uncle Ken

When Plato sat around thinking, thinking, thinking, his every need attended to by slaves so that no impediments ate into his thinking time, one of the things he came up with was the three ways a nation might be led, a king, an oligarchy, or a democracy.  He quickly dismissed the idea of a democracy, let those loons run everything?  An oligarchy was nothing but a bunch of squabblers and that left only a king.  But it had to be a good king, and who better to fulfill that role than a philosopher?  A philosopher-king.  I'm hazy on the details, but he had in mind some sort of elite who would be carefully schooled and tended to, and the kings would be chosen from among them by some kind of council of the elite. and I think, unlike kings, there was no heredity, and I think the kings had terms. 

Not that it mattered .  The Greeks had great mathematics, but lousy scientists because they didn't want to get their hands dirty, and their ideas on governance, well very nice on a warm summer day with slaves peeling your grapes for you, but for the real world, not so hot.  When the much more practical Romans conquered Greece they still had a republic, but that was gone in a hundred years.  Still the Romans hung on for about four hundred more years. There was considerable injustice, assassinations and massacres now and then, but roads got built, ships got sailed, if you were well-born and didn't back some losing emperor everything was groovy. 

For all its talk about democracy, the early US wasn't very in the sense of one man, one vote, but gradually the franchise was extended so that it was.  I understand how it got extended to blacks and to women, but I am not sure how it was extended to people who didn't own property.  Why did the property owners ever let the landless vote?

I am meandering, what I meant to be discussing is who are the elite?  I don't think they are the same as The Man.  You know it is a fine thing for the barefoot young boy at the fishing hole to put on his shoes and march right out to the schoolhouse and pick himself up some learning.  A lot of it is very practical and it will help him help out his dad down on the farm, but some of it is, well, propaganda.

The schools were funded by the state and the state wanted these kids to be good Americans, so they made them study things like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and all the stuff of the founding fathers.  If the founding fathers were not so hot at building a democracy of equals, they excelled in soaring rhetoric, and maybe the kid in the schoolroom picked up on that shit.  Maybe all men should be treated equally.

Well this is a whole new thought for me.  In my cynical attitude I have long dismissed all those bewigged heads as so much fluff, but maybe I was wrong.  I need some time to think.