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SANFORD, Maine—In a town where the hulls of dormant factories match the rusted hues of [autumn] leaves, Felix Goodrich sees salvation in the toss of the dice and the spinning dials of one-armed bandits. But Goodrich—a manufacturing worker laid off in May, who jokes his name should be "Goodpoor"—does not want to gamble in the giant new casino that is the subject of a divisive referendum in this state. He wants to help build it. "I just want to work. I just want to see this town boom again." Sanford, an inland industrial community of more than 20,000, about 90 miles north of Boston, struggling with an unemployment rate among the highest in the state, voted by a slim majority to consider a casino proposal from two local Indian tribes and a Las Vegas developer. Throughout New England, the expansion of legalized gambling has been [contested] since a pair of casinos were built in the early 1990s on reservations in Connecticut. Full story
CITY SCENE: WASHINGTON, D.C.As I stood between the U.S. Capitol and Supreme Court on a recent muggy November day, I realized I had a silly thought in my head. I was looking at the wide expanses of marble steps ascending to both buildings and presuming that you could just walk right up and go inside. Just use the front door. The entrances were built to be inviting, I think, embodying the ideal that these are the people's places. I still remember the poster on the door of my civics classroom, bearing the famous quote of Alexander Hamilton: "Here, sir, the people govern." In fact, you won't get halfway up the steps before you are diverted by a security guard to an unceremonious side door and the metal detectors that await. In the case of the Capitol, you now have to wait in a tent that leads to a trailer that opens to a barricaded walkway that funnels you to a nondescript door, behind which lie … more metal detectors. I'm not complaining; this being my first visit to D.C. after September 11, 2001, I was frightened to see airplanes using the corridor over the Tidal Basin just before landing at Washington National, seemingly scraping the roof of the Jefferson Memorial. And I'm not the first to observe that D.C., lined with forbidding block-long government buildings, has a distinctly anti-populist feel. Even I was drawn to peer down into the House gallery and ask myself whenever someone new took the floor: is that somebody? I read once that Plato calculated the ideal number of citizens in a democracy to be something like 5,000. With as many people we have, we need a representative democracy, and with that looms the prospect of aristocracy.
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- Speaking of democracy, the problem with trying to bring it to Iraq is that it's a mismatch; you can't implant Western ideals of tolerance and openness in a part of the world where such ideals are alien. Or so goes one line of thinking about the current U.S. occupation of Iraq. But in an indispensable essay on the global roots of democracy, a cover story last month in The New Republic, former Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen exposes the fiction that democracy was hatched in Greece and raised in Western Europe. That narrative is too limited, Sen says. "Government by discussion" and "public reasoning" may have had precedence in non-Greek cultures before the heyday of Athens, and did not immediately build momentum in Europe after that. And what about 16th-century Mughal emperor Akbar, who arranged dialogues in India among people of different faiths while the inquisitions were ongoing in Europe? "It is also important to note that nearly every attempt at early printing in China, Korea, and Japan was undertaken by Buddhist technologists, with an interest in expanding communication," Sen writes. He quotes Tocqueville, who arrived in America and said that the democratic ideal is "the most continuous, ancient, and permanent tendency known to history." Article preview - reprinted here
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