Free Republic

Unlike the Maya, Aztec, and Inca, these North American groups had no written language and left no historical records, so it is impossible to present a "history" of the North American Indians before their contact with Europeans. In fact, some scholars have gone so far as to suggest that most North American Indians lived apart from linear time, harmonizing their lives with the cycles of the seasons and the biological processes of propagation, birth, and death. Europeans, forever doing and getting, were obsessed with recording events and measuring time. The Native Americans were focused instead on being. Time itself was...

“You..., it is certain, are very wrong to disturb the peace of other states rather than to rest content with the most splendid state... which you already possess. If you knew how you are universally hated, your hair would stand on end... Do you believe that these powers... now in league together, are truly friends among themselves? Of course they are not; it is only necessity, and the fear which they feel for you and your power, that has bound them in this way... You are alone, with all the world against you... Know then that your enemies do not...

Reading some of the entries here and on other sites, it seems as if the general consensus is that evangelical Christians of the snake-handling variety clinched the election for the incumbent President. While I’m sure that Christians with faith in varying degrees of intensity played a solid role in Mr. Bush’s reelection, there’s a danger in leaving it just at that. Rather than look inward to rediscover the lost core values that made the Democratic Party relevant to the American electorate, they’re going to spend the next four years trying to make the connection that there’s little difference between the...