kelley wrote:
>
> how can we possibly have any sort of
> meaningful dialogue if people can't read?
>
How can huge masses of people enter into meaningful dialogue (a necessary precondition of socialist revolution) if those few who can read will not grant the legitimacy of inability to read and subordinate their peculiar skill to making possible meaningful dialogue among the billions who neither have nor ever will have have that peculiar skill?
The Athenian peasantry, none of whom could read, carried out for well over a century one of the most meaningful dialogues in human history. The peasantry of Longbow, almost none of whom could read, carried out a dialogue which far surpassed in its beauty and power anything I have witnessed on this or any other maillist. So great was that beauty that an intellectual on the County Committee, committed to serving it (the peasant dialogue) but disabled by his fastidious inheritance from tolerating, among other things, the physical stench of peasant bodies, killed himself rather than renounce or betray that commitment.
Depending on how snobbish one is about being human, our species has been around for between 100,000 and 2 million years. Reading as anything like a mass endeavor is only 300 or some years old. For me, and doubtless for many on this list, it is hard to imagine a life in which reading -- and attempting at least to read well -- does not play a central role. But to rather roughly paraphrase the silver tongued Boy Wonder from the Platte, it wouldn't be a good idea to crucify man (or woman) kind upon this cross of print.
Carrol
But to have done instead of not doing
this is not vanity ........................................
Here error is all in the not done, all in the diffidence that faltered . . .
(Canto LXXXI)
I was right there in Boston the night that they died
(W. Guthrie)