The Federalist Papers? The Lincoln-Douglas Debates? Granted these are high points. But the framers expected ordinary artisans to be able to follow arguments in political theory that leave graduate students flummoxed, and the L-D debates, vastly attended in backwoods Illinois, aimed extremely complex constitutional and practical political argument at illiterate (but apparently very smart) farmers and small town inhabitants. In fact, if you just talk something relatively short Lincoln wrote, like the Second Inaugural setting aside that he is a great master of American prose, and focusing on just the vocabulary and syntactic complexity, which was not unusual, it was very demanding. Though Word gives it a grade level of 11.8, ha! Still something happened. Mass media probably,
--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> > But, turning to more important matters, I doubt
> there ever was a time
> when U.S. political discourse wasn't infantilized.
> "Ma Ma Where's My
> Pa? Gone to the White House Ha Ha Ha"!
>
> Doug
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
____________________________________________________________________________________ Be a better Globetrotter. Get better travel answers from someone who knows. Yahoo! Answers - Check it out. http://answers.yahoo.com/dir/?link=list&sid=396545469