Iconoclasm

I'm reading Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death for the third time. It's a required text in our communication program; I think Walter Ong's Literacy and Orality should be too. Both are books that changed my life.

Postman mentions Plato a lot. We all take it for granted that Plato was "right." Actually, he was just bringing up the right topics and questions; his answers were colorful but I don't consider them right. I've always been far more of an Aristotelian (largely because I have a master's in Rhetoric and Public Address, and Plato decried rhetoric). In one of his major faux pas, he said writing was wrong and no intelligent man would use it. And he wrote that down. Go figure.

A foolish consistency is the hobgloblin of little minds, I suppose.