To celebrate The Fourth, I invited Mark Ulriksen to contribute an image that would “expresses the joy and freewheeling spirit that Independence Day seems to bring out in many of us.”

True to form Mark send an array of images, some of which expressed exactly that. He also included the image above.

The story goes, “As best as I can recall the article, by Harvard professor, Jill Lepore, was about the divide in early America suffrage over whether ‘the people’ en mass, as supported by Thomas Jefferson, should be equal to the more refined political class as defined by Federalist Noah Webster, who had a less sanguine view of the masses.

“In the article,” he continues, “Jill Lepore says ‘As Webster saw it, democracy is rule by the people and the people are, generally, insufferable idiots.’”

As the French said during the Revolution, “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose."

So Happy Fourth—keep your powder dry. 

And thanks, Mark.

The DART Board, in its usual format, will return next week.

Drawing above: Whose Democracy by Mark Ulriksen. Courtesy of The New Yorker. The article titled Democracy, originally ran in the magazine’s October 24, 2005 issue. Read it here