While George W. Bush continues to ridicule John Kerry’s flip flopping attitudes on national and international issues, here’s a brilliant photo-essay that takes a tongue-in-cheek look at Bush’s own flip flops over the years, in the form of a shoe catalog.

It’s funny and tastefuly done! And there’s even a download link if you want to send it out to friends as a pdf file.

However, the author of the photo-essay lets us down in the end by putting up a 1778 quote attributed to Alexander Tyler.

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.

The average age of the worlds greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:

From Bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to selfishness;
From selfishness to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back to bondage.

First of all, the author must be referring to Alexander Fraser Tytler, a Scottish history professor who is supposed to have written the above passage in a book titled, ‘The Fall of the Athenian Republic‘. Now, there is no record of such a book even in the US Library of Congress, which houses over 128 million items. So this quote is, in all probability, an urban legend.

However… it is an interesting quote nonetheless! Can this cycle of democracy be applied to an Indian context? Have we ever gone from abundance to selfishness and ultimately from dependence to bondage? Oh but we have, haven’t we?! Loosely put, the regional kings let British and other traders gain political control of their states in exchange for trade and protection… and in the longer run, India ended up as a British colony.

And then from bondage we went on to spiritual faith (rise of people like Gandhi or Swami Vivekanand or countless others)… and from faith we went to great courage as seen in the freedom struggle… and then ultimately we gained liberty!

As for the transition from liberty to abundance… we haven’t seen that yet in India, have we?! Well… I can put it down to the the libertarian argument of not having enough liberty!

Convenient, eh?! ;-)