The cost is $5.00 per person or $10 for a family which is admission to all five participating museums.  Passports (tickets) will be available at all of the museums, Chap's Elba Diner and Bindings Bookstore in Albion.  Have your passport stamped at all of the museums and receive a certificate redeemable at one of many participating local establishments. 

H.L. Mencken's Notes on Democracy reemerges in a new edition just in time to pillory the ravages of what democracy has become in our country, in practice if not in theory. I have always been an undying optimist and therefore approached this volume with some trepidation. Do I want my cherished beliefs shaken? Mencken assures us that none of us do, whether there is any reasonable basis for our beliefs or not. He categorizes "democratic man" as having an eighty percent chance of being by nature unable to think critically. He goes on to examine the faults of every aspect of our democratic form of government and of those who inhabit its various offices as well as those responsible for electing and/or appointing them.

In the end he leaves us with no suggestions for how to proceed, seeing himself as "not engaged in therapeutics, but in pathology." How can we respond to his scathing attack on democracy other than to throw up our hands in despair? This question haunted me throughout my reading of this volume. In the end I decided Mencken's work is best approached as one does a political cartoon. Lampooning our beliefs prods up to reexamine them with two thoughts in mind. One is Socrates' statement as his heresy trial, "The unexamined life is not worth living." The other is John Adams' observation, "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself." Is there a way we can create an exception?