A Quick Rant About the Forefathers Fri. Nov 16th, 07

Alright, so I’m sitting down this morning, trying to write a paper about Kant and his metaphysical morals, and I can’t shake this little bur in my side. So allow me to shoot from the hip (in hopes to clear my head for a different train of thought).

I suppose I might just be sleepwalking through life, but I’m still shocked that I run into naively patriotic people — especially in graduate school. Don’t get me wrong, my anarchist friends would never allow me into their club, but I learned somewhere about the 2nd grade that questioning the government and the state of the union is the proper thing to do, which might not even really be the central issue here.
What’s really bugging me is this:
cutting some slack for some old dead guys simply because they gave us a leg up. fuck that.
Question: Did those fellows accomplish something noble in the span of years where they wrote the Declaration of Independence and Constitution?
Majority answer: Yeah, sure. (all those rights, freedoms etc. are pretty cool.)

What? noble? No. Sure they had deft minds for political organization, particularly when their overall interests were at stake, and they certainly gave us a decent shot at freedom under a democracy (representative republic), but let’s not let time do the work for them. Don’t fast forward through time with them as the continual authors. Nah. They dropped the ball in more than one place, and there’s no reason not to mention it. (I really don’t understand this aversion to criticizing them. I’m dumbfounded that I find intelligent people [people with bachelor's or at ph.d's degrees, so maybe not necessarily intelligent, but "educated"] defending the original constitution (et al) out of, as far I can tell, nothing more than patriotism.)
Need a few examples? Sure, here ya go: The declaration is a fine work, but I think it no less than fair to call them cowards for removing the bits about the rights and whatnot of women and potential slaves. Sure, it would have been difficult to get everyone to sign, and it would have complicated things, but, even more surely, the fact that they consciously left those problems for later generations warrants a judgment of less than noble (whatever the fuck that means). Time did take care of the problem, as they hoped. And people eventually did their sloppily best to deal with women and slaves (minorities in general, really) in the land called USA, but creating a capacity doesn’t warrant them (if this “them” is too vague, mind that I’m referring to all those wigged good ol’boys from the late 1700s, who primarily lived on the east coast of the USA) authorship or immunity — if you think of it as if you were writing a paper, they’d be in your works cited.
And one more thing.
What the hell is this romantic attachment to the “We the people” bit in the Constitution, particularly the whimsical notion that by people they meant anything other than the 5% who were going to have any hand in being a citizen. You’re right, nowhere in the Constitution does it specify who they mean by “people,” so it could possibly mean everyone residing in the (then) newly formed United States. But look, you’re doing it again; doing the work for them. Yes, they wrote it in a universal language (one might also call it vague), but everything from who was participating in the forming of the government to the people immediately participating as citizens evinces who exactly they meant by “people.”
To the regular readers of the fates, that fine bunch, this all will likely prompt a response somewhere along the lines of “No shit, Sherlock.” But I needed a catharsis. Thanks.

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Tags: Declaration of Independence, US Constitution, US Government, political science