The Constitution is not a virgin.
On the contrary, she has been abused, despised, and ignored from her earliest youth.
A read of history suggests that the Constitution was conceived to be a streetwalker, at least in the mind of one of the Founding Fathers, Alexander Hamilton. (The street he had in mind was Wall Street, which was already the financial center of the US in 1787).
Though she was betrothed to sound money (only gold and silver coin), she was used to justify Federalist currency speculators as early as 1789, at the commencement of the very First Congress.
After growing to full maturity with the Bill of Rights in 1791, she was soon forced onto the back of a white horse to bless and justify the Treasury Department's little war on citizens in the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. She was very badly mishandled by the Federalist establishment when the Alien and Sedition Acts travesties were perpetrated in the later 1790s, and she was tortiously treated by Chief Justice John Marshall, et al., on more than one occasion in the early 1800s in his rivalry with Thomas Jefferson.
The Party Men who had charge of her bungled the election of 1800, and began the assault upon her "checks and balances" with the passage of the Twelfth Amendment, which enshrined the "Party Ticket" in the electoral college ever after.
Thankfully, her clauses permitting the abolition of slave trade were honored in 1808; but her compromised arrangements about slaves and taxation were used to justify arguments denying any civil rights to those not taxed, as not being persons. Her silence about race was taken to loudly justify slavery and every other abuse.
Her rules regarding treaties were used to circumvent her, and justify outrages against the natural law, and natural citizens, with the deportations of Indian citizens to distant territories.
Bankers and speculators bypassed her provisions against appropriations of money for longer than two years by loading her down with bonds and other debt instruments to feed their greed and fulfill their manifest destinies.
After about three-score and eleven years of being alternately worshipped as a false goddess and ignored as an inconvenient whore by the Parties, she was gang-raped, killed, and ripped in half by the Lincoln Republicans and their Banker-Corporate masters on one side, and the Cotton Men and their silly Scarlett O'Hara's on the other.
For the next hundred years or so, her murderers practiced various forms of necrophilia upon her, outrage upon outrage, dissolving the sovereignty of her states, calling corporations persons, driving over her corpse with Big Business, Big Government, Big Labor, Big War, Big Deal, Square Deal, New Deal, Fair Deal, Yellow Press, Red Scare, Great Society -- and now our own Perpetual International Security State with its Forever War.
She was buried out of sight by a swarm of lawyers and a small corps of money-men. Her body is hidden under the great slab of the Federal Register, which is itself buried under a vast mountain of bank notes. Probably the old Ark of the Covenant will be exhumed before she is.
I fell in love with her as a school-boy, about the same time I fell in love with geometry, or even sooner. Even then, it was just a picture of her that I fell in love with, as I now know. Even I am far too young to remember her; left only with old stories, many of them false.
Dismembered corpse she is, long buried and gone; but I confess I still love the old girl, even with her warts. Her false lovers, rapists, and murderers? Not so much. God forgive me.
I still believe in the Resurrection of the Dead. As long as a few people love her best ideals, and take the protection of them seriously, there is hope.
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I recently posted the other half of this musing, "The Resurrection Of The Constitution." Comments always welcome.
For another look at the Constitution, here is a link to a brief essay by Clyde Wilson, "The Founding Fathers Guide To The Constitution."
There's not much more that can be said.
ReplyDeleteMurray Rothbard believed that the Constitution was foisted on the country as in a coup. The Convention of 1787 was held in secret with closed windows and doors. The bankers wanted to be sure a strong central government could return to them their Continental Dollars in gold and silver, so the Constitution was their answer.
It's interesting sometimes to go back and read some of what the opponents of the Constitution, like Patrick Henry, said would happen if it were adopted. They've been proven right on every point. The Federalist Papers have their moments of brilliance, but the anti-Federalists had the added bonus of being right.
Ben,
ReplyDeleteI think Murray Rothbard is essentially correct. As far as I have read him, he usually is.
I agree that Patrick Henry and the Anti-Federalists were "righter" than the Federalists, too.
When we get the Constitution restored to its 1791 form (Bill of Rights ratified), then we can go ahead and roll it all the way back to the Articles of Confederation circa 1785!
Add to Murray Rothbard & Patrick Henry, Gary North, Conspiracy in Philadelphia and Kenneth Royce, Hologram of Liberty. North's book is available in pdf here: http://garynorth.com/philadelphia.pdf
ReplyDeleteIt's hard to find out that even the Constitution was a ploy. But if we could go back to even that, what a country we would have.
I used to think that the Federalist Papers were just everyday Americans, letter to the editor, their blog posts, lol. But now I wonder if they were merely propaganda. It wasn't until a couple of years ago that I even heard of the Anti-Federalist papers.