Broken Turtle Blog

Broken Turtle Blog

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Preamble to the Contradiction

Dear Christine O'Donnell, kindly follow my thought thither and hence. The bread on the waters will return to you.

WE THE PEOPLE, in order to form a more perfect union? Wait a minute. Isn't more perfect a little like more pregnant? Of course, if you want to be pregnant, and become so, you are from day one beginning with a kind of perfection. Then, as you grow larger, you can be said to be becoming more perfect. So, okay, let us grant that, under some conditions, one may have degrees of perfection.

Well, I have just re-read the Constitution of the United States, and I am dismayed. If it were a house, it would be a log-cabin without thatch or mortaring. Open to the rain and wind. The fire would not keep much heat in. Founding Fathers, ha!, thank you? And yet. And yet I say yes thank you because all that rain and wind somehow built a mighty estate out of that log cabin. Our Founding Fathers, who were, among other things, monsters, somehow stumbled into securing for posterity significant blessings of Liberty. A more perfect pregnancy, conceived often in what most of us would rather not think about, but giving birth to significant Liberty.

And so, O'Donnell? Running for office here in Delaware? You and your fellow ultra-strict constructionists? Do you really want to go back and live in that log cabin? Don't you understand how well the evolution of constitutional meaning has served to ensure the domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and not only secure the blessings of liberty but of anti-biotics and central heating as well? Invention rights protection is in the Constitution. And these last two really do help during child-birth.

Okay, granted, philosophically and politically, there will always be conflicting interpretations of the Constitution. This is necessary. The framers are all dead, and the world we live in is one they couldn't know. And what they framed was the necessity of only their moment anyway. And that's my point: interpretation means that fundamentalism is impossible. In the beginning was the Word. The Word is a baby: you love it, but would you let it drive your truck?

Don't you understand that even though the moon does not love us, the tide it elicits has raised all our nation's boats? Lucky us: History has handed our Society the moon, in our constitutional evolution. Even rich white males are better off now, despite all the effluvial dispersals of wealth and rights to disenfranchised classes, than were their counterparts of 200 years ago. Everybody is winning. And women too. Hmm...

Which means, Christine O'Donnell, I just noticed something. You're a woman. Oops... Now, strictly speaking, strictly as in strictly constructionist, going back to a fundamentalist beginning, you strictly speaking as a woman had no right to vote, much less run for office. If you're such a political purist, shouldn't you be back home washing dishes, barefoot and pregnant? After all, by your own ideals, you're just a girl. Unless you're also a hypocrite who wants to ordain and establish whatever she can grab.