I'm a closet Constitutional revisionist at heart (sort of).
I hide my views because I think, overall, it is a good thing for our society that we revere our founding fathers as men of extraordinary brilliance and hold their principles to be sacrosanct.
But I believe the truth is that the fathers were flawed men in many respects, crotchety, often petulant, jealous of each other, elitist, parochial, and heavily focused on their own self-interest.
I really feel that we are considerably wiser and more worldly now than they were, and that if we adopted a start-from-scratch approach we could come up with a much better Constitution -- in substance. However, it would lack the panache of the original, because we don't have the knack for the elegant phrasing that they had. We would fall victim to cliches, politically correct phraseology, we would be obsessed with not offending anyone, so ours would come across as filled with bureaucratese, much like an annual sate-of-the-union report. It would be borrrring, sleep-inducing, and no one would remember a single turn of a phrase. It would not inspire anyone. It would not be a thing to die for.
So, all things considered, I think its best that we stick to the original old crusty document.
(Please don't repeat any of this). |
