Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> A dictionary is where most people go to understand a meaning of a word. 
> What better place?

Reality.  History.  Linguistics.  In that order, I'd say.  Language, like 
many people want to make the Constitution, is a living, mutating thing.  A 
dictionary is a good place to start if one doesn't know the meaning of a 
word, but 
it doesn't replace the use of the word in living minds.  The dictionary is a 
reflection of a linguistic reality, not the reality itself.

It's true that used loosely 'democracy' denotes political bodies where the 
people vote as opposed to those places where they do not vote.  But when used 
as 
contrast to a republic, it has no such meaning.  

> 
> Observe California. 

My point exactly.  Indeed, observe California.


 >None of the framers could possibly have imagined 

> the conditions of life today. Call the country as they did and it matters 
> not a whit.
> 

The framers would, I would say, have held freedom in such high regard that if 
it came to a choice of conditions of life today or freedom with the 
conditions of life in the eighteeth century, they would readily choose the 
latter.  
Many of us have made the same choice.

But I don't think it really is such a choice as that.  Many of the  dramatis 
personae of that period were keen historians, notably Jefferson.  He not only 
read Latin, which was nothing remarkable in his day, but he read Greek and 
Anglo-Saxon.  He wrote a pretty piece refuting the idea that the basis of our 
laws came from the Bible by showing how English common law came from the 
Saxons 
who predated Christianity in England.  Others were keen observers of 
radically 
different political systems such as Franklin's knowledge of Iriquoian and 
Algonquin system of politics.  All these things went into the Constitution 
because 
the authors saw that it was a fitting way to run the affairs of the people 
and was equally aplicable to the ancient Greeks, the Saxons, and the 
Algonquins. 
 

No, they did not anticipate what conditions would be like in this century.  
For that matter, who among us anticipated them in our own time?   What the 
revolutionaries of that century understood was that conditions didn't matter, 
there were certain principles that apply no matter the conditions, no matter 
the 
century.  

This is where we disagree, and that disagreement reflects the major political 
struggle that is going on right now.  There are some that see the 
Constitution as flexible, circumstantial, situational.  As the line that gets 
repeated in 
'Pirates of the Carribean' about the Pirate's Code- "It's more like 
guidelines than a code."  There are others that see it's, really very few, 
principles 
as one thing we should always be able to rely upon no matter what.  They are 
so 
basic to human fairness and equitablity that they must be perserved intact.

The difference is, says I, that while we've enjoyed a long history of a 
people with a passion for freedom, that is waning now.  Unless the 
imaginations of 
people are once again lit with the idea of freedom, those who think as I do 
and the Constitution will become only curious anachronisms.

I am not hopeful.

James