smilin' through
Jan. 31st, 2006 10:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mouse_rantsthis morning i put on a cheerful hawaiian shirt, and i brought my polar
bear socks to wear for my lunchtime walk, and i have a bright smile on
my face, and i am going to smile and think about my shirt and my socks,
and not about the smirks on the faces of the men who are intent on
dismantling my country.
let's see if i can put a picture in here:
now look at that smug smile. it's going to be changing our world, along with cheney's winsome little sneer, and bush's good-old-boy smirk. how can people look at those faces, and think these are nice people? how can you not see that what they are laughing at is _us_?
i have a conservative friend i argue with on my favorite forum. he thinks alito will move the supreme court back to the center. considering it is already a conservative court, it's hard to see what he means - unless he thinks it's going to go so far right it will eventually come back around on the other side.
i'm sure he also thinks this is a step against legislating from the bench. he (like most of the country, fed on fox's "news") has missed the fact that most of the legislating is being done by conservative judges, and they have been doing a lot of it. what the conservatives in power mean, of course, is "no legislating by people who won't let us have things _our_ way" - which they think is the Way Things Were, In the Good Old Days. They say all they want is a return to the Constitution as written, as it was intended by the founding fathers.
The thing is, I doubt that the founding fathers intended the Constitution to be set in stone - if they did, why did they include a process to amend it? They understood that the world changes, and the laws change with it. Thomas Paine says something very relevant about this in The Rights of Man - I'll have to look it up and quote it. But essentially he says, in looking at a 200-year-old law in the face of modern opinions, who should judge the validity of that law - the living, or the dead? No doubt where Tom stood.
Of course, the conservatives don't care much for old Tom - he was too much of a firebrand; he really _believed_ all that stuff about liberty and freedom and having a say over your own life, and overthrowing the government if it tries to stop you. They _say_ they want all that, but they don't, really. They want a government that lets the rich and powerful have their way, and keeps the rabble in line.
I wonder how much all those Republican Senators really want a return to the law as it was 230 years ago. In those days, rights were firmly in the hands of property-owning males (aka, the wealthy). Other people ranged from the ignored (like women) to those who could be legally owned (like slaves and indentured servants). They were legally forbidden any voice - which meant, of course, that the guys in power didn't have to think about things like civil rights, reproductive rights, and civil liberties. No one with a vote needed to worry about those things.
There was nothing in the Constitution about the environment, universal health care and social security. Of course, the country was mostly virgin wilderness, you could hardly get through parts of it for the trees, the Industrial Revolution with its smoke and toxic discharges was in its infancy, and if you met up with a bear or a wolf or a cougar, your chances were about 50-50. Clearly, Mother Nature had the upper hand. Most people died before they got old enough to retire; if they got injured on the job, or got cancer or MS or any other sort of degenerative disease, they died even sooner. And health care was something most people avoided - no one had heard of germs, so doctors were often better at spreading diseases than curing them.
Of course, these days we know that Mother Nature is under siege, that we can change the environment in ways the founders couldn't have imagined, and that these things have negative effects on us. We understand that other people's health can impact us directly - that we may be able to catch the bird flu as easily as we catch colds, and we realize that keeping the whole country healthy (even the little people, who after all do a lot of work around here) is keeping the country strong. And we have developed enough empathy to feel that we are strong enough to protect the weak among us - the old, the orphaned, the disabled - and not simple leave them to starve in the gutter. I don't think a desolate landscape littered with the homeless is really what the founders envisioned.
In those days, executions were a public spectacle. People made a day of it, packed a picnic lunch, brought the kids. If the hangee was also a child, well, it just showed the little buggers what could happen to them if they didn't do what daddy told them. Yes, we hung children, for crimes like stealing food. In fact, our Supreme Court only recently decided that it was unconstitutional to execute people who had committed the crime while a juvenile. Good thing Alito and Roberts have such great respect for precedent - at least juvenile offenders will still stay off Death Row.
One of the Supremes cited the fact that the rest of the world considers executing children to be barbarism - and was roundly criticized for letting "foreigners" have a say in U. S. law. But we are part of the world, and what the world thinks has always had an effect on our thinking - just as what we think and do has an effect on the rest of the world. And if the world moves in a more humane and rational direction, is it really sensible for us to refuse to move in the same direction, just because someone else went first? (and incidentally, gave good reasons for why they did so.)
Speaking of the rest of the world - the founders, as I recall, didn't say much about immigration, the halting off. In fact, they wrote right into the Constitution that foreigners could serve in the government (excepting only the president, who must be native-born). Of course, large numbers of citizens _were_ foreign born then (including some of said founders). And they could see how new people coming in helped the country grow, brought needed skills and even new ideas. So there was no intent to shut ourselves off. It will be interesting to see how the "Back to the Original" group will deal with that.
I wonder if the senators remember why some of the Articles were put in the Constitution in the first place. In colonial times, you could be arrested in the middle of the night, thrown into prison with no access to legal aid (indeed, no right to it at all), no charge laid against you, no trial date ever set. Your mail could be intercepted and read, and your private thoughts used against you. Sound familiar? The founding fathers were outraged by this - that's why the Constitution goes on about things like illegal search and seizure, habeas corpus and the right to a speedy trial. I wonder if Mr. Alito, in his zest to preserve the original meaning, will be a voice in support of all these things. Given his stand on illegal wiretapping, somehow I doubt it. Well, I have to admit - Thomas Jefferson never tapped anyone's phone. So of course he wouldn't have any problems with anyone else doing it. (where's the eye-rolling emoticon?)
there, now, see - i've gotten all serious and Capitalized. this will never do. i'm going to get myself a lovely cup of cranberry blood orange tea (republic of tea, the smell alone brightens your day), and put my smile back on my face, and remember that this country has had would-be "imperial" presidents before, it has had men who lied and cheated and tried to steal the government itself, and we have always thrown them off.
and sometimes the charge is lead by decent, conservative middle-americans like my friend - who can be pretty formidable, once they realize they've been lied to.
let's see if i can put a picture in here:
now look at that smug smile. it's going to be changing our world, along with cheney's winsome little sneer, and bush's good-old-boy smirk. how can people look at those faces, and think these are nice people? how can you not see that what they are laughing at is _us_?
i have a conservative friend i argue with on my favorite forum. he thinks alito will move the supreme court back to the center. considering it is already a conservative court, it's hard to see what he means - unless he thinks it's going to go so far right it will eventually come back around on the other side.
i'm sure he also thinks this is a step against legislating from the bench. he (like most of the country, fed on fox's "news") has missed the fact that most of the legislating is being done by conservative judges, and they have been doing a lot of it. what the conservatives in power mean, of course, is "no legislating by people who won't let us have things _our_ way" - which they think is the Way Things Were, In the Good Old Days. They say all they want is a return to the Constitution as written, as it was intended by the founding fathers.
The thing is, I doubt that the founding fathers intended the Constitution to be set in stone - if they did, why did they include a process to amend it? They understood that the world changes, and the laws change with it. Thomas Paine says something very relevant about this in The Rights of Man - I'll have to look it up and quote it. But essentially he says, in looking at a 200-year-old law in the face of modern opinions, who should judge the validity of that law - the living, or the dead? No doubt where Tom stood.
Of course, the conservatives don't care much for old Tom - he was too much of a firebrand; he really _believed_ all that stuff about liberty and freedom and having a say over your own life, and overthrowing the government if it tries to stop you. They _say_ they want all that, but they don't, really. They want a government that lets the rich and powerful have their way, and keeps the rabble in line.
I wonder how much all those Republican Senators really want a return to the law as it was 230 years ago. In those days, rights were firmly in the hands of property-owning males (aka, the wealthy). Other people ranged from the ignored (like women) to those who could be legally owned (like slaves and indentured servants). They were legally forbidden any voice - which meant, of course, that the guys in power didn't have to think about things like civil rights, reproductive rights, and civil liberties. No one with a vote needed to worry about those things.
There was nothing in the Constitution about the environment, universal health care and social security. Of course, the country was mostly virgin wilderness, you could hardly get through parts of it for the trees, the Industrial Revolution with its smoke and toxic discharges was in its infancy, and if you met up with a bear or a wolf or a cougar, your chances were about 50-50. Clearly, Mother Nature had the upper hand. Most people died before they got old enough to retire; if they got injured on the job, or got cancer or MS or any other sort of degenerative disease, they died even sooner. And health care was something most people avoided - no one had heard of germs, so doctors were often better at spreading diseases than curing them.
Of course, these days we know that Mother Nature is under siege, that we can change the environment in ways the founders couldn't have imagined, and that these things have negative effects on us. We understand that other people's health can impact us directly - that we may be able to catch the bird flu as easily as we catch colds, and we realize that keeping the whole country healthy (even the little people, who after all do a lot of work around here) is keeping the country strong. And we have developed enough empathy to feel that we are strong enough to protect the weak among us - the old, the orphaned, the disabled - and not simple leave them to starve in the gutter. I don't think a desolate landscape littered with the homeless is really what the founders envisioned.
In those days, executions were a public spectacle. People made a day of it, packed a picnic lunch, brought the kids. If the hangee was also a child, well, it just showed the little buggers what could happen to them if they didn't do what daddy told them. Yes, we hung children, for crimes like stealing food. In fact, our Supreme Court only recently decided that it was unconstitutional to execute people who had committed the crime while a juvenile. Good thing Alito and Roberts have such great respect for precedent - at least juvenile offenders will still stay off Death Row.
One of the Supremes cited the fact that the rest of the world considers executing children to be barbarism - and was roundly criticized for letting "foreigners" have a say in U. S. law. But we are part of the world, and what the world thinks has always had an effect on our thinking - just as what we think and do has an effect on the rest of the world. And if the world moves in a more humane and rational direction, is it really sensible for us to refuse to move in the same direction, just because someone else went first? (and incidentally, gave good reasons for why they did so.)
Speaking of the rest of the world - the founders, as I recall, didn't say much about immigration, the halting off. In fact, they wrote right into the Constitution that foreigners could serve in the government (excepting only the president, who must be native-born). Of course, large numbers of citizens _were_ foreign born then (including some of said founders). And they could see how new people coming in helped the country grow, brought needed skills and even new ideas. So there was no intent to shut ourselves off. It will be interesting to see how the "Back to the Original" group will deal with that.
I wonder if the senators remember why some of the Articles were put in the Constitution in the first place. In colonial times, you could be arrested in the middle of the night, thrown into prison with no access to legal aid (indeed, no right to it at all), no charge laid against you, no trial date ever set. Your mail could be intercepted and read, and your private thoughts used against you. Sound familiar? The founding fathers were outraged by this - that's why the Constitution goes on about things like illegal search and seizure, habeas corpus and the right to a speedy trial. I wonder if Mr. Alito, in his zest to preserve the original meaning, will be a voice in support of all these things. Given his stand on illegal wiretapping, somehow I doubt it. Well, I have to admit - Thomas Jefferson never tapped anyone's phone. So of course he wouldn't have any problems with anyone else doing it. (where's the eye-rolling emoticon?)
there, now, see - i've gotten all serious and Capitalized. this will never do. i'm going to get myself a lovely cup of cranberry blood orange tea (republic of tea, the smell alone brightens your day), and put my smile back on my face, and remember that this country has had would-be "imperial" presidents before, it has had men who lied and cheated and tried to steal the government itself, and we have always thrown them off.
and sometimes the charge is lead by decent, conservative middle-americans like my friend - who can be pretty formidable, once they realize they've been lied to.
