Of all political literature available in this overheated climate, I have to say that I love the Jeremiad the most. Such tomes with their counterfactual premises, their appeals to consequences both real and imagined, and always, always, always, their simple, simplified, simplistic conclusions wrapped up in Founding Father rhetoric designed to distract the audience from the very concept of self-rule. Could there ever be anything more un-American than a literary work that both extolls the downfall of a nation we never were, and regresses us into permanent slaves to dead men who were determined to keep their experiment in democracy from suffering that exact fate?
Political rhetoric often falls back upon the easy crutch of claiming the legacy of the Founding Fathers. It's the lazy appeal to inappropriate authority that spews most readily from the mouths of partisan hacks who've never actually engaged with the voluminous body of evidence left by these dead white guys that points to a fear that this is exactly what would happen in a nation of uneducated people.
So fuck the Founding Fathers. Fucke 'em. Not hardly any of them are people most of us would spend any time with, if we knew all that much about them. Ben Franklin, who worked his way into the upper crust as a newspaper man and inventor, also fit right in with wingnuts who think helping the poor makes them like being poor, wanted to ban the speaking of German in the state of Pennsylvania, and let his sister live in dreadful poverty when he could easily have lifted her up with him. Fuck old Ben, he was an asshole.
The point of being an American is ownership of one's fate. Like Thomas Paine said:
Every generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions require. It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated. When man ceases to be, his power and his wants cease with him; and having no longer any participation in the concerns of this world, he has no longer any authority in directing who shall be its governors, or how its government shall be organised, or how administered.
Fuck the Founding Fathers and what they intended and what they would think, because not only are they dead and therefore not much concerned with what we are doing in the realm of phenomena they left behind, but they themselves found the idea of fealty to dead men repugnant. They didn't want to be deified, and they certainly didn't set up the structure of a nation meant to ossify as the lands of their birth had. They knew, as Socrates said, that the wisest man knows one thing, that he knows nothing.
If anyone has any notion that that Thomas Jefferson's 18th Century experience could ever have imagined life in the 20th Century, please do step up and figure it for us. I'd love to hear how George Washington, exhumed and revived, would fare in a world of iPods and televised war. How's about that prig, John Adams? He wasn't much of a man even in his own day. Anyone care to live in a world in which only certain Christian sects are allowed to practice? How's about his signature legislation, the Alien and Sedition Acts? Does that seem like the kind of guy whose every utterance should govern how we live and operate our democracy today?
Seriously, these weren't prophetic men. They didn't have the answers to every aspect of life in a future they never could have contemplated. They were just a bunch of guys who read the right books, had the right understanding of human nature, and were able to compromise with each other enough to set up an enduring government that has overcome every obstacle, including internecine war. Their genius wasn't in their ability to run our lives from 200 years in the past, it was in acknowledging that we would have to redefine the nation with each successive generation. The irony of political rhetoric appealing to the intentions of the Founding Fathers is just this: if that particular group were reborn and unaware of their former lives, faced with the raft of problems and the dearth of solutions with which we grapple today, you know what they'd say before rolling up their sleeves and getting to work setting things aright if they could?
Fuck those old bastards, their problems were easy.