Constitutionally Speaking

We've all seen how the Tea Party has busily been reinterpreting the Constitution to suit its interests, often treating it as commandments handed down from the Mount. Not to mention all the quotes they have been attributing to the Founding Fathers, which you won't find in Bartlett's Quotations.I saw this zinger, "It is impossible to rightly govern a nation without God and the Bible," attributed to George Washington. It seems most within this movement have never read the Constitution nor have the first inkling of its origins, much less the religious dispositions of our Founding Fathers.

I got into some arguments with old chums on Facebook over the supposed "divine right" of the Constitution, noting that only once is "Lord" mentioned in the Constitution and that to signify the year of our Lord, not in any direct reference to the Bible, which they firmly believe the Constitution is derived from.

When I tell them that they would be more comfortable with the Articles of Confederation, like their friend Patrick Henry, they scoff, mostly because they don't even know what these articles were. The kicker today was someone quoting the preface to the Declaration of Independence, blithely unaware that when Jefferson referred to Nature's God he was referring to God in the pantheistic sense, not the Biblical sense, completely unaware that Jefferson, like most of his fellow Founding Fathers, was a Deist.

So, I posted this great website on Facebook that enumerates many of the Things That Are Not in the U.S. Constitution.

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The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro

Dylan in America

Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan. Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose. Looks like only yesterday. Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

Dispatches from Vilnius

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