Part IIThe Threat *UNION USAmerican exceptionalism lies not in the hand of God, nor in its economic/military dominance of the world, nor in the accident that this is my country. Human beings, thoughtful, serious, profoundly capable human beings, two-and-a-half hundred years before our time at a moment of economic and military ebb tide, acted onContinue reading “The Long Clasp (Post 5)”
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The Long Clasp (Post 4)
*** The Challenge Human nature—that fecund field strewn as well with all the seeds of noxious weeds and nettles as with those of all perfumy petals and productive harvest—ever works at odds with social good. “Ambition, avarice, personal animosity, party opposition” “the ambition and jealousy of each other” “preconceived jealousies and fears” “glory,Continue reading “The Long Clasp (Post 4)”
The Long Clasp (Post 3)
** The Aspiration Between the first and last phrases of the Constitution’s mission statement—its Preamble—are the following six phrases, which, in fact, list the long-range goals, the desired outcomes that lay behind the system of governance set out within the document: in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provideContinue reading “The Long Clasp (Post 3)”
The Long Clasp (Post 2)
*The Idea Ask a thousand US citizens, or a thousand thousand, to catalogue some of those ideas, and sure to be included on every list will be Freedom and Liberty; on nearly every list in one form or another, the Right to be left alone to do as you please, to worship as you please,Continue reading “The Long Clasp (Post 2)”
The Foetus of a King
Ancillary Post No. 1 Benjamin Franklin in the early weeks of the Constitutional Convention, at the age of 81, proposed that the Executive Officer not receive a salary. His speech to the Convention was memorialized by James Madison in his “Notes on the Debates in the Federal Convention.” His observations and his manner of presentingContinue reading “The Foetus of a King”
The Long Clasp 