At the time this is written there is a television series being broadcast, spawned by the upcoming 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. This essay does not directly concern that, or the historical aspects of those events, as relevant as they are. This essay addresses the practical necessity of an American Revolution, today, and continuing into the foreseeable future. Though it concerns our immediate lives, it will have little interest to most who might read it, for it lacks much in the way of bread and circuses, and can thus be ignored. There are rents and mortgages to cover. Taxes to pay. Food to buy. Illnesses and infirmities to attend. Importantly, there are laws to obey, or avoid. There is not enough time for anything else. A little entertainment would be welcome, but an essay on revolution is not wanted. Besides, it might be disturbing. Better to watch a good football game, or some baseball, depending on the season.
For most of the world, the very idea of revolution is a luxury. That is, the consideration of such an idea is outside the realm of practical application, and though needed, is debatable. And there is no time to debate. There are rents to cover, taxes to pay, etc. That’s the way the world works… until it doesn’t.
In its usual herky-jerky way, that is the way the world usually works. But, now it doesn’t, so ’Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.” Bette Davis had that right, and much else.
‘Criminal,’ we are told, is relating to, or involving, a crime. A crime, of course, is something against the law. The ‘law’ is a custom or practice of prescribed conduct that may be enforced by a controlling authority. That is roughly what Merriam Webster says and it’s good enough for this conversation. Thus, we are all criminals because we are all breaking laws, everyday, as a matter of practical procedure, in order to live. Much of that is common sense. The necessity of keeping things going, despite the law. Well, “The law is an ass,” as Mr. Bumble said when it was suggested that the law presumed that his wife acted under his direction.
Our problem here is not a matter of misunderstanding, or “failure to communicate” as Strother Martin once said. Not wanting to spend needless and boring paragraphs defining words readily understood by most potential readers, it is always easier to resort of a common meme, such as found in the movies (even Oliver Twist has been made into a movie, several times) to elucidate.
We break the laws because there are too many of them. That is not an accident. The idea is that it gives the authorities leverage to have their way with us. We are thus screwed. And not coincidentally, that was what motivated our ancestors to cross the Atlantic on stinking ships—to get away from laws. The attempt to enforce those laws, across a difficult sea, was then the reason for the first American Revolution and the founding of ‘The Republic.’ But as I have said in an essay some years ago, the Republic is dead. All attempts to revive it are wasted due to the self-interest of people who have no real concept of the original. And the concept of ‘liberty’ inherent in that Republic will not be found in a television series made by someone who has no reason to report what goes against his own sense of self-interest.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a nation in possession of a good fortune and in danger of losing it, must be in want of a revolution.” Or so it might have been said if Jane Austen had cared to look beyond the troubled waters that surrounded her. England never produced a constitution of her presumed liberties. The prevailing interests saw to that. But our Founding Fathers (all white males we are often informed by those who think with the color of their skin) realized that a constitution was necessary to establish the Republic they were inventing. It was still a novel idea at the time.
Most importantly, by encoding the principles of governance, the constitution gave guidance to the newly established authority meant to rule a fledgling nation.
But the great failure of the document turned out not to be in enshrining mistakes, such as slavery, or the reduced status of women—those wrongs could and would be addressed in time—but in offering a means of corruption through the establishment of laws that bound the citizen to the needs of the government instead of binding the government to the needs of the citizen.
Famously, this constitution did say, plainly, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people,” as a means of restraining the powers of government, not the citizen, but then buried that caution in an architecture of law that was unrestrained in that age of the baroque. The ornamentation was more than a matter of a fig leaf. And like a fig tree, the stolon of prohibition upon the citizenry propagated madly.
That flaw has flourished while the natural right of the citizen to live his life unmolested by other citizens or government has since been cloaked like ugly genitalia in a church.
So, here we are then, all lawed up with no place to go.
[more, shortly]