ONE OF THE PROBLEMS with the idolatry and absurd romanticism surrounding the cult of the Constitution is, as I mentioned, all human creations have flaws in them, both unintentional ones and those inserted intentionally for evil purposes. The United States Constitution has both and, in abundance, those intended for evil and to thwart democracy.
That is a fact of history, the representatives, a large majority of the fetishized "founders," fully intended to protect the basis of their wealth, slavery as an evil institution that they feared democracy would endanger. The Southern states, of course, were the primary locus of that though slavery was present and not insignificant in Northern States as well, most of that slavery practiced by the very class of rich, white men who comprised the ruling elite, including the "founders".
Every single attempt at progress, the abolition of slavery, the enfranchisement of Women, workers rights, etc. has been a struggle against the flaws embedded in the original document and the accretions of laws and court rulings and Supreme Court decisions that have been far from a steady march of progress towards equality and equal justice, economic, social and legal. And working against that progress there has been a steady and constant and well financed body of lawyers and law scholars who have as a profession sought to exploit every flaw, intended and unintended in that document and as enabled by further laws and court decisions - the legal being a potentially lucrative profession, the larger part of lawyers and law professors and - yes, judges and "justices" have been hirelings to bend the law for those who pay the best. Like it or not, as practiced by many if not most lawyers, it is nothing more than a form of intellectual prostitution, one which unlike that using the bodies of women, children and vulnerable men, has carried little personal risk and no generally respectable opprobrium and legal consequence for the pro.
The United States is in a crisis due to the decisions of the Supreme Court and the corrupt institution of the Senate, for the most part. Without the Supreme Court permitting the media to lie with impunity when it lies about Democratic politicians and other figures, a line of decisions starting with "liberals" on the court for the benefit of the New York Times and the porn industry - or Hollywood and Broadway - as if there's a signficant difference among them.
Yet due to the sacralized language of the Constitution, though everyone acknowledges democracy is being murdered with lies, everyone holds that there is nothing to be done about that. Which is among the most widespread of insanities and mass delusions afflicting modern life. Remember that today as you hear the Rachel Maddows, the Stephen Colberts, etc. use the until recently forbidden "L" word, both of them and all others in the media knowing that there is a total and absolute ban on any rational criticism of free speech absolutism - something which I assure you will never be allowed under what we are coming to if any speech in any way endangers Republican-fascist unitary rule. I recall the shock and surprise when the gray old slut herself allowed the calling of lies lies during the Trump regime.
And that is only one of a myriad of such forbidden ideas, including one that notes that it is exactly those things embedded by the slave power along with their Northern financier allies into the structure of the United States government, the absurdly lauded "balance of powers" and the enumerated as well as the self-created powers of the United States Supreme Court which is destroying even the semblance of democracy as something to realistically aspire to under the Constitution.
We are reaching crisis point where states with a majority of Republican voters are making sure they will be a permanent minority one-party state and, with them, the United States no matter what a majority of Americans want and that will, I guarantee you, force facing the evils embedded in the Constitution at the start. The unequal, anti-democratic Senate, the abomination of the Electoral College, the rigging of congressional, state and local elections in the various states, the dictatorial anti-democratic and elitist nature of the Supreme Court. Those crisis comprise the real underlying history of the United States, the real thing in which real People have had to struggle against the Constitution and, with the terribly written First and Second amendments, the most ridiculously sacralized parts of it, in the hastily written Bill of Rights.
No document should ever be worshiped as that document is, no group of vastly imperfect and often dishonest and self-serving men should ever be deified as those who wrote the Constitution have been. Our crisis is founded in the worship of false gods under a secular religion as absurdly ahistorical and calculatedly dishonest as the worst of 20th century European nationalism. A lot of that religion is based squarely in cheap entertainment of the kind George M. Cohan cynically formalized to save many a bum show.
Entertainment has been the primary vehicle for delivering the lies that are destroying democracy. It was during the late 1970s with the falsification of the war in Vietnam the deification of fascists such as Dirty Harry and the rise of what I started calling "fascist chic" as Hollywood provided us with the first president it provided, Ronald Reagan. I said that I thought it was an intentional promotion of fascism under Republican rule then, I have seen nothing to dissuade me that it has been anything but an attempt to bring us further down the road to fascist hell, the second Hollywood president, Trump being installed by the lies of the New York Times and other media against Hillary Clinton, the sleazy conventionally pious head of the FBI, James Comey and the goddamned Electoral College.
We change the Constitution to get rid of those tools for destroying democracy, including that permission to lie and the permission for facists to amass an extremely dangerous arsenal or democracy is not even going to be the plausible false front that it has been for most of our history as a country. The Republican-fascists are doing without the facade that is there only to cover up for the queasier members of the media and the college-credentialed who still spout the old pieties of a dead religion.
And lots of us will be killed in the modern form of civil war which may make the old one look orderly and polite by comparison. The United States as we have known it will not survive the shit show that is coming with no one really stopping it.
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