Hate Mail - If You Can't Take Me Knocking Those Gods Of the Cult Of The Constitution Off Their Plinths You're In The Wrong Place

Oh, I first heard about the alcoholism of the friggin' founders when I read a (possibly apocryphal) anecdote referring to Benjamin Franklin talking too freely during the Continental Congress.   I came to the firm belief in it through reading a large number of the letters of Thomas Jefferson and came to the conclusion that a lot of them were probably written when he was very drunk.  The quality of them is so drastically different that he had to have been on something when he wrote a lot of them.   One thing I looked at a while back said that Franklin, though perhaps a heavy drinker by today's standards, was one of the less habitually drunk of the deified founders.

I've not yet looked hard for that kind of kind of retrospective examination of the evidence of how much of our Constitution that we treat like divine revelation  . . . no, that's not true, the Supreme Court treats it far more reverently and uncritically and without regard for subsequent history and experience and knowledge than anyone treats the Bible*- . . . anyway, no one I know of has tried to figure out how many of the friggin' founders were drunk when they wrote and adopted it.  Late 18th century people drank enormous amounts of alcohol, I'd guess a number of them would be classified as alcoholics by later, more scientifically informed times.  Which is an irony of our absurd "originalism" and the absurd cult of the 18th century gods made of those guys. 

* No doubt the members of the Supreme Court would never want anyone to take the extremely radical economic justice passages of The Law, The Prophets, The Gospel and The Epistles seriously.   Even those who are less the whores of the oligarchs have that kind of thinking drummed out of them at the Ivy League law schools where they instruct the servants of the wealthy, training them to aspire to become members of the oligarchy, those who aren't already. 

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Note:  It occurs to me while writing this that the people who have sniped at me about wanting to return to some point in the past are, almost to a person, enamored of some period of the past, many of them exactly that period as they imagine it - in the case of the "originalist" soothsayers, for exactly those provisions that were put in it by wealthy, drunkard, white men to keep them in power so better to exploit the labor of others.

I will note that, though he might have the occasional drink, as compared to the founders, Abraham Lincoln, who did more to correct some of the worst features of the original Constitution than any other president, said he didn't care for drinking because it made him feel "flabby and undone".   His address to a temperance society in 1842 is interesting because it showed a more modern conception of the pandemic alcoholism and still is that was rampant.  And still is. Especially this passage - complete with an ethnic stereotype of the period.


If, then, what I have been saying be true, is it wonderful, that some should think and act now as all thought and acted twenty years ago? And is it just to assail, contemn, or despise them, for doing so? The universal sense of mankind, on any subject, is an argument, or at least an influence not easily overcome. The success of the argument in favor of the existence of an over-ruling Providence, mainly depends upon that sense; and men ought not, in justice, to be denounced for yielding to it, in any case, or giving it up slowly, especially, where they are backed by interest, fixed habits, or burning appetites.

Another error, as it seems to me, into which the old reformers fell, was, the position that all habitual drunkards were utterly incorrigible, and therefore, must be turned adrift, and damned without remedy, in order that the grace of temperance might abound to the temperate then, and to all mankind some hundred years thereafter. There is in this something so repugnant to humanity, so uncharitable, so cold-blooded and feelingless, that it never did, nor ever can enlist the enthusiasm of a popular cause. We could not love the man who taught it -- we could not hear him with patience. The heart could not throw open its portals to it. The generous man could not adopt it. It could not mix with his blood. It looked so fiendishly selfish, so like throwing fathers and brothers overboard, to lighten the boat for our security -- that the noble minded shrank from the manifest meanness of the thing.

And besides this, the benefits of a reformation to be effected by such a system, were too remote in point of time, to warmly engage many in its behalf. Few can be induced to labor exclusively for posterity; and none will do it enthusiastically. Posterity has done nothing for us; and theorize on it as we may, practically we shall do very little for it, unless we are made to think, we are, at the same time, doing something for ourselves. What an ignorance of human nature does it exhibit, to ask or expect a whole community to rise up and labor for the temporal happiness of others after themselves shall be consigned to the dust, a majority of which community take no pains whatever to secure their own eternal welfare, at a no greater distant day? Great distance, in either time or space, has wonderful power to lull and render quiescent the human mind. Pleasures to be enjoyed, or pains to be endured, after we shall be dead and gone, are but little regarded, even in our own cases, and much less in the cases of others. 

Still, in addition to this, there is something so ludicrous in promises of good, or threats of evil, a great way off, as to render the whole subject with which they are connected, easily turned into ridicule. "Better lay down that spade you are stealing, Paddy; --if you don't you'll pay for it at the day of judgment." "Be the powers, if ye'll credit me so long, I'll take another, jist." 

By the Washingtonians, this system of consigning the habitual drunkard to hopeless ruin, is repudiated. They adopt a more enlarged philanthropy. They go for present as well as future good. They labor for all now living, as well as all hereafter to live. They teach hope to all -- despair to none. As applying to their cause, they deny the doctrine of unpardonable sin. As in Christianity it is taught, so in this they teach, that

"While the lamp holds out to burn,
The vilest sinner may return."

And, what is a matter of more profound gratulation, they, by experiment upon experiment, and example upon example, prove the maxim to be no less true in the one case than in the other. On every hand we behold those, who but yesterday, were the chief of sinners, now the chief apostles of the cause. Drunken devils are cast out by ones, by sevens, and by legions; and their unfortunate victims, like the poor possessed, who was redeemed from his long and lonely wanderings in the tombs, are publishing to the ends of the earth, how great things have been done for them. To these new champions, and this new system of tactics, our late success is mainly owing; and to them we must mainly look for the final consummation. The ball is now rolling gloriously on, and none are so able as they to increase its speed, and its bulk -- to add to its momentum, and its magnitude. Even though unlearned in letters, for this task, none are so well educated. To fit them for this work, they have been taught in the true school. They have been in that gulf, from which they would teach others the means of escape. They have passed that prison wall, which others have long declared impassable; and who that has not shall dare to weigh opinions with them, as to the mode of passing.

I'm not sure that we know how to treat alcoholism and other addictions,  Conditions that have killed two members of my family in my generation and which is certainly one of the major health and safety problems and social emergencies.   And as a book I recommended earlier this year,  Firewater:  How Alcohol Is Killing My People (And Yours) by Harold R. Johnson notes, the medical model which came out of that kind of 19th century progress over the disastrous 18th century one, isn't a notable success.   The medical model, especially as a branch of the pseudo-sciences of psychology and psychiatry, is less successful than Alcoholics Anonymous, which when it works, it works, but it doesn't work nearly enough. 

I do have to add that whenever I read Lincoln's persuasive writing, the man had a deeper and firmer notion of human habits of thought than any allegedly scientific modeling of the same.   I have to add,  I think Nancy Pelosi has similar and deep understanding of the way peoples' minds work and how to lead  people.   I trust her judgement far better than almost any other of today's politicians.   I trust it a lot more than I trust the 18th century aristocratic slaveholders, oligarchs and drunks we're supposed to treat as eternal gods.