BECAUSE ESQUIRE has put his online column behind a subscription requirement that I can't afford to breech, I don't read the estimable Charles Pierce as often as I used to. I generally like Pierce's pieces and I almost always agree with him but one of the things that he does that drives me up the friggin' wall is his adoration of James Madison. "Jemmy" Madison, in Pierce's frequent affectionate mentions of him is one of the things in American mythology that we are going to have to face realistically or we will never, ever save egalitarian democracy, BOTH OF WHICH "JEMMY" HATED OR AT LEAST DIDN'T TRUST.
That an aristocratic, well educated, slave-holder and protector of the institution that made him and a majority of his fellow Constitution and Bill of Rights writing aristocrats rich had a deep suspicion of the wisdom and morality of common people is hardly to be unexpected, look at the snobbery that pervades the merely middle-class, college-credentialed blog rats on allegedly lefty, allegedly egalitarian, blogs to get a milder version of what the "Jemmy" I imagine was like. That is what I imagine him after doing what so few ever get around to doing, looking more deeply into his writing and primary documentation. The whole "founders" thin needs to be junked or at least subjected to deep and skeptical scrutiny. That that look into, especially, Thomas Jefferson, Madison's very uneven letter writing fellow genius among the Founders, leads me to suspect he was an alcoholic who was frequently drunk as a skunk when he wrote. Looking into not only the primary record but their contemporary critics really has opened my eyes and informed my thinking of just how intentionally anti-democratic the government they framed is and just who it was intended to benefit from the beginning. We have been fighting tooth and nail, actual oceans of blood, against it since it was adopted, especially shed by People of Color and the also wage slaves.
Think about that this week as we hear journalists like the genuinely and equally estimable Rachel Maddow rightly rail against Senator Joe Manchin who has already announced that he will continue as being the person who puts guns into the hands of mass shooters - THAT ANY TWO REPUBLICAN SENATORS COULD MAKE THAT STAND MOOT SHOULD BE MENTIONED BUT MANCHIN HAS CHOSEN TO BE THE FOCAL POINT OF THIS SO HE OWNS IT.
Think about that because the Senate was sold to skeptics of that anti-democratically constituted body as the saucer to cool hot tea passed by the actually more democratically constituted House to prevent things happening. That is what your "Evening Jemmy" not only planned but stated was his intention and, no doubt, that of his aristocratic colleagues who were afraid that largely Northern popular opinion would turn against slavery and the Southern economic system and free the people whose violent incarceration on their plantations made him and his fellow aristocrats AND THEIR NORTHERN MONEY MEN COLLEAGUES rich.
The Senate only cools things that are good, I'm having a hard time remembering much of anything bad that they prevented passing into law, and even a lot of the good that was made law in the past is destroyed by the Supreme Court which the Founders ensured would be staffed by people such as the anti-democratically constituted Senate would allow to get on it.
If the Senate is broken, and it always has been, the fault will not be corrected until we get over the goddamend founders fetish that is the irrational and stupid and totally ahistorical mythology of the college-credentialed class.
A popular mythological "Founders" and especially James Madison are wildly popular among journalists because of his reluctant paternity of the First Amendment, he had to promise the Virginia Legislature that in the First Congress he would push through a bill of rights and what he pushed through has bedeviled us in so many ways today. The professional interests of the paid media - who have benefited from the modern interpretation of the "free speech-press" provisions as certainly as the gun industry has benefited from the slave-patrol benefiting Second Amendment, will never face the fact that its interpretation allowing lies is why the goddamned Senate is even more broken than it might have been. Their profession, their lying colleagues whose rights to lie they would never want to see abridged lest they might get sued for their sloppiness, are as much to blame as a Joe Manchin who would probably be a lot less depraved if he didn't have to worry about a lie campaign against him in West Virginia. Or, I dare say, at least two of the Republican Senators who might be less depraved if Madison and his colleagues had bothered to note that allowing a right to lie would destroy not only democracy but any hope for any kind of decency.
That the First Amendment created an artificial right for an artificial, human enterprise, publishing, and unwisely made it legally equivalent to rights that are held by living beings is a defect. It also ignores the fact that "the press" what is now "the media" are a means of exercising vastly more influence and, among those many of us susceptible to the media's methods, power and so permitting lies the impunity our idiot Supreme Court has granted to them is dangerous for exactly the same reason that that right was used by the gun industry and its lobby to get the same "rights" for that industry, the reason a Joe Manchin is acting the role he is
As things developed under the Constitution, the answer to Rachel Maddow's question of why a Joe Manchin OR ANY OTHERWISE NOT INSANE REPUBLICAN would do the bidding of the gun industry and the idiot 10% they have propagandized is obvious. They can lie a Senator out of office. You won't change anything about that until you remove the idiocies embedded into the Constitution by James Madison and his sleazier colleagues, yes, Alexander Hamilton among them.
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