Posted on 12/14/2004 10:32:58 AM PST by groanup
The nation of commoners
Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin were skeptical about the common man and government.
By PERRY TREADWELL
Tuesday, December 14, 2004
This has been the year of Alexander Hamilton, with a new biography and a museum exhibit in New York City.
All that I remember about Hamilton from high school senior history taken more than a half-century ago is a quote attributed to him, "The People is a Beast."
More recently, a poem Hamilton may have read by a 17th century Italian cleric, Tommaso Campanella, has appeared. The first stanza goes:
The People is a beast of muddy brain,
That knows not its own force, and therefore stands
Loaded with wood and stone; the powerless hands
Of a mere child guide it with bit and rein.
Hamilton was quite wary of the ability of the common man to make rational choices. The Federalist Papers attest that he was not alone in his fears. As the poem anticipated, we now have petulant children guiding our country.
In spite of the protestations of evangelical Christians, the Constitution of the United States was written by the products of the Enlightenment. These men believed in the right of the people to govern themselves during a time when kings reigned. But they disagreed on the checks and balances necessary to perpetuate that dream.
One of the major fathers of that document, Benjamin Franklin, warned that the government "is likely to be well administered for a course of years and can only end in despotism as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other."
It is a measure of the strength of the Constitution that it has taken more than 200 years for the government to become so corrupt as to re-quire a despot in the White House.
As Abraham Lincoln said, "You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time." This last presidential election proved that some of the people can be fooled all the time.
They got fooled by spurious arguments while the real issues, such as war, economics and the environment, were ignored.
It is no surprise that the Southern red states (the Bible Belt) have the worst health care, the worst educational systems and the highest divorce rates. Residents have become consumers bought off by their wants supplied by malls.
Muslim Irshad Manji, who has tried to reform her own religion, comments on American values: "I could have become a runaway materialist, a robotic mall rat who resorts to retail therapy in pursuit of fulfillment. I didn't. That's because religion introduces competing claims. It injects a tension that compels me to think and allows me to avoid fundamentalisms of my own."
As a former teacher, I can attest that critical thinking is quite uncommon among students today. Just look at the feeding frenzy developed over the Thanksgiving buying. TV ads show people crashing through doors to get to the malls in the middle of the night.
The electorate has been bought off by the Roman example of "bread and games." The bread is the apparently cheap goods flooding in from abroad. The games are the violent sports in the new coliseums around the country: football, boxing and now basketball. The games appear on more than 100 channels: unreal reality, fear factors, inane sitcoms, in-your-face rap, shout talk shows and more sports.
The United States has become a strange animal, half theocracy, half plutocracy. We have returned to the theocracy of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, figuratively burning witches (gays and lesbians) and hanging Quakers (Muslims).
Consumers of religions sold on Sundays listen to shouters replacing Christian love with Old Testament fear leaning heavily on a vengeful God rather than the Prince of Peace. Americans seem to need to create enemies to destroy, on the battlefield or on the playing field.
While the United States tries to govern the world by spending more than any other nation or group of nations on the military, China and India, followed by the European Union, are becoming economic giants.
The United States will be following in their dust. The life of the U.S. Constitution is being smothered by the theocrats and the plutocrats. Hamilton and Franklin were right.
• Perry Treadwell is a retired Emory University professor.
yawn
shocking
sarcasm/>
Stupid is as stupid does.
The world is a lot better off with this guy in retirement.
I believe there are both left-wing and right-wing versions of this kind of thing. They differ only on who the dummies are.
Read The Theme is Freedom by M. Stanton Evans. He debunks this myth. Thoroughly.
Or in the White House?
There's that canard again. The professor laments the loss of critical thinking later in his article, but clearly demonstrates that he is as guilty as his students.
Dolt!
Any op/ed piece that postulates an equivalence between Muslims and the Quakers isn't worthy of serious consideration.
A history lesson about Alexander Hamilton? OK. He p*ssed off a common man, Aaron Burr, who shot and killed him.
He needs a boot up his elitist butt.
Regards
Hamilton was a pompous ass who got his just rewards at the hands of Aaron Burr on a dueling field outside Weehawken, N.J... Franklin was a pervert and a pedafile ...the tenured tart who wrote this tripe is just a turd!
They never burned witches in MA.
They hanged them. (Or in one case, the "witch" was pressed to death.)
Other colonies, notably New York, occasionally burned people to death, usually revolting slaves.
The property/income restriction should still be around.
No Representation without Taxation is just as important as the reverse.
So9
This guy came from the same institution that gave us Michael Desailles (Arming America).
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