Go Ahead, Take It. I Dare You.

Will someone please tell me from whom the  Ricks (Santorum and Perry) want to take back America ?  I notice them intoning this sentiment at all of their campaign rallies-"Let's take America back!"  From whom???  Me?  What did I do? Vote for Obama?  What, I am not allowed to express a few words in support of Occupy Wall Street?  Have I stolen America  if I express my doubts about our economic future being left in the hands of a cadre of Wall Street executives and bankers who have already proven that the only deity they worship is the up arrow on the Dow Jones graph?  Do they think that my liberal World War II veteran Dad, who spent his early adulthood protecting our Atlantic coast from German U-boats, should relinquish the America he believes in and fought for?  An America that belongs to no single interest group and a government that guards against the tyranny of the majority?  A moral majority, btw, that doesn't even exist except in Iowa.


Did Thomas Jefferson want to take America back  from John Adams?  Okay, perhaps he did.  But that was about state's rights versus federal hegemony.  And we all know what that was about.  At least you should know.  Now that I think about it, maybe that is what they do mean.  That the states should take America back from the federal government.  It is possible I take their bombastic rhetoric too personally.  I'm no James Madison but I realize all that stuff about not infringing upon the free trade between the states and c. (that is how the founders expressed "etc") was about the North not infringing upon the slave based economy of the South.  Of course I am distilling 200 years of Federalist debate into one sentence but you get my drift.  John Rutledge wasn't so interested in fending off  federally mandated health care as he was in opposing a federally mandated economic system not based on enslaved three fifths of a human, human beings.

In any event, I don't even agree with this excessive emphasis on states rights.  Taken to it's logical conclusion, as expressed by the likes of Ron Paul and c., we might as well devolve into internecine tribes.  Not unlike Afghanistan.  Or Native America (not that there is anything wrong with that). Or pre-celtic Britain.  I have no idea what that means except I envision fur clad Vikings flinging scary looking maces at petrified villagers and catapulting flame engulfed tar balls at their grass roofed huts.  An analogy not so far removed from Newt Gingrich's campaign rhetoric;  metaphorical flaming tar balls hurled at any idea that did not originate in his own head.

For me the debate was settled when Ben noted that "We must all hang together or most assuredly we will all hang separately".  He was talking about the War for Independence of course, not about state's rights, but like Newt, I enjoy a good rhetorical flourish every now and then.  It took the thoughtfulness of many enlightened men to realize that compromise is the incubator of a civil society.  Let us not blow it now.