Blasphemy!

I'm officially sick of the founding fathers!

We conjure these glazed colossi with their antique words to condemn or defend whatever pleases us. Their words are easy to manipulate because they were composed in another time, in response to other realities than ours. These men's intentions were their own and they held them in a context far different from ours. How they might have reacted to the realities of 2010 we can't be sure.

It's useful to look back and learn from the wisdom of those who came before us and to see how they grappled with the problems of their day. Teasing intentions out from the tangled and inconsistent output of a life well and richly lived in the distant past is a fascinating academic exercise, but we shouldn't make the mistake of believing that it reveals anything about what course we should take nearly two hundred years later. Even if we could know what Thomas Jefferson or James Maddison or any of them intended, why should we care? We don't live today to serve their intentions. They lived their lives in the most exceptional manner available to them, and they achieved something remarkable. They're done. It's our job to carry on, and what The Founding Fathers intended is precisely as important as how they preferred to lace their boots.

I love to talk about these guys; I really do. Many of them were gifted writers with fascinating insights. But their remarkable words become non-sequiturs when we try to bash each other over the head with them in service of whatever current event has our dander up at the moment.

Thank you, Emerson!