The Failure of the Constitution's Protectors
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By Moses Sands, as told to Vassar Bushmills
(What follows is a discussion between Moses Sands and me. I’m the one who is listening- VB)
I’ll say it straight out, then explain. If the U S Constitution ends up in the dustbin of history it won’t be because of the common man
and woman, or the popular culture. They have been debased on purpose. And it won’t be because of the elitists who’ve hated what it
stands for since the day it was first drafted. You should never blame a state of nature…such as dogs being dogs.
It will be because the natural protectors of the Constitution have turned their backs on the common man and dropped the
handshake the Constitution fashioned between them.
For some time now we’ve been trying to re-draw the Constitutional blueprint for the modern American, that shows the ordinary
citizen how to go about restoring his House, and re-linking his House to the Constitution. The blueprint is easy to understand, the
plan's easy to follow. There’s only a few simple rules to building the House, and a fellow doesn’t have to do a whole lot more to keep
his House protected and to pass the blueprint onto the next in line. He doesn’t have to send money to anyone, join a committee, go to
meetings, read a lot of magazines, or even put on a tie. All he has to do is subscribe to a few simple, what anthropologists call
‘survival-enhancing building blocks...all of this was common sense once upon a time... in order to keep the survival-endangering
ones outside his door...and know how to tell the difference. It would also help if he voted more often.
Do those few simple things and everything else will just fix itself on its own accord…after a changing of some diapers in
Congress and some blood-letting with the Бureaucracies.
The American House is the cornerstone, of course. And I mean the House all up and down the hill of life, but especially the
common man’s, down there at the bottom and in the middle. Make no mistake about it. That was always what the Constitution was
about. Jefferson knew it as did Hamilton and Adams. They just saw different kinds of people down there.
They all saw the Constitution as a means of holding open certain doors for furthering their House, to go through at a time and
place of their choosing (VB: italics mine) and a House that was built on universally accepted values. The stronger the values, the
stronger the House. As I see it, the House is a spiritual possession, not a building, or real estate, and a person owns it simply by
virtue of citizenship. How big he builds it, if at all, and when, if at all, is up to him. How well he builds it depends on how mindful he is
of its foundation, and how well he passes that knowledge on. Burke said it almost as well as Jefferson; "Patience, work, sobriety,
frugality and religion should be recommended to all; all the rest is fraud."
The Constitution simply supposes, because the House is all of Mankind’s greatest dream and desire, that he will do the right
things in sufficient number…compared to the sick who can’t and the lazy who won’t…and by sheer weight of numbers with each
generation the Constitution would be re-nourished. Who would want to tinker with a blueprint like
that?
Well, the Founders knew that, too.
The Constitution wasn’t written so Lawrence Tribe could hold onto tenure at Harvard, any more than the New Testament was
written so Henry Sloan Coffin could have his rice bowl at Union
Seminary.
See the connection? From the earliest days of Christianity there were always those who it just gnawed at their gut that here was
a religion the simple-minded could understand and acquire without their intercession. To them “…suffer the little children to come
unto Me…” were the most despised words in the New Testament…just as “…we hold these truths to be self-evident…” are among
constitutional theologians…for those words mean even Homer Simpson can figure out how to pursue life, liberty and happiness
without the interference of his betters. I was taught that in Russia, by the way…of all places.
The ‘self-evident’ clause is the handshake between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It is also the
handshake between Jefferson and Hamilton. Probably their only one. But it is the handshake the Constitution inferred would always
exist between its protecting elites sitting atop the hill and the common man, further down that hill. In one generation or another, they
all had to climb the same hill and go through the same doors.
By going up the hill and passing through those doors, the fellow at top's his first job to hold open those doors and reach around
and extend his hand back down the hill. Liberty is not just built, but protected and regenerated by this
reciprocity.
Where or when the Protectors lost sight of that handshake, I can’t say, but it was before the anti-constitutionalists took over the
institutions of government, media and education. They lost it on their own. In the 1960s I walked away from America and took my little
revolution to Asia and Russia, thinking there was nothing that could come between the American family and their House. The
Protectors probably thought the same thing, thinking their war with the elitists was more of an academic exercise, played out in the
courts and journals of opinion. After all, for years they’d commanded the high ground, not knowing the anti-constitutionalists had their
own plan for separating the common man from his House, using everything from those courts to Madison Avenue to get it done.
When the fight finally ended up in the streets and the gutter, modern day Protectors looked at their white shirts and decided it was too
nasty a place to carry on a fight and abandoned the field. I blame your generation (VB: I’m a Baby Boomer) for that, though I blame my
own for not raising you better.
I think your generation of Protectors believes the handshake is delivered by osmosis. True, it isn’t always delivered face to face.
If I saw Bill Buckley spooning out food in a soup kitchen I’d think he was wasting precious time. But there is an ancient chain in how
Protectors hand down their handshake to each other. We’ve given credit to the elitists for taking the common man away from the
general plan of his House via the pop culture, but have ignored how well they detoured the Protectors themselves away from their
own mission of protecting them, using their own vanities.
The left knows your generation’s appetites and habits, and they are more like their own than you want to admit. Like them, you
like clean sheets and clean fingernails. Like them you don’t look good in muddy boots or rolled up sleeves. Unlike them, you don’t
have surrogates to do the street brawling. To my mind, you’ve abandoned the constitution’s non-com’s in the field, just like the
Democrats left the Cambodians to Pol Pot.
The simple rule of constitutional protection is that the Protectors will not only insure those doors stay open and to insure the anti-
constitutional brood cannot shut them or have a toll gate on them but they will provide models for the common man to use in
establishing the foundation of his House. That’s the handshake, lead by example.
The Constitution named a whole slough of people who would protect it, which is why government was divided the way it was,
between elites looking over each other’s shoulders. But the Constitution also inferred that there would be a body of keepers and
Protectors who were not elected, but who would always be wise enough to reflect with gratitude upon the worn, often illiterate
shoulders they themselves were standing on, then reach back and guide and protect that next fellow climbing up the hill. Some would
do it in the market place, some through scholarship, some in the service of their country or state, but all would do it out of a love of the
human yearning to be free.
And to prove the French wrong.
Every community still has its civic organizations, but have you gone to a meeting lately? Between the old-generation Protectors, of
which there are fewer and fewer, and the common man down at the bottom of the hill, there was always this army of citizens in
communities, some at the top of the hill for the first time, still others half-way up, and they provided the platform for expanding
citizenship among the masses. Virtually every advance in American civilization over the last 150 years can be laid at their feet… just
as we can lay at their feet now the accountability for every reversal of those deeds that past forty.
My first role model was in a new school I moved to when I was in the sixth grade. His name was Jim and he was the high school
quarterback and I noticed him my very first week for all the younger kids would crowd around him. Jim was about six feet, one-
seventy, not a big fellow, but he’d been known to back down real thugs, including a couple of linemen from his own team, just for
picking on kids in the lunchroom. Like every other school, we had our share of Tubbys, Four-Eyes, and Gimps, who today, if I read the
news stories right, are teased and bullied into buying guns, hanging themselves or sending Mom out for lawyers. Jim was hero to
them. You see, Jim knew bullying is no fun when it’s the other guy making the good
impression.
Jim graduated that year and joined the Army, like most kids. I never saw him again. But I found my next year in school there were
other "protectors" to take his place. And up ‘til the time I graduated the same rules applied, and I’m proud to say I was a protector,
too. Of course, in those days boys could meet after school to get the rules straight. That was how respect was earned in those
days.
My point is this; Jim was a C-student, and was never going to be an engineer or doctor. Had it not been for the war he probably
would have taken a job in a local store, married, and gone to Friday-night games to watch his own kids play for years to come. He
was just a natural leader and had the natural instincts of fairness, like the twelve things we used to list off from memory in the Boy
Scout Law…things they never did teach you in college….but sort of sum up the foundation blocks of the successful House, like Burke
mentioned. I can’t say who gave these values to him, but someone did, and probably not in his home, for he grew up pretty rough, I
recall. And he passed it on…and on. Jim was killed in North Africa in ‘43, and news of it was one of the few times in my life I ever
cried.
Did I say he wasn’t an officer? He was a sergeant. Now, I know three generations of academy graduates, very fine officers, not to
mention several ROTC men. I like the idea of a citizen-soldier. But for every officer Ernie Pyle honored, I recall one captain in Italy
especially, he honored half a dozen more non-com’s, men like Jim, of uncommon good sense, skill and above all, leadership. See
where I’m going?
Many of those guys came home and used the GI Bill to become captains of business and industry, and leaders at every level of
state and local government. But for reasons I’m still scratching my head over, they sired the greatest assemblage of narcissistic
twerps every to throw a teat fit outside of Shaker Heights.
To my mind that’s when the handshake was lost, when the children of men ceased becoming one. But Jim showed me how the
handshake was supposed to work, first in just getting to him in his rough surroundings, and then from him back down to the lowest
of the low in the community. If he were alive today, Jim would have done Bill Buckley’s alley fighting for him. And won. I can see a
linked chain running from Monticello down to the university in Charlottesville to the Lion’s Club in town and then onto Jim and from
Jim to the people no one but him paid attention to. Because of Jim, even people from the gutter on up had someone to look up to,
someone they’d want to be like.
Oh, they still do….only no one with any resemblance to the ‘self-evident clause’. The Constitution’s army is still filled with
generals and officers, but it’s way short on its non-coms. The constitutional dis-connect today is between our educated betters and
our Jims. And into the breach have stepped the elitists in order to keep it that way.
Down at Rotary most people who fancy themselves constitutional protectors these days are little more than common men who’
ve done well and made it up the hill, but with no additional grounding in the arts of Protection. As Mark Twain once wrote about
Christians, there’s professing constitutionalists and there’s professional constitutionalists. And it’s easy to tell them apart for when
they come upon a fight they sound like my mother when she said “Get thee behind me Satan”…which she always said when she
spied a sinner coming down the street. But when she told ol’ Clewfoot to get around behind her in fact it was always she who turned
her back and went the other way. Satan always commanded the road in my mother’s world of good and evil. She just took out to the
side street and claimed another victory just for being able to recognize the sonuvabitch. Unlike Christ in the wilderness, she never
spit in anybody’s eye, much less the devil’s. What constitutional Protectors think is the gutter today is in fact the main public highway.
Their high road is limited to their own driveway…and damned be their neighbor’s.
For the longest time it was really fairly easy for the protecting elites to keep the Constitution intact since the common man did all
the back-breaking work…with both vigor and enthusiasm. Wave after wave of new immigrants proved and re-proved what the
founders always believed, and the Euro-crats refuse to believe even today…if you give a man the power to build his own House…and
he keeps to a simple set of rules…his House will grow and reproduce and liberty will be nourished and refreshed. And the sum total
of their efforts will be called ‘Great.’ They call that American exceptionalism now.
In world history that has only happened once, so you can understand why the elitists of world hate America, and why the
common men and women of the world love the ideals we represent. It’s important to know the stakes. The average rice farmer in
Indonesia right now has a greater understanding of the meaning of the US Constitution than all the Democrats in Rhode Island.
Consider the elitist enemies of the Constitution. But first consider elitism in its natural state, for I think herein is the problem with
the handshake. Most of the class tumult in America’s early days arose out the natural conflict that exists between first generation
immigrants and second and third generation immigrants. I know it sounds about as silly as an olive-skinned citizen of modern
Athens claiming a direct line to Pericles, but most phony elitism in America today begins with when one’s family first got off the
boat…or first built a sod hut on the South Platte. Snobbery. Every creek hollow in east Tennessee has its own special Mayflower
queen, and everyone who came after His and Herself is expected to pay due respect.
Most things come in twos, sometimes threes, and in the matter of elitism, it’s no different. There have always been people out
there who, often from blood lineage alone, see themselves as superior. Moreover, they like to have some sort of acknowledgment of
that fact from time to time. Since almost everybody wants to be good in at least one thing in their life, and better than their neighbor in
that one thing, what we call ‘bragging rights’, usually a little ribbon or pin or trophy is about all they need to strut their stuff. Hell, we
even deny children that anymore.
But with bloodlines and the educated that’s not always enough. There have always been those who believed because of their
education, breeding or station, they should have power over others. I refer to this bunch as "elitists". The Constitution took into
account the natural animosities that exist between men of different backgrounds. Much of the bad blood that existed between
Jefferson and Adams was over their world views. City folks have always looked down on farm folk. They call ‘em names. Country folk
had ugly names for city folks, too. And flatlanders (who got there first and farmed the bottom lands) had even worse names for hill
folk, who got there last, and farmed the rocky slopes, which is why, every few generations or so, the hill folk would come storming out
of the mountains and take the flatlanders’ land. Alexander was, after all, the son of a hillbilly king in Macedonia before he became
king of almost everyone else’s flatlands.
Of course rich kids tend to look down their noses at the less rich, usually momma’s doing, and even among the rich there’s the
turned-up nose of old money when it smells new money. And don’t forget the self-righteousness of lawyer’s wives and other
reformed whores. There’s an endless number of ways to feel superior to your neighbor, usually without much harm coming of it in a
dynamic, free economy, but there’s a lot of harm can come of it in a static, envy-based society. Once there it only takes a few ways to
goad another person into hating his neighbor, and that’s where we are now. In our modern world this sort of spiteful elitism is often
found in the government and legal class. Bureaucrats, along with lawyers, hate more than anything the C-students from their high
schools who became rich buying and selling scrap metal…and almost every school class had one. Never forget that the rich we are
most often taught to hate is the fellow who made it all in his lifetime. Elitists whisper in the ears of the less well-off to hate that scrap
dealer because, no matter what his luck, as they call it, his children ain’t any better’n theirs. But why the elitists really hate the scrap
dealer is because it isn’t fair that they should slave away at law school while he sweated away in the junk yard only to out-earn them
by three times. And worse, he still listens to Johnny Cash, wears plaid golf pants, and gives more money to the high school cheer-
leading squad than they do to NPR. As one CPA complained to me, ‘…he spent forty thousand on a Lexus, then spent another ten
turning back into a Toyota.’ It’s not right that someone with that little class should have that much money…and I am afraid, Mr
Bushmills, in these instances, this sentiment trumps the politics of right or left. It trumps the Constitution. It trumps right and good.
Your generation is infested with this hateful envy. To them common sense is radical thinking and hard work is pornography.
(pg2)
(What follows is a discussion between Moses Sands and me. I’m the one who is listening- VB)
I’ll say it straight out, then explain. If the U S Constitution ends up in the dustbin of history it won’t be because of the common man
and woman, or the popular culture. They have been debased on purpose. And it won’t be because of the elitists who’ve hated what it
stands for since the day it was first drafted. You should never blame a state of nature…such as dogs being dogs.
It will be because the natural protectors of the Constitution have turned their backs on the common man and dropped the
handshake the Constitution fashioned between them.
For some time now we’ve been trying to re-draw the Constitutional blueprint for the modern American, that shows the ordinary
citizen how to go about restoring his House, and re-linking his House to the Constitution. The blueprint is easy to understand, the
plan's easy to follow. There’s only a few simple rules to building the House, and a fellow doesn’t have to do a whole lot more to keep
his House protected and to pass the blueprint onto the next in line. He doesn’t have to send money to anyone, join a committee, go to
meetings, read a lot of magazines, or even put on a tie. All he has to do is subscribe to a few simple, what anthropologists call
‘survival-enhancing building blocks...all of this was common sense once upon a time... in order to keep the survival-endangering
ones outside his door...and know how to tell the difference. It would also help if he voted more often.
Do those few simple things and everything else will just fix itself on its own accord…after a changing of some diapers in
Congress and some blood-letting with the Бureaucracies.
The American House is the cornerstone, of course. And I mean the House all up and down the hill of life, but especially the
common man’s, down there at the bottom and in the middle. Make no mistake about it. That was always what the Constitution was
about. Jefferson knew it as did Hamilton and Adams. They just saw different kinds of people down there.
They all saw the Constitution as a means of holding open certain doors for furthering their House, to go through at a time and
place of their choosing (VB: italics mine) and a House that was built on universally accepted values. The stronger the values, the
stronger the House. As I see it, the House is a spiritual possession, not a building, or real estate, and a person owns it simply by
virtue of citizenship. How big he builds it, if at all, and when, if at all, is up to him. How well he builds it depends on how mindful he is
of its foundation, and how well he passes that knowledge on. Burke said it almost as well as Jefferson; "Patience, work, sobriety,
frugality and religion should be recommended to all; all the rest is fraud."
The Constitution simply supposes, because the House is all of Mankind’s greatest dream and desire, that he will do the right
things in sufficient number…compared to the sick who can’t and the lazy who won’t…and by sheer weight of numbers with each
generation the Constitution would be re-nourished. Who would want to tinker with a blueprint like
that?
Well, the Founders knew that, too.
The Constitution wasn’t written so Lawrence Tribe could hold onto tenure at Harvard, any more than the New Testament was
written so Henry Sloan Coffin could have his rice bowl at Union
Seminary.
See the connection? From the earliest days of Christianity there were always those who it just gnawed at their gut that here was
a religion the simple-minded could understand and acquire without their intercession. To them “…suffer the little children to come
unto Me…” were the most despised words in the New Testament…just as “…we hold these truths to be self-evident…” are among
constitutional theologians…for those words mean even Homer Simpson can figure out how to pursue life, liberty and happiness
without the interference of his betters. I was taught that in Russia, by the way…of all places.
The ‘self-evident’ clause is the handshake between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It is also the
handshake between Jefferson and Hamilton. Probably their only one. But it is the handshake the Constitution inferred would always
exist between its protecting elites sitting atop the hill and the common man, further down that hill. In one generation or another, they
all had to climb the same hill and go through the same doors.
By going up the hill and passing through those doors, the fellow at top's his first job to hold open those doors and reach around
and extend his hand back down the hill. Liberty is not just built, but protected and regenerated by this
reciprocity.
Where or when the Protectors lost sight of that handshake, I can’t say, but it was before the anti-constitutionalists took over the
institutions of government, media and education. They lost it on their own. In the 1960s I walked away from America and took my little
revolution to Asia and Russia, thinking there was nothing that could come between the American family and their House. The
Protectors probably thought the same thing, thinking their war with the elitists was more of an academic exercise, played out in the
courts and journals of opinion. After all, for years they’d commanded the high ground, not knowing the anti-constitutionalists had their
own plan for separating the common man from his House, using everything from those courts to Madison Avenue to get it done.
When the fight finally ended up in the streets and the gutter, modern day Protectors looked at their white shirts and decided it was too
nasty a place to carry on a fight and abandoned the field. I blame your generation (VB: I’m a Baby Boomer) for that, though I blame my
own for not raising you better.
I think your generation of Protectors believes the handshake is delivered by osmosis. True, it isn’t always delivered face to face.
If I saw Bill Buckley spooning out food in a soup kitchen I’d think he was wasting precious time. But there is an ancient chain in how
Protectors hand down their handshake to each other. We’ve given credit to the elitists for taking the common man away from the
general plan of his House via the pop culture, but have ignored how well they detoured the Protectors themselves away from their
own mission of protecting them, using their own vanities.
The left knows your generation’s appetites and habits, and they are more like their own than you want to admit. Like them, you
like clean sheets and clean fingernails. Like them you don’t look good in muddy boots or rolled up sleeves. Unlike them, you don’t
have surrogates to do the street brawling. To my mind, you’ve abandoned the constitution’s non-com’s in the field, just like the
Democrats left the Cambodians to Pol Pot.
The simple rule of constitutional protection is that the Protectors will not only insure those doors stay open and to insure the anti-
constitutional brood cannot shut them or have a toll gate on them but they will provide models for the common man to use in
establishing the foundation of his House. That’s the handshake, lead by example.
The Constitution named a whole slough of people who would protect it, which is why government was divided the way it was,
between elites looking over each other’s shoulders. But the Constitution also inferred that there would be a body of keepers and
Protectors who were not elected, but who would always be wise enough to reflect with gratitude upon the worn, often illiterate
shoulders they themselves were standing on, then reach back and guide and protect that next fellow climbing up the hill. Some would
do it in the market place, some through scholarship, some in the service of their country or state, but all would do it out of a love of the
human yearning to be free.
And to prove the French wrong.
Every community still has its civic organizations, but have you gone to a meeting lately? Between the old-generation Protectors, of
which there are fewer and fewer, and the common man down at the bottom of the hill, there was always this army of citizens in
communities, some at the top of the hill for the first time, still others half-way up, and they provided the platform for expanding
citizenship among the masses. Virtually every advance in American civilization over the last 150 years can be laid at their feet… just
as we can lay at their feet now the accountability for every reversal of those deeds that past forty.
My first role model was in a new school I moved to when I was in the sixth grade. His name was Jim and he was the high school
quarterback and I noticed him my very first week for all the younger kids would crowd around him. Jim was about six feet, one-
seventy, not a big fellow, but he’d been known to back down real thugs, including a couple of linemen from his own team, just for
picking on kids in the lunchroom. Like every other school, we had our share of Tubbys, Four-Eyes, and Gimps, who today, if I read the
news stories right, are teased and bullied into buying guns, hanging themselves or sending Mom out for lawyers. Jim was hero to
them. You see, Jim knew bullying is no fun when it’s the other guy making the good
impression.
Jim graduated that year and joined the Army, like most kids. I never saw him again. But I found my next year in school there were
other "protectors" to take his place. And up ‘til the time I graduated the same rules applied, and I’m proud to say I was a protector,
too. Of course, in those days boys could meet after school to get the rules straight. That was how respect was earned in those
days.
My point is this; Jim was a C-student, and was never going to be an engineer or doctor. Had it not been for the war he probably
would have taken a job in a local store, married, and gone to Friday-night games to watch his own kids play for years to come. He
was just a natural leader and had the natural instincts of fairness, like the twelve things we used to list off from memory in the Boy
Scout Law…things they never did teach you in college….but sort of sum up the foundation blocks of the successful House, like Burke
mentioned. I can’t say who gave these values to him, but someone did, and probably not in his home, for he grew up pretty rough, I
recall. And he passed it on…and on. Jim was killed in North Africa in ‘43, and news of it was one of the few times in my life I ever
cried.
Did I say he wasn’t an officer? He was a sergeant. Now, I know three generations of academy graduates, very fine officers, not to
mention several ROTC men. I like the idea of a citizen-soldier. But for every officer Ernie Pyle honored, I recall one captain in Italy
especially, he honored half a dozen more non-com’s, men like Jim, of uncommon good sense, skill and above all, leadership. See
where I’m going?
Many of those guys came home and used the GI Bill to become captains of business and industry, and leaders at every level of
state and local government. But for reasons I’m still scratching my head over, they sired the greatest assemblage of narcissistic
twerps every to throw a teat fit outside of Shaker Heights.
To my mind that’s when the handshake was lost, when the children of men ceased becoming one. But Jim showed me how the
handshake was supposed to work, first in just getting to him in his rough surroundings, and then from him back down to the lowest
of the low in the community. If he were alive today, Jim would have done Bill Buckley’s alley fighting for him. And won. I can see a
linked chain running from Monticello down to the university in Charlottesville to the Lion’s Club in town and then onto Jim and from
Jim to the people no one but him paid attention to. Because of Jim, even people from the gutter on up had someone to look up to,
someone they’d want to be like.
Oh, they still do….only no one with any resemblance to the ‘self-evident clause’. The Constitution’s army is still filled with
generals and officers, but it’s way short on its non-coms. The constitutional dis-connect today is between our educated betters and
our Jims. And into the breach have stepped the elitists in order to keep it that way.
Down at Rotary most people who fancy themselves constitutional protectors these days are little more than common men who’
ve done well and made it up the hill, but with no additional grounding in the arts of Protection. As Mark Twain once wrote about
Christians, there’s professing constitutionalists and there’s professional constitutionalists. And it’s easy to tell them apart for when
they come upon a fight they sound like my mother when she said “Get thee behind me Satan”…which she always said when she
spied a sinner coming down the street. But when she told ol’ Clewfoot to get around behind her in fact it was always she who turned
her back and went the other way. Satan always commanded the road in my mother’s world of good and evil. She just took out to the
side street and claimed another victory just for being able to recognize the sonuvabitch. Unlike Christ in the wilderness, she never
spit in anybody’s eye, much less the devil’s. What constitutional Protectors think is the gutter today is in fact the main public highway.
Their high road is limited to their own driveway…and damned be their neighbor’s.
For the longest time it was really fairly easy for the protecting elites to keep the Constitution intact since the common man did all
the back-breaking work…with both vigor and enthusiasm. Wave after wave of new immigrants proved and re-proved what the
founders always believed, and the Euro-crats refuse to believe even today…if you give a man the power to build his own House…and
he keeps to a simple set of rules…his House will grow and reproduce and liberty will be nourished and refreshed. And the sum total
of their efforts will be called ‘Great.’ They call that American exceptionalism now.
In world history that has only happened once, so you can understand why the elitists of world hate America, and why the
common men and women of the world love the ideals we represent. It’s important to know the stakes. The average rice farmer in
Indonesia right now has a greater understanding of the meaning of the US Constitution than all the Democrats in Rhode Island.
Consider the elitist enemies of the Constitution. But first consider elitism in its natural state, for I think herein is the problem with
the handshake. Most of the class tumult in America’s early days arose out the natural conflict that exists between first generation
immigrants and second and third generation immigrants. I know it sounds about as silly as an olive-skinned citizen of modern
Athens claiming a direct line to Pericles, but most phony elitism in America today begins with when one’s family first got off the
boat…or first built a sod hut on the South Platte. Snobbery. Every creek hollow in east Tennessee has its own special Mayflower
queen, and everyone who came after His and Herself is expected to pay due respect.
Most things come in twos, sometimes threes, and in the matter of elitism, it’s no different. There have always been people out
there who, often from blood lineage alone, see themselves as superior. Moreover, they like to have some sort of acknowledgment of
that fact from time to time. Since almost everybody wants to be good in at least one thing in their life, and better than their neighbor in
that one thing, what we call ‘bragging rights’, usually a little ribbon or pin or trophy is about all they need to strut their stuff. Hell, we
even deny children that anymore.
But with bloodlines and the educated that’s not always enough. There have always been those who believed because of their
education, breeding or station, they should have power over others. I refer to this bunch as "elitists". The Constitution took into
account the natural animosities that exist between men of different backgrounds. Much of the bad blood that existed between
Jefferson and Adams was over their world views. City folks have always looked down on farm folk. They call ‘em names. Country folk
had ugly names for city folks, too. And flatlanders (who got there first and farmed the bottom lands) had even worse names for hill
folk, who got there last, and farmed the rocky slopes, which is why, every few generations or so, the hill folk would come storming out
of the mountains and take the flatlanders’ land. Alexander was, after all, the son of a hillbilly king in Macedonia before he became
king of almost everyone else’s flatlands.
Of course rich kids tend to look down their noses at the less rich, usually momma’s doing, and even among the rich there’s the
turned-up nose of old money when it smells new money. And don’t forget the self-righteousness of lawyer’s wives and other
reformed whores. There’s an endless number of ways to feel superior to your neighbor, usually without much harm coming of it in a
dynamic, free economy, but there’s a lot of harm can come of it in a static, envy-based society. Once there it only takes a few ways to
goad another person into hating his neighbor, and that’s where we are now. In our modern world this sort of spiteful elitism is often
found in the government and legal class. Bureaucrats, along with lawyers, hate more than anything the C-students from their high
schools who became rich buying and selling scrap metal…and almost every school class had one. Never forget that the rich we are
most often taught to hate is the fellow who made it all in his lifetime. Elitists whisper in the ears of the less well-off to hate that scrap
dealer because, no matter what his luck, as they call it, his children ain’t any better’n theirs. But why the elitists really hate the scrap
dealer is because it isn’t fair that they should slave away at law school while he sweated away in the junk yard only to out-earn them
by three times. And worse, he still listens to Johnny Cash, wears plaid golf pants, and gives more money to the high school cheer-
leading squad than they do to NPR. As one CPA complained to me, ‘…he spent forty thousand on a Lexus, then spent another ten
turning back into a Toyota.’ It’s not right that someone with that little class should have that much money…and I am afraid, Mr
Bushmills, in these instances, this sentiment trumps the politics of right or left. It trumps the Constitution. It trumps right and good.
Your generation is infested with this hateful envy. To them common sense is radical thinking and hard work is pornography.
(pg2)