Dan Brooks is no gentleman, but he is able to control the shaking of his hands long enough to transcribe the remarks of Colonel Rawlins Birch, one of the classiest bluebloods ever to cream a goose. This week, the Colonel considers the gentlemanly governance of the United States of America.
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By Colonel Rawlins Birch |
Since its inception, the United States has been dedicated to government by the people, which sounds like a fine idea to anyone who does not know very many people. The Founding Fathers were, for the most part, wealthy farmers who lived on enormous plantations in 18th-century Virginia, and therefore rarely came into contact with people whom they did not personally own. If they had, they would have realized that public opinion, like public schools and public restrooms, is a font of limited wisdom. |
Still, every four years or so we coax the masses off of their ever-widening buttocks and into the voting booths, so that they can choose the best among us, after which we let them go back to eating cheesburger-flavored potato chips and not realizing that The Hills is fake. It’s a foolproof system, in the sense that it mostly leaves government in the hands of gun nuts and the very rich. Such people would rule the country by force if we didn’t have a democracy anyway, so we might as well let newspaper writers and college students have a good time.
Government by democracy is to an informed citizenry what a spray bottle full of lemon juice is to the cat: in order for it to work, everyone has to know what it is. Luckily, the elements of American governance are pretty well established.
The Constitution
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The Constitution is pretty much the Bible of United States democracy. Like the Bible, much of it is hilariously outdated and irrelevant to modern experience, but fortunately also like the Bible hardly anyone who talks about it has actually read it. Lately it has become fashionable to refer to the Constitution when you don’t want to do something, like pay your taxes or acknowledge that a black person is President. This sort of strict historical scholarship is best left to old white people, who have accumulated enough money, safe housing and disability insurance under the protection of the federal government that they now see no need for it.
