Celebrate Constitution Day: Stand Up for American Liberty

UPDATE Below

Two hundred and twenty-one years ago, on September 17, a few dozen mostly young and mostly wealthy white men, exhausted and apprehensive after months of furious debate, put forward a document more fragile, yet more powerful, than any created before or since.

Fragile, because its very existence depended on the power not of armies or monarchs or gods, but of people themselves to protect and maintain it.

Powerful, because it put the people first, before armies or monarchs or even gods.

Everything the United States of America is, everything it has accomplished, every hope its people have for the future, is embodied in the document George W. Bush calls "just a goddamned piece of paper."

That piece of paper, you smirking chimp, gives to the people the power to throw you out of office for the offense of that remark alone. Alas, Article One fails to include "spine" among the qualifications for Congress.

For eight years, Smirky/Darth have attacked the Constitution with everything in their authoritarian arsenal, but it still survives. Weakened, mutilated, defiled. But still there, waiting for real Americans to restore it.

Ways to celebrate Constitution Day here.

The Constitution itself with hyptertexted links.

The Constitution in outline format.

Constitution facts, fun quiz and free pocket copies of the Constitution.

The Wikipedia history of the Constitution.

Catherine Drinker Bowen's classic history of Constitutional Convention, which reads like a thriller.

And a superb new history of the Constitution from the Revolution to 2006.

And finally, from the introduction to Naomi Wolf's new book on reclaiming American liberty:

Liberty is a state of mind before it is anything else. You can have a nation of wealth and power, but without this state of mind -- this psychological "America" -- you are living in a deadening consciousness; with this state of mind, you can be in a darkened cell waiting for your torturer to arrive and yet inhabit a chainless space as wide as the sky.

"America," too, is a state of mind. "Being an American" is a set of attitudes and actions, not a nationality or a posture of reflexive loyalty. This tribe of true "Americans" consists of people who have crossed a personal Rubicon of a specific kind and can no longer be satisfied with anything less than absolute liberty.

This state of mind, I learned, has no national boundaries. The Tibetans, who, as I write this, are marching in the face of Chinese soldiers, are acting like members of this tribe; so did the Pakistani lawyers who recently faced down house arrest and tear gas in their suits and judicial robes. Nathan Hale, Patrick Henry, and Ida B. Wells, who risked their lives for liberty, acted like "Americans." When the crusading journalist Anna Politkovskaya insisted on reporting on war crimes in Chechnya, even though her informing her fellow citizens led -- as she knew it well could -- to her being gunned down on her doorstep as she went home to her fourteen-year-old daughter, she was acting like an American. When three JAG lawyers refused to sell out their detainee clients, they were being "Americans." When Vietnam vet David Antoon risked his career to speak out in favor of the Constitution's separation of church and state, he was being an "American." When journalist Josh Wolf went to jail rather than reveal a source, he was being an "American" too. Always, everywhere, the members of this tribe are fundamentally the same, in spite of the great deal that may divide them in terms of clothing and religion, language and culture. But when we quietly go about our business as our rights are plundered, when we yield to passivity and switch on the Wii and hand over our power to a leadership class that has no interest in our voice, we are not acting like true Americans. Indeed, at those moments we are essentially giving up our citizenship.

The notion that "American-ness" is a state of mind -- a rigorous psychodynamic process or a continued personal challenge, rather than a static point on a map or an impressive display in a Fourth of July parade -- is not new. But we are so used to being raised on a rhetoric of cheap patriotism -- the kind that you get to tune in to in a feel-good way just because you were lucky enough to have been born here and can then pretty much forget about -- that this definition seems positively exotic. The founders understood "American-ness" in this way, though, not at all in our way.

SNIP

The stories I read and reread of the "spirit of 1776" led me with new faith to these conclusions: We are not to wait for others to lead. You and I are meant to take back the founders' mandate, and you and I are meant to lead. You and I must protest, you and I must confront our representatives, you and I must run for office, you and I must write the opeds, you and I must take over the battle. The founders -- the unknown as well as the well-known Americans who "conceived" the nation in liberty -- did not intend for us to delegate worrying about the Constitution to a cadre of constitutional scholars, or to leave debate to a class of professional pundits, or to leave the job of fighting for liberty to a caste of politicians. They meant for us to defend the Constitution, for us to debate the issues of the day, and for us to rise up against tyranny: the American who delivers the mail; the American who teaches our children; ordinary people.

Today we have most of our rights still codified on paper -- but these documents are indeed "only paper" if we no longer experience them viscerally, if their violation no longer infuriates us. We can be citizens of a republic; we can have a Constitution and a Congress; but if we, the people, have fallen asleep to the meaning of the Constitution and to the radical implications of representative and direct democracy, then we aren't really Americans anymore.

So we must listen to the original revolutionaries and to current ones as well, and explain their ideas clearly to new generations. To hear the voices of the original vision and the voices of those modern heroes, here in the U.S. and around the world, who are true heirs to the American Revolution is to feel your wishes change. "[Freedom] liberated us the day we stopped living in a world where 'truth' and 'falsehood' were, like everything else, the property of the State. And for the most part, this liberation did not stop when we were sentenced to prison," wrote Sharansky. "I was not born to be forced," wrote Henry David Thoreau. "I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest...they only can force me to obey a higher law than I." You want to stay in that room where these revolutionaries are conversing in this electrifying way among themselves. It feels painful but ultimately cleansing and energizing. You want to be more like them; then you realize that maybe you can be -- then finally you realize that you already are.

Our "America," our Constitution, our dream, when properly felt within us, does more than "defend freedom." It clears space to build the society that allows for the highest possible development of who we ourselves personally were meant to be.

We have to rise up in self-defense and legitimate rebellion. We need more drastic action than e-mails to Congress.

We need the next revolution.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE, 6:27 a.m. At They Gave Us A Republic .... Blue Girl reminds us that preserving the Constitution has been our responsbility from the beginning.

Ben Franklin was the first delegate to emerge from Constitution hall, where a crowd had gathered after rumor spread through the town that the work was done, the document was complete. The crowd grew excited, and the Mayor's wife, Mrs. Powell, called out over the noise of the crowd, "Well Dr. Franklin, what have we got, a monarchy or a republic?" He peered at her over his glasses and said "A republic, Madame, IF you can keep it."

I'll be damned if I'm letting her go without a fight.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.