Now that it is clear that all the guns are going to go, daily we are deafened by the howlings of the living-in-fear bitter-clingers, who ululate without surcease that any attempt to bring Sanity to the culture of the killing machine shall "transgress the Second Amendment."
This near-literal deification of the United States Constitution has long puzzled me.
Now, it is known that among the wingnuts, there exists the firm belief that Jesus of Nazereth personally inscribed the Constitution—presumably on orders from the Big Guy himself.
But even among those who may harbor some doubt as to whether Adam and Eve really rode dinosaurs to church, knee-jerk genuflection before this aged and anti-evolutionary document as some sort of holy writ, is widespread, reflexive, pervasive, and damn near impossible to stamp out.
Why?
Have people ever truly considered who it is who actually wrote the dern thing?
Old dead white men. Dust for more than two centuries. Who had never seen a light bulb. Who conceived not of the automobile, much less the space shuttle. Who were unacquainted with germs. Who were not altogether unconvinced that if someone went Bad, a sulfurous demon upbubbling from Hell should be blamed. Who abjured bathing, because they believed that immersion in water could prove fatal.
Benjamin Franklin, regarded today as a sort of super all-around genius, strongly recommended that his fellow Americans cleanse themselves solely through the method of shedding one's clothing, and then standing naked in the faint breeze passing between two open windows.
Eons would pass between baths for this water-fearing fellow. If the historical Franklin were at this moment to come into your presence, the stench would prove so overpowering you would run from him like Richard Pryor with his body on fire.
Franklin also kept his nephew chained to the floor of a barn for the last 30 years of his life, as such was then considered the most "humane" treatment for the mentally ill.
And gave not a single thought at all to the Reality that his sister, who was every bit as bright as he was, was never afforded even the glimmer of a chance to be what he was.
As Jill Lepore so starkly expressed it:
In eighteenth-century America, I wouldn’t have been able to vote. I wouldn’t have been able to own property, either. I’d very likely have been unable to write, and, if I survived childhood, chances are that I’d have died in childbirth. And, no matter how long or short my life, I’d almost certainly have died without having once ventured a political opinion preserved in any historical record.
From the perspective of 220 years on, the fellows who wrote the Constitution can be perceived, correctly, as the functional equivalent of apes before the monolith. They tried to do their best, but they could not. They saw but through a glass darkly. With their document, they achieved but what Robert Stone's whiskey priest in A Flag For Sunrise identified as "Half moments. Glintings. A little rising of the heart."
And only for themselves alone. These were, without exception, white well-off men of property. Their Constitution was intended only for persons like themselves. They never dreamed that anyone other than white well-off men of property would ever have any say about anything. Most believed, and without even thinking about it, that black people were not really human. Many struggled with the notion that women might possess souls. They considered the native peoples of this continent of so little account that their occupation of these peoples' lands was regarded not as theft, but as manifest divinely-blessed destiny.
They were lost, these guys, every one, in the fog. The human condition.
In retrospect, perhaps the coolest things about someone like Thomas Jefferson cannot be found in his political writings—which include vast tracts on the base and permanent inferiority of black people, scrupulously grounded in the "science" of his day—but instead in other results of that questing mind, such as introducing pasta to North America, and instructing a mockingbird in the language of the White House.
Or the manifold contributions of someone like Gouverneur Morris to the Constitution—which he almost immediately thereafter disavowed, fearing it had gone too far in larding powers to "the mob"—might pale beside the strong and satisfying expression of his life force, when caught by just such a mob in the streets of Paris, during the French Revolution (then, as now, all the best Americans emigrated to France).
Said mob had identified him as an aristocrat, which he was, and in the blood-lust of the day they thought to string him up. Till Morris swiftly unbuckled his wooden leg, waved it over his head, and boomed that he'd lost his natural limb over there in the American colonies, fighting for liberty. Whereupon he became the hero, rather than the target, of those assembled. Though in truth Morris had lost that leg when diving out the second-story window of the home of a favored mistress, upon the sudden and unanticipated arrival of her husband.
The Second Amendment, like too much of the US Constitution—see, for instance, Article I, Section 2; Article I, Section 9; Article IV, Section 2; Article V—was intended to perpetuate human slavery.
On this basis alone—that the document not only condoned, but codified, the owning of human beings as property—the United States Constitution should be rejected, by any evolved 21st Century human being, regarded as an outrageous and embarrassing relict of an earlier, more barbaric age, a scrap of odious paper that itself must needs simply be scrapped.
Slavery is gone now. And the Second Amendment, which enabled it, shall go too. Slavery was wrong, and it is over. So too the Second Amendment. It is a museum piece, that amendment, like powder-horns, and tri-cornered hats.
All the guns are going to go. Guns are finished. Humans don't want them anymore. They are an appendix of the age of the warrior, which is finally fucking over. We are in the age of the healer now. Killing is done. We are now about living. And no piece of crabbed and cramped and withered parchment, stained with ink applied by people too afraid even to take a bath, is going to stand in our way.
People who live the requisite number of years experience, and therefore understand, that the child moves on from the parent. And then the child of that child, since become a parent, moves on from there.
For more than 220 years, people in this country have retarded their evolutionary development by continuing to suck at the shriveled empty teats of bewigged bath-fearing ignorant old white men long ago dead as the dust of the ground.
No. That's finished. We sing now our own song
