V for Vendetta is now out there, which means that revolution is on the table. Not that it's ever been really off the table. After all, our very own Declaration of Independence states:
"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
I get cold sweats just copying and pasting those words (can you get renditioned for quoting the D of I these days? I wonder. Seriously).
The distance between Jefferson's first sentence and the second is the most dramatic leap in history, and it is all the more to his genius that he didn't separate the two by pages of equivocating, qualifying, nuance, or footnoting. The two sentences illuminate the horns of the Liberal dilemma by clearly delineating the obligations of free citizens in a Western democracy. The first obligation is to process in bringing about change. The second obligation is to violence when process breaks down. The dilemma comes in deciding when the first obligation gives way to the second.
V for Vendetta is about the second obligation. And the squeamishness it has elicited in certain quarters is, as Jefferson says, quite natural. Most of us would rather fight for our rights with posts to DailyKos and donations to Moveon.org than mixing explosives in the basement.
But V for Vendetta suggests a future when we may not have that comfortable option; if we really believe our own eyes about how badly things are going under George W. Bush, we ought to be preparing for that future sooner, rather than later.
How so?
Here's just one modest proposal. The Left ought to become as evangelical about the Bill of Rights as the Right is about the Ten Commandments. We should be insisting that those rights are posted and thoroughly taught in every school in America. Any student we don't want left behind should know those rights by heart--where they came from, why they're important, who and what threatens them.
Most importantly, when I say Bill of Rights, I'm talking about all 10 of them, including our bastard child, the Second Amendment. It is time for the American Left to make peace with the Second Amendment. The way this Administration is eroding the others, it may be the only one we have left in the end.