The Civic Conscience
Reconsidering 1776: An open letter to Meghan Markle
Dear Meghan,
I wrote this letter to Pippa Middleton a couple of years ago, but since the election of Trump it has gotten even worse, so please hear me out.
I am aware that you are about to become the stylish sister-in-law of the stylish Duchess of Cambridge and I am an American commoner, far more common than you, you know one of the ex-colonials, sort of. Don't take offense, you see colonial is a status that at this moment I relish and aspire to.
I hope your new relatives are not still sore about 1776, because, as I am sure you know, we need your help. As a fellow “commoner,” I have a favor to ask of you. Do you suppose that you could ask your sister-to-be, the Duchess, to talk to the Duke, and have him prevail upon Prince Charles to talk to the Queen about an important matter? You see we have got ourselves into a terrible fix over here. Things have started to turn out badly.
The question is this. Would your new folks be willing to reconsider the rebellion, you remember, 1776? I know we let things go a little too far. I blame most of it on those guys throwing all that Tea in to Boston Harbor. Well, it turns out that some of them are still around. We have this crowd over here who still go by the name “T-party,” and they seem to still have the same pissy attitude. Do you think if we apologized to the Queen for our being disagreeable to some of her relatives in 1776 that she would forgive us and Britain would take us back?
The problem is this. Our pie in the sky political system is falling apart. Perhaps we didn't study Blackstone's Commentaries closely enough. Maybe we didn't watch PBS or C-Span when it featured the question hour in Parliament. Accordingly, we didn't really learn how to do it right.
If you guys did agree to take us back, you would want to do so in a manner that consigned the American Senators to the House of Lords, but you would need to be sure to fix their salaries much lower and make sure that they could not vote for anything important. Their tenure should be for one American senatorial term and then kick them out. No need to replace them. This is for the transition only. Also, don't—and I mean DON'T—allow them to decide any legal cases.
The House of Representatives is another matter because they are truly dangerous. I believe this is where Friedrich Nietzsche comes in, you know, where “cattle become masters”? You could take the idea of one man, one vote very seriously when creating parliamentary districts on this continent, you know, we have the rotten borough problem to a greater or lesser degree. But I have reconsidered the matter and you should not let American congressman anywhere near the seat of government.
At one point I thought there was something to be considered, but then rejected it. In the original version of our Constitution before all of its Amendments, except for the Second Amendment which should be excluded in any future merger your new country would want to consider, if you were to take us on as a “ward of the realm.”
We had a 3/5 rule. Then it said that one slave could only be counted as 3/5 of a person. While I would not want to see slavery under this rule, maybe it could be adapted so that members of the American House of Representatives would count in Parliament as only 3/5 of a vote. But I rejected this idea because of differences in population for a better one. Don’t let any of them anywhere near the seat of government.
I know that this could be a terrible inconvenience to the Brits, who have been pretty patient with us since 1812, and we appreciate that. But if you could let bygones be bygones you guys could really help us out of a pickle.
Oh, by the way, my Great Grandma Sophie Rohr (maiden name was Fletcher) came from London well after all that trouble in 1776 and 1812, so she should not be blamed. She married my Great Grandfather who was a German, and I know that the Queen has German cousins in her family, so maybe this will help.
My own family name ancestors came from Devon in 1631, so I can't vouch for their behavior in 1776, but maybe you will forgive us even if some them did live near Boston. I would appreciate any help that you could give.
Very truly yours
Richard W. Crockett
Monmouth, Illinois, USA