Michael Chabon, the author of Wonder Boys and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, has an interesting op-ed in the NYT today called "Solitude and the Fortresses of Youth."
The op-ed is about the kid who got kicked out of art school earlier this month in San Francisco because he wrote a gruesome and bloodthirsty story, and how Michael Chabon feels about that expulsion and the subsequent firing of the kid's teacher (He feels those actions are iniquitous).
He digresses to talk about the Bill of Rights:
It is in the nature of a teenager to want to destroy. The destructive impulse is universal among children of all ages, rises to a peak of vividness, ingenuity and fascination in adolescence, and thereafter never entirely goes away. Violence and hatred, and the fear of our own inability to control them in ourselves, are a fundamental part of our birthright, along with altruism, creativity, tenderness, pity and love. It therefore requires an immense act of hypocrisy to stigmatize our young adults and teenagers as agents of deviance and disorder. It requires a policy of dishonesty about and blindness to our own histories, as a species, as a nation, and as individuals who were troubled as teenagers, and who will always be troubled, by the same dark impulses. It also requires that favorite tool of the hypocritical, dishonest and fearful: the suppression of constitutional rights.
We justly celebrate the ideals enshrined in the Bill of Rights, but it is also a profoundly disillusioned document, in the best sense of that adjective. It stipulates all the worst impulses of humanity: toward repression, brutality, intolerance and fear. It couples an unbridled faith in the individual human being, redeemed time and again by his or her singular capacity for tenderness, pity and all the rest, with a profound disenchantment about groups of human beings acting as governments, court systems, armies, state religions and bureaucracies, unchecked by the sting of individual conscience and only belatedly if ever capable of anything resembling redemption.
In this light the Bill of Rights can be read as a classic expression of the teenage spirit: a powerful imagination reacting to a history of overwhelming institutional repression, hypocrisy, chicanery and weakness. It is a document written by men who, like teenagers, knew their enemy intimately, and saw in themselves all the potential they possessed to one day become him. We tend to view idealism and cynicism as opposites, when in fact neither possesses any merit or power unless tempered by, fused with, the other. The Bill of Rights is the fruit of that kind of fusion; so is the teenage imagination.
I always enjoy taking a moment to think about the Bill of Rights, so I thought I would post this. The rest of the editorial, which you can read here: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/13/opinion/13CHAB.html?ex=1082884016&ei=1&en=91d0414d65a1fe10
(Sorry, forgot how to do the hyperlinks--this is a very feeble day upstairs) is also a good read, unless you are all Camille Paglia-ed out, in which case, you may want to avoid.
