Mysterical-E

The Hell You Say

THE HELL YOU SAY
Autumn, 2014
REDEFINING GALORE

Somehow I just can’t get over the impression that the conservatives in the US Supreme Course are four (sometimes five) ignorant fools.

Let’s start by taking for granted the twin axioms they profess to regard as unassailable, namely that the ideas of the founders of this nation were infallible in their ability to anticipate every possible political or social development in it, and second that the US Constitution is an infallible guide to what those founders saw as the absolutes of government.

If these axioms are true, then recent Supreme Court decisions tell us that the four (or five) believe that when the founders of this nation referred to “freedom of speech,” they simply took for granted that money is a form of speech, so that money must not be restricted as to what it can buy at election time. If one questions whether the people at the original constitutional convention had money in mind as a form of speech, then it would follow immediately that they should have said so, along with mentioning other things thay might have regarded as speech, such as land, crops, relatives in Europe, digging ditches wherever one pleases regardless of how this affects one’s neighbors, and so on for a huge list of items that the conservative four (sometimes five) haven’t mentioned yet, but may, at any time, surprise us by declaring covered by the prohibition against abridging freedom of speech.

Our conservative four (sometimes five) have also “discovered” that the founders of the nation, when they spoke of a person—actually, did they even use the word “person”? Well, they used “man” in a general way that subsequent developments show includes most adult individual human beings—when they spoke of a person they also meant to include as persons arbitrary confederations of humans, such as corporations, unions, and presumably Boy Scout Troops, stamp collecting clubs, liquor store patrons, etc. Clearly, one can multiply one’s person-hood mightily by joining a great many groups, from Little-Orphan-Annie-Shake-Up-Mug collectors, to militias plotting the overthrow of some government—perhaps even our own. Any collection of people, they insist, counts as another person. I, for example, am an individual person, and also a portion of an organization of practitioners of my pre-retirement occupation, of the National Geographic Society (in order to receive their magazine) and no end of web organizations that ask me to join in order to receive a discount on my next order. Think of all the power I generate by belonging to all these institutions!

And think whether the founders of the nation had any idea what a can of worms they were opening when they created a Supreme Court. I, for one, think they thought they knew what they were doing, and I believe they had no idea that their words could be twisted by a Supreme Court in order to declare money (and, so far, but only so far, not ears of corn) to be a form of speech in the eyes of the founders of the nation, and unions and corporations (and so far but only so far, occupants of a bus bound for Niagara Falls) to be in and of itself a a person in the eyes of the founders of the nation. They could not have anticipated such stupidity in any way. They might, however, have guessed that some day a Supreme Court might pursue its own ideas of political advantage for their friends by going to (at that time) unthinkable excesses.They might have. But I don’t think they did.