[UPDATE: Ideas sketched and stabbed at here now get boiled down in the next post, from AlterNet. Thanks to commenters, here and on Twitter, especially Bill Chapman, for helping me shape my thinking. (Not roping any of them into my ideas, however! Blogging as public note-taking? Mixed feelings about that, but …]
[UPDATE. The bottom line of this post:
1. I blame — yes, blame — James Madison.
2. But that’s not because I’m so deluded as to believe he was trying to protect an individual right to keep and bear arms!
3. And I’m not, literally, holding Madison responsible for problems he couldn’t have foreseen — I’m trying to turn up the volume — to eleven — on what I think we desperately need, in this dire moment: some grown-up perspective on the strange, bumpy, sometimes shabby, all-too-human, all-too-political processes by which our rights were first secured by our Constitution. Such perspective may be our only hope for improving matters that we actually do have the power to improve; it might help us stop “constitutionalizing” every political dispute we have. This connects with what Michael Moore was talking about on CNN the other night, and with some sort of weird madness, some immature love of fantasy, that sometimes seems hardwired into the American psyche. That’s what I talk about too.] Continue reading
William Hogeland 