It's the American Way

"Small town breed is a motley crew, carpenter, ironworker, fisherman too.
Two three drinks an they'll tell you, if they was in the White house, exactly what they'd do."
(From the song "Small Town Blues" by Tom Rauch of Cheboygan, Michigan)

I think the U.S. is kind of unique that way. Maybe the U.K. is too, which might be from whence we got it. In some other countries the "common people" don't concern themselves much with politics. My grandparents believed that all politicians are crooks. They didn't say it like it was something to get excited about, they just took it for granted and got on with their own lives. It used to be said that you should never discuss religion or politics in polite company, but I don't know if people still say that, or if polite company can even be found in this country anymore. I suppose I should get out and circulate more than I do, but that's what the internet is for. In some other countries they believe, as your man Mao used to say, that "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." When they hold an election, it is only the opening ceremony of the civil war that is soon to follow. We've only had one civil war, and that seemed to have gotten it out of our system. We have protest demonstrations and riots, but they are generally short lived. Americans bitch and complain when an election doesn't go their way, but they grudgingly accept it and start working on the next one.

We learned in Sawyer Elementary that the ink was barely dry on the Constitution when two different schools of thought developed about it. The Strict Constructionists believed that the government could only do what the Constitution says it can do, while the Loose Constructionists believed that the government could do anything that the Constitution doesn't say it can't do. The Loose Constructionists kind of won, but some people still don't accept that. It's only lately that I've heard of the Originalists. (Apparently our spell checker is still not aware of them.) I'm not sure where I stand on that one. When I worked at the paper mill, a grievance arbitrator would usually try to determine what was the intent of the original bargaining parties and go with that. Sometimes they would even call in witnesses who didn't even work there anymore to try to determine exactly what they intended when they bargained that particular clause. We can't do that with our constitution, so I suppose it makes more sense to interpret it in the light of contemporary knowledge, but that makes me kind of nervous. Sometimes there's a fine line between interpreting something and outright changing it. If they want change it, there is a procedure for that, and they should use it.

I don't remember you telling me about your brush with the law. Wait, that didn't come out right, but you know what I mean. I agree that the law should be like mathematics, only one right answer to each problem. I think that's why they used to write it in Latin, because Latin is a "dead" language and doesn't change over time. I wonder when and why they stopped doing that.

Are you sure that the wishy-washers comprise only 10% of the electorate? I seem to remember reading someplace that most people consider themselves to be moderates, but a certain amount of memory loss is normal at my age. Whatever their percentage, I doubt that they are the majority. That means, if your ilk and my ilk got together, they could easily take over the country. Now all we've got to do is figure out how to bring them together. If they had anything in common, they would already be together, so we need to build something on the fact that they don't have anything in common. Lets ponder on that and see what we can come up with.