just a scrap of paper in Plato's cave

A thin local newspaper, whatever news leaks in between the time you settle into your chair and the weather or stocks prices come up, a little wiki from time to time, no books to speak of and I’ll wager no magazines that aren’t about hunting or ammo, doesn’t sound like much, like looking at the world through squinted eyes.

Squinted eyes though is probably the preferred look of the sentry of the freehold of
Beaglesonia. Keep them gummint snoops out especially when they ask all casual like, “Hey there Old timer, you wouldn’t happen to have any of them old hunting rifles, or AK-47s, or bazookas tucked away somewhere do you?”

You’re right, I don’t believe in anything. The flag is just a piece of cloth, and the constitution was not handed down like the ten commandments, instead hammered out by some guys who didn’t agree on much, maybe twenty years before they put up the first Fort Dearborn, where I look out the window now and there is the London Guaranty Building. No god to wipe the sweat from their brows and guide their eyes out of Plato’s cave into the realm of ideal forms.

Am kind of a Platonist though, sort of believe in ideal forms, mostly just for numbers, numbers exist in some pure form beyond the realm of this icky and imperfect world, that has no points, no lines, no icosahedrons to speak of. But all that talk makes me sound like one of the nuts that writes letters to the editor huh?

Icosahedrons si, the Constitution no. Just the work of guys with dirty hands a long time ago. But you got to give it its due. It’s still here, and so are we. But I think it’s mostly us that gets the credit for that longevity. Give the constitution to some emerging nation and they wouldn’t be able to handle it.

I think the reason they never get around to actually having congress declare war, is that it is too cumbersome, and really unrealistic. Anytime the president wants to go to war all he has to do is start beating the drums and anybody who is against it is a traitor, so you will seldom see more than a handful opposing it. Of course once the war goes bad, they will kind of turn on it, but very slowly, with their fingers to the wind of public opinion, not wanting the guy running against them to accuse them of being traitors, and mostly the wars just fade away when nobody wants to pay for them anymore. So easy to get into a war, so hard to get out of one.

There is a difference between laws and amendments. Once you pass an amendment not to ban liquor (I wonder how that is phrased), you can’t make laws to ban liquor, but you can make laws to ban anything else. Hum, I wonder, if we could first make an amendment to ban something and then another to repeal it, I guess we could just pass an amendment to repeal all the other amendments.