8

The framers of the Constitution may have been brilliant, but they weren’t perfect.

They lived in another age-lawyers, merchants, and gentlemen farmers-amateur politicians all. For their time the concepts they introduced were radical, but they were not unrestrained. The preamble may have been orchestrated for “We the People,” but the fine print kept the common fingers off the piano keys.

The founders were men of property, in an age when only men who owned property could vote. The concept of common suffrage, to say nothing of women voting, was alien to them, something they would have rebelled against as vigorously as they fought the British Empire.

Campaigning for election to office was an act of personal dishonor.

They could not conceive of their experiment falling into the hands of full-time politicians steered by armies of consultants, forming committees to suck millions in “donations” from those seeking favor from government; permanent officeholders who would wield the levers of power with the partisan ruthlessness of warlords.

A Congress routinely hijacking essential national legislation just to load it with amendments like tumors, hauling pork back to their districts to solidify their death grip on power-this would have been as alien to them as E.T.

When Lincoln sat in Congress for his single term, beginning in 1847, he considered himself lucky to have a desk with a drawer for his private papers and the privilege to borrow a book from time to time from the Library of Congress.

Only the insane of the eighteenth century could foresee that a bleak two lines added to the Constitution a century after its creation, authorizing the collection of a federal income tax, could result in a seventy-year rampage by government to mentally rape its own citizens with millions of pages of totally unintelligible tax laws, rules, regulations, and forms.

Today we have special federal tax courts because the law is so convoluted that ordinary federal judges are presumed too ignorant and unschooled to understand the complexities of laws and forms that every citizen down to the village janitor is required to understand, to obey, and to sign under penalty of perjury and threat of imprisonment.

Nor could it be possible in the Age of Reason to foresee a Social Security system that if run by a private business would result in their arrest, prosecution, and conviction for operating a Ponzi scheme. In the real world, taking invested funds in the form of Social Security taxes, paying current claims, and skimming the rest for other purposes is called embezzlement. When government does it, it is simply called politics. In either case the arithmetic is always the same. When the scheme goes belly-up, its operators, if they’re smart, will be in Brazil, or, in the case of Congress, retired, which is the political equivalent of being in Brazil.

With all of this, the people in what is touted as the greatest democracy on the planet have no effective recourse. They cannot act directly to fix any of the obvious open sores or seeping wounds in their own government, because the founders didn’t trust them with the only effective medicine, the power to amend their own Constitution. That is reserved for the serpent its creators never saw.

Short of revolution, something Jefferson urged take place at least every twenty years, the average citizen is left to pound sand by casting a largely empty vote to replace the devil-in-office with the devil-in-waiting and hope that the caustic nature of power to corrupt can somehow be neutralized.

Praying for the devil to grow a halo, we all plod on, one foot in front of the other, trusting that somehow we will not follow the Soviet Union over the national cliff.

It is little wonder, then, that the founders failed to envision the minuscule procedural crack that allowed the language of slavery to remain visible as a festering sore in the Constitution more than a century after the institution had a stake driven through its heart in the Civil War.

It would have taken a soothsaying of monumental capacity to foresee that Scarborough 150 years later could pick at this scab, the language of slavery, and open it to the point of inducing race riots and the civil unrest that now looms like a battle scene on Broadway out in front of the county courthouse downtown.

Early February, Friday morning, opening day of trial, and I’m being escorted by four burly sheriff’s deputies through the throng of people, a horde I would estimate at more than a thousand as it jams the sidewalks. There are groups of angry protesters hurling insults like mortar rounds from one side of the street across the four broad lanes of traffic to the other side in front of the main entrance to the courthouse.

A huge banner, letters three feet high in black paint, has been unfurled and is now being displayed on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse:

END BLACK SLAVERY

Separate lines of deputies have been deployed along the whole block, all dressed in riot regalia, holding ballistic shields to keep the two warring armies from charging each other and doing battle around the cars and buses that are now stalled in traffic. A few crazies have managed to infiltrate the enemy camp on this side of the street, one of them trying to rip at the banner. Three uniformed cops are busy trying to keep them from being killed, struggling to pull them through the mob back to the ideological safe zone on the other side, where their own band of crazies is located.

I am reminded of the politically sensitive phrase that the city prints on many of its forms in big bold type:

DIVERSITY BRINGS US ALL TOGETHER

They’d better hope not, at least not today, or there’s going to be one hell of a mess in the middle of Broadway.

Deputies at the fringes are confiscating any sign attached to a stick. Verbal insults are one thing, war clubs another. The sheriff has prepared buses normally used for jail transport so that if things get out of control, these can be rolled into place like a barricade to block the street directly in front of the courthouse. Thus far they’ve avoided using these.

So wild is the melee that Court TV, which wanted to film the trial but failed to get approval from the judge, has abandoned its outdoor perch, a covered enclosure set up on a scaffold near the corner at the intersection. Some in the crowd have now taken hold of the green metal pipes that support the scaffold. They are pushing and pulling them so that the entire structure, cameras included, is shimmying as if in an earthquake.

Many of the demonstrators in front of the courthouse are African American, some of them singing, others shouting. One woman, the veins on her neck protruding like electric wires under the skin, has blown her vocal cords. So hoarse is her voice that despite all the energy coiled in her body I can barely hear or make out her rasping words as I pass her with my escort, barely ten feet away.

As yet no one has taken particular notice of us. There are so many cops on the street that four more with a guy in a suit don’t even register. Lucky for me. If this continues, once my picture gets around and they realize I’m defending Arnsberg, I may need an armored car just to get to court.

The other side of the street looks like Halloween, people in costume, some of them wearing hard hats and white T-shirts with the sleeves rolled to the armpits. They might pass for construction workers on break, except that their clothes look like they just came out of the washer. A small group, maybe six or eight nutcases in starched brown uniforms, all sporting swastikas on their arms, give the cops indignant looks and prance at the curb as if they’re waiting for the second coming of the Führer.