For the Record: Rights Gotten Spectacularly Wrong

For freedom before she was against it, or both at the same time? Or is the decision to terminate a pregnancy not a private family decision? It certainly would be in my family, don't know about Marsha's.

 

The Constitution has a dream that its four little children will be judged by the content of their character.

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) March 24, 2022

Cleaning up the Jefferson monument

Jefferson Memorial aims to clean up a microbial colony of algae, fungi and bacteria that has tarnished the monument’s dome. (Kirk D. McKoy / Los Angeles Times)

Grand Duchess Ivanka Donaldovna reminding her papa that other great men have had it just as tough as he has:

“…surrounded by enemies and spies catching and perverting every word that falls from my lips or flows from my pen, and inventing where facts fail them.” -Thomas Jefferson’s reflections on Washington, D.C. in a letter to his daughter Martha.
Some things never change, dad!

— Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) October 31, 2019

Somebody was thinking it would be pretty amusing if the "inventing where facts fail them" Jefferson was complaining about was a reference to the campaign slur claiming he had fathered a child on an enslaved woman, which was actually true, of course (actually six children, and it's hard to imagine Martha didn't know about it; the woman in question, Sally Hemings, was her mother's half-sister, and a very central person in the household after her mother's death).

Is Ivanka quoting a sinful president begging for sympathy over wicked and salacious accusations that are in fact true as she seeks to console another one?

Sadly, no, as a great blogger used to say:

Fifth of July

Blythe Danner as Martha Jefferson with William Daniels (Adams) and Howard da Silva (Franklin), from Barb Spangler's Pinterest.

Found myself watching the 1972 movie musical 1776 (based on the Broadway show, with music and lyrics by Sherman Hunt, book by Peter Stone, directed by Peter H. Hunt) on the teevee at the end of the day, a dramatization of the Continental Congress activity in Philadelphia over the two or three months leading up to that first Fourth of July. Not a very plausible subject for a musical comedy, with dozens of male characters and basically no women (the female lead, Abigail Adams, is hundreds of miles away in Quincy the entire time and appears on stage only in John Adams's daydreams, or staged reconstructions of their very extensive correspondence, depending on how you look at it), and there really aren't enough songs in fact, or too many words (it's almost three hours).

What they really did right dramatically, I thought, and it feeds into the way we should think about the history, is to present it in terms of a series of conflicts among the delegates, in which everything could go wrong at any moment, principally between a startlingly obnoxious, pushy Adams (we like him, and know he's right, but we see why Franklin is the only one of the characters who does) and more or less everybody else, simultaneously or in sequence, beginning with his rage at them all for their preoccupation with trivia and refusal to understand the colonists' need to separate themselves from the empire that's trying to kill them all.

Carry On Continentals

David Brooks is off today, so we're kind of on our own.

The late Sid James as (I'm pretty sure) highwayman Dick Turpin in Carry on Dick (1974). Via My Ear-Trumpet Has Been Struck by Lightning.

David Brooks writes ("The Declaration Dilemma", New-York Times, July 3 1776):

All eyes seem to be fixed on the so-called Continental Congress, which has been hunkered down in Philadelphia for a little over a year now, ever since last year's unfortunate disturbances in Massachusetts, where rebel rioters managed to force the royal peacekeeping troops to pull back to Boston from Lexington and Concord.

Yesterday the Congress voted to declare that all the crown colonies south of the Canadas are independent countries, so that they can start negotiating with the French for financial support. A committee chaired by Dr. Benjamin Franklin is said to be drafting a document explaining this weird theory, and it could be published as early as tomorrow.

Declarations, continued

Via somebody's Zachary Taylor Pinterest page.

OK, I hope you all don't mind this extension of the previous post. I think it should be the end. One part of it continues the stupid debate over whether (white) Christian churches ran the abolition movement in the 19th century, with a backing off the position:

Rich Puchalsky 06.20.15 at 11:35 pm

Getting back to the thread, Jerry V. writes:
“What I mean is that neither of those other languages had the kind of penetration that would have been required of a mass movement in opposition to a society-wide problem like slavery. “

Declarations

This Declaration mentions a Supreme Being, but the nontheism of the authors is universally acknowledged. Image via VideoGamesAndTheBible.

Spent an awful lot of time yesterday commenting in a vast and fancy-ass academic thread at Crooked Timber, which ran for some reason a post by the George Washington University political theorist Samuel Goldman arguing, in a post on Danielle Allen's Our Declaration (2014), that you can't really comprehend the meaning of the Declaration of Independence unless you believe in God:

Can you agree with the Declaration of Independence if you don’t believe in God? ....  On the level of intention, the Declaration presumes a personal and providential deity. 

...while people can accept the Declaration’s claims about rights for secular reasons, I suspect that those who take its religious elements seriously are more likely to act in the ways necessary to secure them. This is important because the Declaration is not, as Allen claims, “a philosophical argument”. Instead, it is a call to arms. People generally don’t fight for “commitments” and “grounds”. For better or for worse, they do fight for what they believe God demands...

I'm running most of my own comments here, with a little continuity, because it's my blog so I can do it if I want, and to take the opportunity to edit some. You should totally look at the whole exchange, though, which covers an enormous range of topics, and contributions, as always happens there, at a very high level along with some idiocy.