election times

I'm reasonably pleased with the results of the midterm elections. I wouldn't describe myself as being quite over the moon, but I'm relieved that America has been able to salvage some of its ravaged dignity, after these utterly disgraceful past couple of years. Some local ballot measures sadly fell between the cracks, owing, no doubt, to SAT-inspired trick wording and the limited reading abilities of the voting public, as a result of which, not only will environment issues be put on the back burner (the CO2-pumping sort) for the foreseeable future, but the government will not be permitted to levy any new taxes on food and other consumables. So it was not a total victory for the Pacific North West, though I confess myself surprised that the gun control measure, which even by my liberal standards seemed quite an overreach, passed by a sizeable margin.

The Second Amendment was honestly the Founding Fathers' greatest mistake, second to allowing Noah Webster to live and operate in the United States. It is a paranoid piece of legislation that was written at a time when the British were apt to drop in on you unannounced in the safety of your home, like a spider descending from the rafters. (They are still known to do this, though not as frequently.) The defenders of the Second Amendment like to claim that its purpose was to arm the public against a tyrannical government, yet it only ever seems to be used to defend mass shootings. How many times has America seen an armed revolt against a tyrannical government or had a felt need for such a thing? Inasmuch as the police are part of the executive branch, you would expect this faction to condone or even support armed resistance to police brutality. Yet the people who who are the most religious in defending the Second Amendment are also somehow the most corybantic in celebrating acts of police violence. Obviously self-defense is important, and one can even make limited allowances for the red of neck to go hunting for pleasure, but fetishizing assault rifles? That's straight up mental illness.

The Founders' third great mistake was not foreseeing that they and the Constitution would both be accorded semi-divine status by future generations, which would make the act of changing it to keep up with the times next to impossible. Thomas Jefferson, between his affairs with his slaves, might have had the sense to know that his dream that the Constitution be tossed out the window and a new one drafted in its place every twenty years was no more attainable than his dream of outliving John Adams. America in many ways is like a piece of software that was all the rage when it first came out but gradually lost its cachet when it became apparent that no updates were forthcoming.