-Caveat Lector- Are you... beginning to think violent rebellion might be the ultimate, dreaded answer? Stop! Wait! There are a lot more things you can do! --from 'Don't Shoot the Bastards [Bitches] (Yet)' by Claire Wolfe http://www.curleywolfe.net/cw/Lodge.html ----------------------------------------------------- http://www.counterpunch.org/2ndamend.html CounterPunch edited by alexander cockburn and jeffrey st. clair October 1, 1999 Chronicles of Nutty Leftism: "Tear Up The Constitution!" "The US Constitution's great gift to the cause of international democracy is contained in its first three words. The rest of it can go.... Checks and balances, separation of powers, and the rest would have to defend themselves in the court of democratic opinion, something they have never had to do since ratification. All would be considered guilty until proven innocent." Thus Daniel Lazare, a well-known leftist writer. You can find the latest edition of Lazare's suggested itinerary towards a socialist America in the October Harper's, under the title "Your Constitution Is Killing You -- A Reconsideration of the Right to Bear Arms," where he invites us to face what he regards as the obvious connection between 240 million guns and "the increase of violence in our culture." Lazare regards anyone who does not connect these two "facts" as a person "determined to avoid" something utterly true. This supposed increase in violence is established by evocation of the killings at Columbine High, and a kindred episode in Conyers, Georgia shortly thereafter, with "crazed day traders and resentful adolescents mowing down large numbers of their fellow citizens every few weeks." If we are to believe Lazare these killers come to us courtesy of a "messy and unruly...pre-modern pre-modern" constitution that obstructs the "neat and orderly" society desired by all good liberals. Because of the regrettable reverence in which this same constitution is held, "we" are forced to stand "helplessly by while ordinary people are gunned down by a succession of heavily armed maniacs". CounterPunch is not sure who the "we" is here. The time we most vividly remember as an occasion for standing helplessly by while ordinary people were gunned down by heavily armed maniacs was when we all watched the Branch Davidians burn. And later we had to watch the federal building in Oklahoma City crumbling into rubble in revenge. Should we ban fertilizer and rent-a-trucks? As we shall see, Lazare has an agenda which he does not disclose to the genteel readers of Harpers, but let us stay for a moment with his premise that random acts of bloodstained violence derive from the right to bear arms, protected by the Second Amendment. After all, it wasn't until the late l960s that the state -- perturbed by civic commotion and the specter of black power -- began its first effort in many decades to impose any conditions on gun ownership. Why wasn't the Second Amendment creating Columbines in the l950s, when kids would take guns to school because they were going to ROTC class later in the day? One could more convincingly connect the 240 million guns and the culture of violence to the vast military adventures of the past 60 years, to the training and deployment of lethal force by the state, guarding its interests abroad and at home. But in fact we're not sure whether Lazare is truly interested in gun control, as anything other than a fulcrum for heaving the whole constitution into the trashcan. He takes good care in his Harper's essay to emphasize that liberal revisionist attempts to exclude an individual's right to bear arms from the Second Amendment are no longer sustainable and that the tide of modern constitutional scholarship has flowed strongly toward the views of the gun owners. To get rid of the Second Amendment, he says, you have to attack the constitution full bore. To understand Lazare's strategy we have to go back to another essay, published in New Left Review, where we find the excited phrases quoted in our first paragraph. Lazare's theme here is that we are presently enduring "a growing crisis of American democracy", a phrase which reminded us of a kindred "crisis of democracy" detected a generation ago by scholars in the pay of Nelson Rockefeller. Indeed, Lazare cites one of these same scholars, Sam Huntington, as the authority for the notion that it was the Puritans who transported across the Atlantic these pre-modern, messy checks, balances and separation of powers that obstruct the untrammeled exercise of popular sovereignty. Lazare should have remembered that Huntington was one of the intellectuals who dreamed up the strategic hamlets strategy in the Vietnam war, and that it takes just that sort of mindset to think that the constitution was shipped over in a container from eighteenth century England. "Separation of powers" and "checks and balances" described something very different than the baggage brought along by Puritans intent on establishing a church-state based on covenant theology. The phrases described two centuries of American political experience in the ambit of British power, French power, Spanish power, Iroquois power, Cherokee power, thirteen colonies -- with most colonies divided into Eastern and Western factions. This long experience is what the constitution embodies. And this is a different experience from the English, or the French or the Italian, just as those experiences differ from each other. But Lazare regrets this! How he casts envious eyes at the constitutional modernity of Western Europe! How he despises even the Bill of Rights (at which English constitutional reformers constantly cast envious glances) as either "embarrassing", "irrelevant" or "hopelessly obscure". In the latter instance he refers to the ninth amendment which most splendidly declares that liberty is not restricted to the freedoms guaranteed in previous amendments. To Lazare, the messy constitution has been a bar to socialism, whose properties he mostly seems to conceive of in terms of "efficiency" , a quality similarly revered by the New Dealers who imported much of their modernity from Mussolini's Italy. Lazare reserves some of his haughtiest jibes for "localism". He bristles with contempt for America's "83,000 local governments, everything from city councils and school boards to such exotica as library boards... All are elected, all are largely autonomous, and all are intensely jealous of their ancient constitutional liberties". Lazare's equally overweening about "well-heeled civil-liberties professionals" who incur his insults for somehow distracting revolutionary energies from the task of properly democratizing the political structure. Has he any idea how hard public defenders, the infantry of this "vast US civil establishment" work; how few they are? You'd think the ACLU, the National Lawyers' Guild and the Center for Constitutional Rights were infested by as many billionaires as Forbes' annual list of capitalist titans. But then, Lazare has no time for any discussion of capitalism, reserving his abuse purely for the constitution which he apparently takes to be capitalism's surrogate and essential expression. Let us leave Lazare, for the time being, amid this contradiction. For him, as for many leftists or liberals, the American political landscape is a place of terror, infested by heavily armed, pre-modern barbarians. Yet he simultaneously yearns for a convention that would place the entire constitution and amendments under review. What does he think the balance of forces is in our society in on the edge of the millennium? And if he trusts the masses, why does he simultaneously so fear and despise them? © Copyright: 1998-1999. All rights reserved. CounterPunch is a project of the Institute for the Advancement of Journalistic Clarity http://www.counterpunch.org/2ndamend.html Bard We don't need a 3rd Party; we need a 2nd Party! "FREE SPEECH! Use it, or lose it!" --- Ken Hamblin http://www.hamblin.com/ "She was proud and free back in '63 Back when coffee cost just a dime; When her children could play in the parks all day Without fear of drugs and crime Yes, these streets of old, were once paved with gold But know they're cold and damp I know, Since the job I just lost went south to Mexico. Guess these streets are the only place I've got left to go." http://www.bnp.net/klang.html DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! 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