A Modern Modest
Proposal
It is a melancholy truth of this, the sixth century in which the sacred name of America can be uttered, that the divine wisdom of our Founding Fathers has become so vitiated that the Nation itself is threatened with dissolution and destruction. Many have alleged various causes for so tragic a state of affairs, but no one has found the true root of the decay. The Constitution written by those sages of the past has been debauched repeatedly by the unfortunate tags and emendations loosely called "amendments"—as if it were possible to improve what the god-like minds of the Creators of our land originally intended. I therefore modestly propose a return to the virgin document crafted by those wise men, wiping aside all the excreta of amendment and putative refinement.
I do not except that initial codicil that began the path of decay, the newfangled Decalogue called the Bill of Rights that substitutes for the Original Decalogue that came down to us from Mount Zion and the Mind of God. Strip it all away. Freedom of the press? How could the Founders have foreseen the socialist corruption and fascist indulgences of a New York Times? Freedom of the press is really freedom to destroy, and it is destruction that I seek to extirpate, root and branch. Freedom of religion? The most cursory glance at our lubrick and adulterate age will reveal that "amendment" to mean freedom from, not of, religion. Our God has been hurried off the Nation's stage and is made to sit idly by, fiddling while America burns. Freedom to bear arms? Freedom to destroy the security of all citizens and of the Nation itself!
But the guiltiest of the guilty catalogue of sins with which we have deracinated the intent of our elders are those "amendments" that turn aside the wisdom of the Founding Fathers in limiting the scope of the electorate. The communist fascism of our current course roots itself directly in the miserable fact that "the people" will vote themselves what privileges and luxuries they see fit, with no regard for the privilege of a free people to live or die by the amount of sweat that they are willing to expend. I aim my broadside, therefore, at those "amendments" that expand the suffrage.
This country was founded by Good Christian Men, descended from European settlers whose single-minded desire to exploit their opportunities without the coercive force of legal and social limitations made this the greatest country in the history of the world. It was those men who wrote that Glorious Document that engendered the federal state, and it was their self-evident original intent that only men like them should rule and thrive. I am broad-minded and will not cavil at the admission of Southern Europeans into the list of the enfranchised; but surely the first large step towards the decline of America came when the Fifteenth "Amendment" extended the right to vote to people who do not trace their origins to Europe. The irrational exuberance fostered by the post-Civil War abolition of slavery led to that erroneous "amendment" to our Founder's wisdom. I do not argue for the return of slavery, but rather for the sensible return of the franchise to those whom the Founders originally intended. It was Europeans who invented, fostered, and understood the worth and price of liberty; and it is Europeans only who should enjoy what our Founders originally intended as their right to political authority and power.
More reprehensible still is the Nineteenth "Amendment." Here surely we have indubitable evidence of the Founders' original intent, that they understood women to be categorically incapable of suffrage. Abigail Adam's repeated requests notwithstanding, John Adams, wise beyond the emotional ties that bind a husband to his wife, rejected her pleas for female political equivalence. In what mind-benumbed universe does it seem right that political rights be given to a gender of peoples who never sacrificed their blood and treasure for the common good? For mistake me not, women who are legally incapable of owning property, as was the case until that estimable practice was undone, could nowise sacrifice what was not properly their own. And of course no woman shed blood on the parapets of Bunker Hill or the fields of Saratoga. Indeed, the Founders understood only too well that the emotional instability of the female sex, coupled with the easy, tearful compassion incident to the sex, would compel the kind of fascist socialism that would give and give and give to the poor, the suffering, the weak, and the sick, all at the expense of the economic well-being of the state. Such emotionalism is worthy of irrational women, but so far from our Founders' original intent that, absent the influence of women's socialist emotionalism, we would never have accepted that Trojan Horse, the Statue of Liberty, and its fascist incitement to receive the tired and the poor of the world. Admission of such people, and the charity incident to their admission, destroys a great Nation whose motto should be, not "give me your naked wretches," but rather what the Founders originally intended: "live free and die!"
Having once given the franchise to women, however, it was inevitable that this great Nation would sink even further as the Founders' original intent simply disappeared into the morass of socialist fascism. The Twenty-fourth "Amendment" was an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of the emotional irrationality introduced into the national character by the suffrage of women. Abolish the poll tax indeed! How then are state governments to weed out those whose economic failure is a clear sign of their moral and intellectual unworthiness to govern? The Constitution wisely provides that each state determine who can be a federal elector. The wisdom of the Founding Fathers is to be understood in light of the laws of the thirteen glorious colonies whose legislatures ensured that the franchise would be limited to those who had the wisdom and intellect to make money and own property. Of the thirteen colonies, only three—Georgia, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire—did not have property limitations for electors. The three exceptionalist colonies, vitiated by the socialism of Quakers and the fascism of egalitarian founding documents that encouraged the poor and the debtor, indeed of the criminal convict in the case of Georgia, to immigrate, would have seen the light sooner rather than later, as had all the other colonies that preserved the vote for European men whose property made them have a significant interest in limiting the reach of the taxing power of the state—a power to destroy, as John Marshall affirmed in the only coherent decision of his career as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. But women having encouraged the tired and the poor and the naked wretches, now thought it only right to extend the franchise to people who clearly had no business deciding the fate of the Nation. The original intent of the Founders is clear in ceding the right to limit the franchise to the wise self-interest of the landed gentry and substantial burghers of each state. To remove that power by "amendment" is so far from the original intent of the Founders that only a dolt would think otherwise.
And then comes the final act that transforms the Nation into a sociofascist state, when the feminazi bleeding heart of the ladies and of the poor naked wretches forced the extension of the franchise to eighteen year olds. The Twenty-sixth "Amendment" is so obviously a travesty of the Founders' original intent that it beggars the imagination to see it in any way other than an indulgence of socialist fascism. Yes, eighteen year olds do go to war and yes eighteen year olds do shed their blood for the safety of the Nation. But for the same reason that wise laws prevent those same eighteen year olds from drinking alcoholic beverages, so too the law should preclude their voting. An eighteen year old has neither the wisdom nor experience to command himself, let alone the fate of the Nation. The Founders clearly saw the ripeness of age as a singular criterion for the franchise. Why else would the Constitution expressly state the age at which a citizen could become a legislator or a Commander in Chief? Yes, the Constitution offers no direct language limiting the franchise to those who have achieved an age of rational and experiential wisdom, but the original intent is clearly evident in the limitation of federal responsibility on the basis of age.
And so "amendment" by "amendment" the Nation has been destroyed. We owe more to China and other foreign potentates than we can ever repay. And why? Merely so a corrupted nation could limn out a socialist fantasy of eternal ease by the imposition of fascist rules of conduct. It would be completely useless to argue for a rational response to the problems of the Nation, as for instance returning our armies to a reasonable size, or recognizing the folly of becoming a latter-day Roman Empire, or limiting the influence of those imaginary beings called corporations so that only the citizen would be consulted in the deliberations of Congress, and then taxing the corporations at a rate that would enable the well-being of real people. Such visionary schemes are impossible to consider seriously as a plan by which the Nation might achieve a fruitful, self-perpetuating, and sensible future. It is therefore that I modestly propose a return to the original intent of the unadorned, un"amended" Constitution. Let the Nation be governed as the Founders originally intended, by financially substantial men of European extraction who have achieved an age at which reason and experience command their behavior. Any other proposal is mere folderol.
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