The Declaration of Independence

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident:

That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and, when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them, and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing, with manly firmness, his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining, in the mean time, exposed to all the dangers of invasions from without and convulsions within.

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.

He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies, without the consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the military independent of, and superior to, the civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution and unacknowledged by our laws, giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us;

For protecting them, by a mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states;

For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world;

For imposing taxes on us without our consent;

For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury;

For transporting us beyond seas, to be tried for pretended offenses;

For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries, so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these colonies;

For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments;

For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation, and tyranny already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow-citizens, taken captive on the high seas, to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.

He has excited domestic insurrection among us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms; our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in our attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them, from time to time, of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity; and we have conjured them, by the ties of our common kindred, to disavow these usurpations which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too, have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our separation, and hold them as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the authority of the good people of these colonies solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved; and that, as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

[Signed by] JOHN HANCOCK [President]
New Hampshire
JOSIAH BARTLETT, WM. WHIPPLE, MATTHEW THORNTON.
Massachusetts Bay
SAML. ADAMS,JOHN ADAMS,ROBT. TREAT PAINE,ELBRIDGE GERRY
Rhode Island
STEP. HOPKINS,WILLIAM ELLERY.
Connecticut
ROGER SHERMAN, SAM'EL HUNTINGTON, WM. WILLIAMS, OLIVER WOLCOTT.
New York
WM. FLOYD, PHIL. LIVINGSTON, FRANS. LEWIS, LEWIS MORRIS.
New Jersey
RICHD. STOCKTON, JNO. WITHERSPOON, FRAS. HOPKINSON, JOHN HART, ABRA. CLARK.
Pennsylvania
ROBT. MORRISBENJAMIN RUSH,BENJA. FRANKLIN,JOHN MORTON,GEO. CLYMER,JAS. SMITH,GEO. TAYLOR,JAMES WILSON,GEO. ROSS.
Delaware
CAESAR RODNEY, GEO. READ, THO. M'KEAN.
Maryland
SAMUEL CHASE,WM. PACA,THOS. STONE,CHARLES CARROLL of Carrollton.
Virginia
GEORGE WYTHE,RICHARD HENRY LEE,TH. JEFFERSON,BENJA. HARRISON,THS. NELSON, JR.,FRANCIS LIGHTFOOT LEE,CARTER BRAXTON.
North Carolina
WM. HOOPER,JOSEPH HEWES,JOHN PENN.
South Carolina
EDWARD RUTLEDGE,THOS. HAYWARD, JUNR.,THOMAS LYNCH, JUNR.,ARTHUR MIDDLETON.
Georgia
BUTTON GWINNETT,LYMAN HALL,GEO. WALTON.

The War Comes Home

If it isn’t one thing with imperialism, it’s another.

This morning, while a licensed electrician was improvising his way through my circuit panel, he informed me that the aluminum wiring I have in my house tends to run hotter than copper wiring, run up an electric bill by up to 10% more than copper, burn out circuits and lights quicker than copper, and is a potential fire hazard.

I wondered “why would an electrician wire a house with aluminum wiring in the first place?”

The answer is that during the Vietnam War in the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s (when my house was built), copper was being used for shell casings in ammunition, driving the price up. So because the Dulles brothers convinced President Eisenhower (and by proxy every Cold War president) of their “domino theory” that if one more country went Communist, every other country in the world would follow, I have substandard wiring in my house that keeps shorting out when I turn my goddamn oven on.

War.
Huh.

Good God y’all.
What is it good for?

Absolutely nothin’.

Say it again.

Crazy From The Heat

A news story I read this morning reported that "the last few decades of the 20th century were warmer than any comparable period in the last 400 years." Disturbing, yes, but put into its proper historical context, even more so.

That would make it warmer than its been since the seventeenth century, which gave us the witch hunts of Europe and New England. The "Burning Time," as it came to be known, targeted women and the poor in particular. Historians estimate tens to hundreds of thousands were killed, tortured and otherwise maligned in the name of cultural conformity based on weak interpretations of Christian doctrine.

The seventeenth century also brought the institutionalization of the slave trade, which made racial victims of, as historian Ira Berlin refers to them, the "many thousands gone." The slave trade was ultimately a necessity of a nascent consumer society which was more preoccupied with materialism than morality.

The seventeenth century also saw an unprecedented consolidation of wealth and power in the English imperial system, complete with poor laws against vagabondage and begging, and the institutionalization of torture and capital punishment as forms of state-sanctioned terror against those who dared to challenge the theft of the "common wealth."

Given this historical context, I am more against global warming than I ever have been, since I see many of the same patterns in the news headlines of today. The connection between temperature and social, political and economic repression may be a bit specious, but ultimately warrants a reconsideration of the always good advice to "chill out."

Jihad (Holy War)

Why, five years after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, do reporters insist on qualifying the term "Jihad" with the tag "holy war" when they use it in their stories?

Firstly, interpreting the term Jihad as "holy war," is a gross oversimplification. Muslim scholars have written entire treatises on what Jihad means, and the term "war" as applied by corporate media types doesn't do as much to get at the complexity of the idea as it does to reaffirm the suspicion that all Muslims are pathologically insane. That aside, any American who doesn't know what the term means, even in oversimplified commercial terms, doesn't deserve to understand the point of the story. I seriously doubt that anyone reading or listening to a news story would have to go to the dictionary if the term "Jihad" appeared without an explanation that it means (or at least is implied by the writer to mean) "holy war."

So reporters, please, stop explaining what a Jihad is, or better yet, go more in depth about it. Parenthesizing the definition is no longer necessary. Thank you.

Road Trip

Yesterday

I saw a guy

Feathering his hair

In the rearview mirror of his red

Pontiac Fiero, which had Indiana plates.

Nothing else to report.

Bumper Sticker Mentality

While I was on the road the other day, I noticed something that I hadn't seen in a while: a "Bush/Cheney 2004" bumper sticker. Remembering back two years ago, those things were omnipresent, along with "I Stand With George W. Bush," and "W, The President" stickers. Now with his approval rating dropping to Nixon-like numbers, I wonder how many people actually took the stickers off their cars, and how many simply didn't put them on their new vehicles when they traded in their SUV's in the name of fuel/cost efficiency.

Similarly, I haven't seen much of a rash of reactionary bumper stickers like "Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry," or "Impeach Bush" like we did when Clinton was in office. I wonder if that will change, or if the citizenry has pushed past the bumper sticker conversation and opted for a less confrontational, more substantial dialogue regarding such matters. Judging by the talk radio that people listen to in said automobiles, that might be a bit optimistic. Still, it's always interesting to see what people are (or aren't) declaring about themselves on bumper stickers.

Just something to think about next time you're in traffic.

Hammer The Keys

I'm sitting here looking down the barrel of a near-empty coffee cup thinking about this monumental writing task I'm planning to take on in a few weeks. Manuscript revisions. Holy shit. I'm going to try to make my dissertation readable. That should be a neat trick.

In the meantime, I've taken to putting the new Pearl Jam album on "repeat" and working around the house. Yesterday I installed a new sanitary tub in the basement, and my lawn has never looked better. It's not exactly up to Augusta National fairway or centerfield at Fenway Park standards, but I'm working on it. There are other projects on the horizon (miles to go before I sleep...), and I think them something of a subconscious manifestation gearing up to the aforementioned writing project.

Writing, like home improvement, is ultimately a collection of met goals. Today I will research X, tomorrow I will write about it, and I will revise and expand on it the day after. By setting out to "do things around the house," I'm mentally warming up for the writing which will consume me over the summer months.

I figure the writing will go something like the work around the house. I won't get everything done that I want to, but the things I do get done will be impressive and fantastic, at least to me. Like working around the house, the more you write, the more you realize needs to be written (or repaired, if you're still on the house metaphor). Still, it's good to have a home to putter around, and a titanic project to keep one intellectually engaged, whatever it may be. I may not be particularly good at either home improvement or writing, but it sure is fun trying...I think.

Gloria Steinem once said that "Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else." I think she put it very well...in the meantime, I've got to figure out a way to unclog the gutter drain next to my bedroom window.