Creating Perfection

THE STANDARD VERSION, the version with which we historically brainwash our children, is that America's founders, the people who designed the United States government and constitutional system, were men of unrivaled genius, of extraordinary capabilities who gave the world an intellectual achievement unequaled in human history, a document so perfect, so flawless, that it must and shall be enshrined down through the ages, like holy scripture. Why not? When we flatter our founders, we flatter our country, and we flatter ourselves. This, of course, is complete nonsense. The framers were indeed educated, intelligent people, but so were many others, including women, who did not participate. Abigail Adams and Martha Jefferson were the intellectual equal of any man who ratified the constitution. The framers were flawed. Among them were many petty rivalries. Jefferson and Hamilton hated each other. Jefferson was popular, Hamilton was not. John Adams was unpopular, so abrasive was he. If Washington liked anyone, he never showed it; hr refused to touch another human being, including, rumor had it, his wife.The Vice President Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel, then dined at the White House one week later with President Jefferson illustrates how deep the pettiness and animosities ran. As one said of another: "He is a man of extraordinary capabilities, but utterly corrupt; he shines and stinks like dead mackeral by moonlight". Hamilton, with a wife and seven kids, was a notorious womanizer. She lived decades after he died, and constantly reminded others that she could not wait to rejoin him. Jefferson, we recall, had his enslave girlfriend, whom he owned, by whom he had six children, whose descendants are among us today. The constitution they produced was so imperfect most of its authors, mainly Madison, thought it would never survive its authors. With five years after its installation, Madison believed it should be scrapped, and replaced with a better one. The constitution is, rather than a perfectly crafted document, a hodge podge of contradictory schemes and ideas, pieced together amidst much acrimony, and many compromises, mainly for the purpose of appeasing the southern slave holding states, which would never have joined the union had slaves been given the right to vote, or if they, on the other hand, had been ignored as human beings, treated as property. The compromise? Slaves counted as three fifths of human beings for the purpose of congressional apportionment, and as property in terms of civil rights and voting; human for purposes of population count, property for all other purposes, were slaves. Everyone realized what hypocritical nonsense this was; many framers from non slave states wondered whether they could include their horses for purposes of representation in Congress, and as mere property otherwise. Merely reading the constitution reveals its quirky inadequacies, and merely reading accurate history tells us about the serious flaws of the folks who created our American republic. No matter, their imperfections were no greater or less than our own.