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Re: the Floundering Fathers
mike shupp (ms44278@HUEY.CSUN.EDU)
Fri, 10 May 1996 20:16:02 -0700
Amusing stuff, Mr. Foss, but I suspect that while undermining one myth,
you show yourself captured by another. There's a discussion somewhere in
Madison's NOTES, about a third of the way thru, in which the delegates
wondered whether some sections of the document they were writing should
be modified at great length, lest they be outdated by future events. In
the end, the delegates to the Consitutional Convention decided not to
worry about hypothetical future uses/abuses, because the general feeling
was that in 60 or 70 years (around 1860, say) Americans would probably
feel the document was too old for practical use and would create another
constitution.
We didn't of course, because we were paralyzed by the slavery
issue, and then by the Civil War. But that's another subject. The point
is, the FF's didn't really intend to shove us into a straitjacket for
all time. Our political/economic/social ills of today are the fault and
responsibility of our present crummy politicians, not the two-century
dead crummy politicians.
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ms44278@huey.csun.edu
Mike Shupp
California State University, Northridge
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