a Declarational pledge

In the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence, that legal document that lies at the heart of this American nation, our founding persons – and, by extension, all American citizens living or dead – declare that, “[A]ll 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[.]” (Since starting this piece, I have read that the federal government does not consider the Declaration an active legal document because it was ratified before the Constitution by merely thirteen states, not after this republic's official establishment by the number of states we have now; so long as even a single American yearns for Liberty and the right to Pursue his Happiness as he sees best fit, however, the Declaration grants him – and us all – the right to alter and abolish our government until it creates Safety and Happiness for all, equally.) Long have our political and social leaders hewn to this pledge, laboring tirelessly to ensure that we are all blessed with freedom and justice; now, however, the Republican Party plans to destroy the essence of the Declaration of Independence by amending its sister-text, the Constitution, with a sentence defining marriage according to the Christian bible, just one of hundreds of different religious texts we turn to in this country, each and every day.

To restrict a person's right to marry whomever he should please is to rob him of his ability to Pursue Happiness; it says to him that he is worth less than others, that he was created less than equal, that his Liberty is less important than the Liberty of persons with a taste for heterosexual liaisons. Anyone with even the slightest shred of intelligence will look at the quote given above and immediately join our ranks as we fight the Republican Party's plans to abolish the rule of law and to supplant it with the rule of the church. (Which church or which faith is irrelevant; organized religion, with its fear-based indoctrination tactics, brainwashing of young people, and rigid, unyielding structure, poses among the greatest of conceivable threats to the Safety and Happiness of free-thinking, Liberty-loving individuals everywhere.)

This author finds it curious that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan prefer lies and hatred to Honor and Truth, and that they care so little for the opinions of the American people that they dare to stand up and say, Fuck everyone who isn't a hardcore Christian, fuck everyone who likes to sleep with persons of the same sex, and fuck everyone poorer than our corporate cronies and slave-masters. More shocking, however, is that roughly half of the American voting population – some seventy million (70,000,000) people – seem to agree with the vile nonsense spewing from the Republican Party, its members and representatives; when tens of millions of people abandon critical thinking and stop doubting the bullshit that is being shoveled down their throats we get things such as the Nazi's Holocaust, the Soviets' gulags, and Bush's Patriot Act; when tens of millions of people sit idly by as their leaders rack up record debts and wage wars of aggression against sovereign foreign nations, we can honestly say that America has fallen from grace, that the pledge of equality once made in the Declaration of Independence is null and void, and that our attempt to create a just and peaceful society comprised of self-reliant and self-respecting individuals who mind their own business has been trampled under the jackboots of mindless, Me-First automatons blindly adhering to poorly-formed notions and vacuous party-lines.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

on Sallust

I have recently finished reading a Latin-to-English translation from 1920 of the War with Catiline, by Sallust. (I had purchased the book for one dollar during a visit to my alma mater's library.) Beyond the fact that the actual war which this work purports to cover consumed no more than the last few pages of the text (which is scores of pages long), the tale deals primarily with such political corruption, societal decay, and moral downfall as that seems to have set the stage for Catiline's failed rebellion. Moreover, the situations Sallust describes in this book – situations which Catiline appears to have tried to exploit to his own benefit – struck me as eerily similar to situations we face in America, today.

Sallust speaks of the founding of Rome, how the city came to wealth and great fortune, becoming the mother of an empire. But, soon enough, the principles upon which it was founded – industriousness, thriftiness, valor – were supplanted by avarice, sloth, and self-aggrandizement. And, soon enough, in its primary political body, the Senate, “instead of modesty, incorruptibility, and honesty, shamelessness, bribery, and rapacity held sway.” This, I believe, is the trap into which our own Congress and Senate have fallen. The politicians who fill these bodies, while campaigning for election or reelection, champion themselves as honest persons of incorruptible and modest moral fiber only to revert, once they have gained office, to shamelessly selling their time and influence to the highest bidder and to writing such laws as rape the very people they have sworn to protect of their Lives, Liberty, and Property. Sallust speaks that when Rome had grown “great through toil and the practice of justice… savage tribes and mighty people subdued by force of arms… and all the seas and lands were open, then Fortune began to grow cruel and to bring confusion into all our affairs.” This text almost perfectly describes the course America charted from its founding until now, in that this nation was born in perilous circumstances, becoming soon a country dedicated to the preservation of the rule of law, then wiping out whole populations of First People tribes, and finally conquering Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia to leave land and sea our disposal, only to discover, as if we had but recently come to our senses, that our internal affairs were seriously – and perhaps irrevocably – out of alignment.

I am not the first to draw comparisons between the Roman and the American empires, and I am not the first to suggest the inevitability of an empire such as our own to fail, but I am delighted to have found an ancient work that so well supports these points. While there is much solid wisdom to be learned from past writers (I should like to suggest to persons in the Occupy and the Indignados movements to read the aforementioned book, and to prepare for a total lack of positive change), the primary lessons I gleaned from this interesting and worthwhile text are that life seems to follow certain paths inexorably, that politics are intolerably messy and best left alone, that money and influence always corrupt, that people should be trusted about as far as they can be thrown, and that elected officials will only reluctantly and with much kicking and screaming give up such power as to which they have become accustomed. So please, dear reader, fellow Second Sons of Liberty, comrades of the New Guards for our Future Security, please do not despair, for no matter how dark our times may seem, they are sure to get worse before they get better. Mahalo.

場黑麥 mentiri manufactorem fecit

work cited: Sallust, page 14, J. C. Rolfe, London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam's Sons, 1920