Though curation isn’t my thing, as I prefer the “value added” path of commentary and view it as a bit of a facile way to generate readers without much effort, my own stroll around the blawgosphere this morning leaves me with little to add to some of the more interesting things others have to offer.  So rather than waste the space (and your time) with my thoughts, I bring those of others.

At Radley Balko’s Agitator, where Radley has turned over the keys to some very interesting folks while he recovers from the hair transplants,  In a story by  Ken White (who has been quite prolific and compelling lately) of his youth, remembers the day he was taken by a judge to the Veterans of Foreign Wars to fulfill part of a promise made decades earlier, upon which our Congress reneged after America enjoyed the benefit of a group of men who risked, and some lost, their lives in World War II.

There, in a dark and baroque room, we found eight elderly men. They were too infirm to stand. Three were on stretchers, several were in wheelchairs, two had oxygen tanks. One had an empty sleeve where his right arm had been. A few relatives, beaming, stood near each man. One by one, Judge Lew administered the naturalization oath to them — closely, sometimes touching their hands, speaking loudly so they could hear him, like a priest administering extreme unction. They smiled, grasped his hand, spoke the oath as loudly as they could with evident pride. Some wept. I may have as well. One said, not with anger but with the tone of a dream finally realized, “We’ve waited so long for this.”

And oh, how they had waited. These men, born Filipinos, answered America’s call in World War II and fought for us. President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked the men of the Philippines to fight, promising them United States citizenship and veterans benefits in return. 200,000 fought. Tens of thousands died. They weathered the brutal conditions under Japanese occupation, fought a valiant guerrilla war, and in some cases survived the Bataan death march.

They could have been angry, filled with frustration and hatred toward a nation that was happy to take their lives but refused to honor their promises. Instead, they thrilled at the fulfillment of a dream to become an American, even if only for their few remaining years.

The sentimentality of the story strikes home, that these men, that their families, finally received what they had been promised so many years before.  But the deeper meaning of the story, how they were not filled with hatred toward a country that failed them, and instead, in the final years of their lives, appreciated becoming Americans.  While some spew hatred toward America and pray for the day the revolution begins, these men, burned far more than most of us, wanted only to be able to die as Americans. 

Another guest at Case de Balko is Maggie McNeill, who brings the rather curious perspective of a retired call girl and madam to the mix.  Maggie offers her  homage to our Founding Fathers via the journey of Gene Roddenberry’s U.S.S. Enterprise.

In the deeply-flawed episode “The Omega Glory”, descendants of early Earth colonists (or else the inhabitants of an impossibly-parallel world) fought a bacteriological war between Americans and Chinese which ended in both nations being hurled back into barbarism; the Yangs (Yankees) still have an American flag and a copy of the Constitution, but have forgotten the real meaning of the artifacts.  They revere the flag as a totem and recite the “holy words” by rote; today’s epigram is the Yang leader’s rendition of the beginning of the Preamble to the Constitution (“We the People, in order to form a more perfect union…”) altered by centuries of repetition without meaning.

Naturally, Capt. Kirk sets them straight, because who doesn’t want the future of our beloved Constitution in lesser hands.  Maggie then contrasts Star Trek’s Yangs with our own.

The situation presents a useful (if exaggerated) metaphor of modern America; though we have not descended to the barbarism of the Yangs, our law and traditions have drifted ever further from their philosophical and constitutional moorings.  The Founding Fathers would not recognize the current legal code of this country, grounded as it is in religion and other dangerous superstitions and “-isms” inimical to the Enlightenment philosophy and thousand-year-old English common law tradition in which it was originally based.

This idealized vision of what “has become” of America is sadly common and pervasive. Our nation wasn’t quite the utopia many believe from their reading of the Constitution and the platitudes engraved on federal building lintels.  Slavery was embraced, and blacks were only three fifths of a person for the convenience of those seeking power.  Neither women nor the poor were considered more than chattel.  Freedom of religion was sanctified, provided it stayed within Christian norms, and laws reflected a deeply embedded Puritan ethic.  Many crimes were punished by death, and due process was decidedly haphazard as “justice” was meted out swiftly and, most of the time, carelessly.

Our Founding Fathers ran the gamut from dry good merchants to vast land owners, whose economic interests compelled them to pay poor street toughs like Crispus Attucks to do their dirty work.  They were smart enough to couch their rhetoric in liberty and freedom, because they foresaw that “a decent return on equity” wouldn’t fit on license plates. And yet they created a document that remains the most remarkable in the history of the world.

The pendulum has swung between law and order many times since then. The message has soured, such as Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, or the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. We’ve suffered Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson and Korematsu.  The USA Patriot Act, secret FISA warrants and rendition.  And yet we’ve enjoyed Miranda and Gideon, even Brady if you have a good sense of humor.

No, it wasn’t always wonderful.  We do not live in a paradise lost, but in a work in progress. The message isn’t that our Forefathers created Nirvana, but gave us the chance to turn a vast nation into one. The struggle to fulfill our promise never ends, and there will never be a time when our vigilance is no longer needed. But as Ken’s finally-minted Americans understood, it is worth fighting for America to fulfill its promise.

And finally, my good buddy  Dan Hull offers a thousand words with one picture.



Happy Fourth of July.