On the Return of the Articles of Confederation

Every so often I read something in the newsy part of the blogosphere and I think, “That can’t be right. Nobody could possibly be that stupid.” And invariably I find myself confronted with the one, basic, overriding fact of the universe, the fact upon which all facts are based and from which no facts can hide:

Oh yes they can.

Whenever you hear an idea so blindingly stupid that it actually sucks intelligence out of a room, so pointlessly vapid that the only way a responsible human being could even enunciate it, let alone attempt to believe it, would be for that human being to have their brains scooped out with a plastic spork and replaced with cottage cheese – low fat cottage cheese, mind you – and so blisteringly appalling that its believers should be roundly horsewhipped just for conceiving of such a thing and bringing it into existence on this plane of reality, whenever you hear such an idea you can be sure that yes, indeed, it has adherents. Powerful adherents. Adherents that want to force you to behave in accordance with their mental handicaps. Adherents who cannot understand why this idea will cause normal people to perform actual spit-takes as if they were in an old vaudeville routine.

You can also be pretty sure that this idea has traction among the Teabaggers.

Because that is the function Teabaggers serve in the political landscape of the modern United States – they are miner’s canaries for stupid. Whenever they get excited and hop up and down on one foot and start chirping in that inane way that they do, the clear meaning is that the toxins in the air have reached crippling levels, the level of idiocy is about to go through the roof, and the job of responsible citizens is going to be to figure out a way out of the situation before irreparable harm befalls the republic.

They’re handy that way, Teabaggers.

The latest iteration of this routine comes to me courtesy of a group of right-wing extremists currently in Congress.

I know. Who’d have thought, huh? The same group of people who think that the House of Representatives gets to decide what is and isn’t law when a bill gets bottled up in the Senate, regardless of what the President does? They have more stupid ideas where that one came from?

Who. Would. Have. Guessed.

Apparently a bunch of these guys have decided that the problem with the United States today is, in fact, the Constitution itself.

And I can understand that. Really, I can. If they can undo the Constitution, then they no longer have to try to find a time to read it – something they clearly have not done yet – nor do they have to find someone to explain it to them once it has been read, in the short, easy words to which they revert whenever challenged by reality.

Specifically, these Teabaggers are proposing to amend the Constitution to allow states to nullify federal laws.

That spinning sound you hear out there? James Madison in his grave. Harness him – maybe we can generate electricity and get something positive out of this deal.

Sweet dancing monkeys on a stick, people – don’t these pantsless buffoons know why the Constitution was written in the first place?

The Federal Constitution of 1787 was not the first framework of government this country tried. This always comes as a shock to people, but really it shouldn’t. We declared independence in 1776. The Constitution was written in 1787. Do the math – that’s eleven years where something else had to be doing the heavy lifting of national government. That something else was the Articles of Confederation.

The Confederation government had a lot on its plate – fight the Revolution, find allies, make treaties, negotiate the peace, deal with the inevitable economic crisis that follows wars like that, resolve the crushing debt issues that came out of the war, try to unite a fractious and suspicious people into a fractious and suspicious country, figure out what to do with all the western territory that now belonged to the new republic – and it is not all that surprising that despite a few notable successes overall it didn’t work out all that well. That’s a tall order for any government in a world where nothing moves faster than 3mph.

But the Articles of Confederation was handicapped by its very nature. Even had the times been prosperous and tranquil, it would have failed anyway. And the reason for that was that it was built exactly the way the Teabaggers want to change the Constitution to resemble.

The Articles of Confederation was a document imbued with the spirit of Lockean Liberalism. Liberalism, the political expression of the Enlightenment, shares with that cultural movement a deep and rather optimistic faith in human nature, one that is based on first principles and reasoned argument rather than on any evidence in the historical record. In a position reminiscent of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment argued that human beings were by nature good, decent creatures who would do the right things if only they were allowed to do so. That people would and could take care of both their own interests and the larger interests of society on their own, with nobody forcing them to do so. The key to politics, therefore, was to design a system in which those benevolent impulses could be encouraged and channeled into a functional government.

Americans as a group still believe this today – it’s the mainspring behind all the talk of smaller government and less regulation that so dominates our politics here in the early 21st century.

Unfortunately, as the classical republicans among the Founding Fathers well understood, the fact is that people can be viciously flawed creatures, especially where power and wealth are at stake, and any governmental system that is based on the idea that people will voluntarily act against their own interests because they’re just decent that way is doomed to failure.

The Articles of Confederation were Exhibit A in that case.

The national government created by the Articles had no coercive power whatsoever.

It had no ability to tax, for example. Faced with the expenses of maintaining a diplomatic corps, paying off the Revolutionary war debts, and even paying for the delivery of the mail, it could only requisition money from the states and hope that the states would cough it up out of their sense of civic responsibility.

That worked about as well as you would think it would.

For example, between October 1781 and February 1786, the Confederation government requested nearly $16 million from the states, and of that it received a grand total of only $2.4 million. By 1786 its income had fallen to $400,000 a year at a time when the interest alone on the national debt amounted to more than eight times that, and the principal of that debt was about to fall due.

The Confederation government also had no ability to regulate trade. Each individual state was left to do that on its own, and the resultant hodgepodge of state regulations effectively crippled both interstate and international trade.

Most importantly, the Confederation had no way to enforce its own laws.

On the practical level, there was no national judiciary. The highest courts in the land were the state supreme courts, and they had no interest in ruling against the interests of their own states. Nor did they have the legal authority to do so, given their charge to enforce state laws rather than national laws.

Which, on a theoretical level, was exactly the problem. The Articles of Confederation explicitly granted to the states their full sovereignty, which effectively made the new United States more of a United Nations sort of organization than a real nation because it meant that state law trumped federal law.

The states, in other words, could nullify national laws anytime they wanted to do so, simply by passing a different law.

And this too worked about as well as you would expect it would.

By 1786 it was clear to everyone concerned that the United States of America was in serious trouble. Its ability to govern the various states was effectively nil, it was about to default on its debts, and collapse was simply a matter of time.

Enter the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

The Federal Constitution that emerged from that was specifically designed to remedy the problems of the Articles of Confederation. It was based on classical republicanism and did not waste time with the idea that people were basically good and would do the right thing without being forced – instead, it was based on the idea that people were basically selfish and power-hungry, and that these traits could be usefully balanced and checked against each other to produce a viable government. And it gave to the new federal government all of the powers that it had lacked under the Confederation.

The new government had the power to tax. It had the power to regulate trade. And it had the power to enforce its laws – there was a federal judiciary, and the Constitution explicitly stated that federal law was supreme over the laws of the states.

This system has worked pretty well since then. Only once – when Confederation zealots attempted to make their states supreme because of the issue of slavery – did the Federal Constitution face any serious challenges after its adoption, and it is significant that when the time came for those same zealots to try to set up their own treasonous government, they did so by copying the Constitution (not the Articles of Confederation) nearly word for word. Even traitors aren’t that stupid.

But now there is an amendment in the works, brought to you by the Teabaggers, that will bring us back to the days of the Articles of Confederation by allowing the states to trump federal law. It will undo the work of the Founding Fathers, and will no doubt create exactly the kind of instability, chaos and dysfunctionality that the Constitutional Convention was called to put an end to.

Because that’s just the kind of Constitutional scholars the Teabaggers are.

My guess is that they don’t really understand what they’re doing. Precedent, after all, is on my side on that point. They just think they’ve found another way for states they control to opt out of their responsibilities to the larger community around them, another way to prove the Founders right by exercising their vicious selfishness in the matter of greed and power.

And perhaps they will succeed.

If that happens, though, watch your back. There aren’t many James Madisons left in the world today, and whether we could undo the damage of a return to the Articles is an open question.

It's Show Time!

Today was another in what has turned out to be a long line of theatrical presentations down at Not Bad President Elementary. And far be it for me to complain about this – I think it’s just wonderful. It’s been decades since I graduated from K-12, and to be honest most of the friends and times I remember from that period I found backstage. I’m glad my daughters are continuing that tradition.

Admittedly, I didn’t discover the theater until high school – they’re years ahead of their old man.

Which is as it should be.

Today it was Tabitha’s turn. She auditioned for a role in the 4th/5th-grade musical, Readin’, Ritin, and Rockin’ (Spellin’ being optional, apparently), and won the job of representing the school principal.

No pressure.

Fortunately the principal is a good sport about this sort of thing, even to the point of lending Tabitha one of her outfits as a costume. And wasn’t that a shock to this parent, seeing his daughter looking so grown-up like that.

As with all NBPE productions, this one took place in the All-Purpose Room and was packed, just packed, with parents – I got there half an hour early and still didn’t get my choice of seats. Kim and Lauren joined me as curtain drew nigh, and eventually the cast of the show (normally referred to as “the entire fourth and fifth grades”) filed in.

And then it was a solid hour of entertainment fit for a king.

No, I have no idea what the plot was. I’m not sure it had a plot. Seriously, plot is overrated. Turn on any network's prime time line-up and tell me different. 

Mostly it was a series of sketches, many of which contained songs. And Tabitha had not one but two – count ‘em, two – solos! One of which she had been given more than a week’s notice for!

She did a very good job.

One of the impressive parts of the play was the cast’s dedication to their craft, especially when the unexpected severe storm blew in about halfway through. The All-Purpose Room is a big empty space with a flat metal roof – the architectural equivalent of a bongo, in other words – and it was full of audience members who were all, unanimously, suddenly asking the same questions of each other in a very worried tone of voice: “Did I leave my car windows open? Is it too far to go check?”

Nobody left. A wet car is a small price to pay to see your child shine on stage, really.

Congratulations, Tabitha. I’m proud of you.

Financial Wizardry

We met with our financial advisors this morning.

Silly me. I always thought you needed finances to have a financial advisor. Apparently this is optional in these hard economic times – now you can have an advisor to tell you what you would do in the event of finances. And that’s handy, I suppose.

I’m not really sure why I go to these meetings. I have no real grasp of finances more complicated than “try to spend less than you earn” but less complicated than the Dawes Plan. There’s a great big black box in between those two end points that just mystifies me, one that is decorated with arcane symbols such as “401k” (which, frankly, sounds like a NASCAR event to me) and that responds to chanted psalms containing the word “tax” with various prefixes and suffixes attached. Money goes in, money comes out, and it’s all magic as far as I’m concerned.

Naturally I’m the one who ends up paying the bills at the end of the month, because the universe has a sense of humor that way.

Fortunately for all concerned, Kim generally handles investments in our house. This means we actually have investments. And insurance. And even a couple of those numbered things that allow you to save money for your children’s education down the line, since the fact that we are both college professors is actually rather counterproductive in terms of having enough money to send our kids to college.

Again, the universe has an odd sense of humor.

This particular meeting went about the same way that most of them go. We went down to the Local Coffee House and quickly identified the representative of the financial firm who was there to meet us. Not that this was hard, mind you. Find the guy with the tie and briefcase in the middle of the coffee house full of people who look like they’re on their way to a baseball game and you’ve got a good chance of success that way.

We sat down, exchanged pleasantries, and then it was 45 minutes of me nodding and answering the occasional direct question while Kim handled the actual business of managing our money.

I’m just there to dress the set.

He Da Bomb!

Well, it looks like the Bomb Class is a go now that we’ve hit our enrollment target for the summer. Good news! Teacher gets to eat this summer!

I like this class – it’s an awful lot of fun to teach. It’s a team-taught class, with three of us up there discussing the history, science and ethics of the atomic bomb, and we all bring a very different perspective to this one object.

To a scientist, the atomic bomb is just a device that converts one form of energy (the binding energy in the nucleus of atoms) into other forms of energy (heat, light, pressure, sound). So he approaches it from that perspective and asks questions like “What is energy?” “How do you measure it?” “How do you release binding energy?” “How much energy do you get when you do?”

To a philosopher, the atomic bomb is an ethical question. Are there any circumstances where a weapon of this magnitude and indiscriminate force can justifiably be used? If so, what are they? If not, why not? So he tends to approach it from that perspective and spend a lot of time discussing just war theory, the nature of ethics, and how well the situation in 1945 squared with either of these.

To me as a historian, the atomic bomb is something that happened at a given moment in time. Things led up to it. Things happened around it. And things resulted in consequence of it. So I tend to spend my time looking at the developments that made it possible and the events that surrounded its creation and use. How did the United States develop the organizational capacity to manage a project like this? (Hint: look at Andrew Carnegie’s steel empire – they’re both just large vertically-integrated industrial enterprises.) How does the federal government grow to where it can manage a project like this – how does it get from laissez-faire to the New Deal? And why does it care enough about the rest of the world to do all this, both in the long term sense of going from isolationism to involvement and the short-term sense of why did the world look so ugly in 1939, when the project started?

Plus, you can make a decent argument that the single most important event in all of American history is Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676, but nobody has an opinion about Bacon’s Rebellion. Everybody has an opinion about the bomb.

And we get to those at the Debate – because you have to have the Debate: the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified, yes or no?

We’ve never changed anyone’s opinion about this issue, as far as I know, and that has never been our goal. Mostly we want students to walk away with a more complex and well-supported reasoning for their opinions, and a strong sense that, whatever their position is, the other side has points that they cannot answer, only concede.

The three of us disagree on this Debate, which makes it even more fun.

So it’s a great class to teach.

It also led me into one of the more surreal moments of my life.

We first taught this class in 1998, well before I had kids of my own. The philosopher, however, did have two young boys at home – boys he was trying to raise on an ad-hoc instructor’s salary. He was thus a wizard at making things out of cardboard.

So with a little help from the teenager who lived next door, he gathered together a couple of refrigerator boxes, several rolls of duct tape and a large pot of grey paint and built a life-sized replica of Little Boy, the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

The thing about this is that the bomb was not actually all that big. It was maybe two and a half feet in diameter, and about nine or ten feet long. That’s one of the points we tried to make with it when we dragged it into class on day one – something just that big destroyed an entire city. The mismatch between size and power was something students remembered quite well.

And then we needed to store it.

That year we kept it backstage in the scenery shop, behind the theater, which was remarkably convenient when we hauled it out again for the following year’s rendition of the Bomb Class. Unfortunately the theater department didn’t want us to store it there again – why, I don’t know, since they had a lot of space. Perhaps they just were worried it would get damaged and didn’t want to be responsible for it.

So the philosopher convinced the local VFW hall across town to stash it in their basement.

I have no idea how he got it over there. But I do know how we got it back.

The philosopher asked me to help with this plan, and – not having any kittens to rescue from tall trees or other similar feats of derring do on my plate that afternoon – I said, “sure!” But neither of us had a vehicle of appropriate size for such a task. So we went down to the Maintenance Department, who loaned us the campus pickup truck.

When we got to the VFW, we realized that the replica atomic bomb was rather longer than the bed of the pickup.

No problem, we thought. We’d just load the thing into the bed, heavy side down, and let the light end – the end with the tail fins – stick up.

Since it was a rather windy day that day, we decided that I would ride in the bed with the replica atomic bomb with the tail fins sticking up, to keep it from blowing away.

And off we went through town.

The looks on the faces of other drivers were just ... priceless.

The ones going the other way flashed by too quickly for me to see them or them to get a good look at me. All they saw was a beat-up pickup truck with what was clearly a large bomb in the back, trundling through the streets of Our Little Town, with someone in the back holding on to it. What they thought of it I don’t know, but I will say that I am glad that we were doing this in the pre-9/11 era.

Seriously. Can you imagine Homeland Security’s response? I can’t even bring a full-sized bottle of shampoo aboard an airplane anymore – a pickup with a life-sized model of an atomic bomb probably would have warranted an airstrike.

It was the people driving behind us that I enjoyed so much, though. They’d be toodling along, not really paying attention to what was in front of them, as most people do when driving, when all of the sudden – and I could see the exact moment it happened – realization would dawn.

And I’d wave merrily at them.

And they’d sort of hesitate, and then wave back. Some of them smiled. Others looked sort of flustered. One guy shouted at me – “Hey! Where are you going with that?”

“Gonna go rob a bank!” I shouted back.

It was the best ride through town ever.

Employee Appreciation Day!

Have you ever gotten the feeling that you are being toyed with but that you can’t quite wrap your head around the sheer scope of the con without your head exploding?

I have.

Yesterday Governor Teabagger (a wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) declared the day to be State Employee Appreciation Day here in Wisconsin. He even posted a YouTube video on the subject.

No, I'm not going to link to the video. He can promote his program on his own time, thank you very much.

I have actually seen this video, though. In fact, I made it all the way through its minute-plus length without once laughing, crying, or attempting to reach through the computer screen to express my opinion on the subject directly to its author in physically intimate ways. For which I think I deserve a medal, by the way. The video is an astonishing display of cluelessness and condescension, though I will admit that the comments below it are worth the price of admission.

Not everyone is buying it – let’s just put it that way.

Guess what gang? It’s State Employee Appreciation Day! Nominate your favorite state employee for a prize!

A prize? We get a prize? I've always liked prizes. Now, what sort of prize do you think we might be getting?

Do we get to stop tithing Governor Teabagger (a wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) in order to pay for his tax cuts to the wealthy and the salaries of the unqualified cronies he has hired into important positions?

Do we get the return of our rights of freedom of speech and freedom of association? Will we no longer get arrested or ticketed for daring to exercise the provisions of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution while in the Wisconsin State Capitol?

Do we get the rule of law back in Wisconsin? Democracy? A government that cares more about running the state than feathering the nest of its campaign contributors? Free and fair elections where votes aren’t “discovered” on the personal computer of partisan hacks and then added to the Teabagger total in order to produce fraudulent victories? A regime that regards court decisions as lawfully binding instead of nuisances to be ignored in their blind quest for power?

How about a legislature that actually lets the minority party vote? One that recognizes and follows the state constitution when it passes or publishes bills?

Hell, if we could choose from that list of prizes, I might be tempted to take this program seriously.

My guess is that we are more likely to get a nice certificate in a tastefully non-descript frame, though, and maybe a $20 gift certificate for Dixie paper products (furnished of course by the Koch brothers, who own that company too).

It is frankly astonishing that this governor, a pantsless buffoon who has made his disdain and contempt for the honest workers of the State of Wisconsin so abundantly plain over the last four months, would have the sheer clueless idiocy to even suggest, let alone promote, such a blisteringly stupid idea.

You know why satire is dead in America?

Because it has to compete with stuff like this.

By the Numbers

The number of the day was 5. As in, “I spent five hours today down at the Kids Museum in the Rather Larger Town south of us.”

Or perhaps the number of the day was 60, which was the number of second-graders that were on this trip, three of whom – Lauren and her friends Claire and Mackenzie – were my own special responsibility. This was on top of the two other elementary schools that I noticed that were having similar field trips while we were there. The lunch area was just hopping.

It is also possible that the number of the day could well have been 80, which would have been the proof of the beverage I felt I deserved afterward and might yet enjoy responsibly now that everyone is safe in their beds.

For you see, keeping track of three second-graders in a museum full of exhibits designed to draw children in from across the room is not easy, as they are being drawn to any number of exhibits at any given time and are thus prone to vibrate uncontrollably before shooting off in random directions. Separate random directions, which is not what it says we’re supposed to encourage in the Big Book O’ Chaperoning that every parent gets when they sign their kids up for these field trips.

Have you ever tried to keep track of three small children in a place like that? Now you know what particle physicists go through at those atom smashing places they like to build, monitoring the velocity and direction of tiny things shooting off at odd angles and hoping that whatever results isn’t the end of anybody’s world.

But this is why you sign up for this gig – the chance to be a part of their lives, to give back to the schools and communities they’re part of, to let your kids know that they are important enough that you would set aside the rest of your tasks for a day and hang around a museum with them, even if it means you get whiplash from tracking them all.

Because whiplash heals. And kids grow older. And days at the museum are there to be treasured, one by one as they come up.

A Little Afternoon Music

It was recital time yesterday in Our Little Town, and there was beautiful music to be made.

Every spring the girls’ music teacher holds a recital for all of her charges – they practice a piece or two, she rents a small hall, and the parents bring goodies for afterward. We’ve been doing this for a few years now, and it’s a nice little tradition.

This year there were a couple of new wrinkles adding to the uncertainty.

On Tabitha’s side, she outgrew her violin this spring so we traded in the half-sized model for a full-sized model. Did you know that a half-sized violin is not actually half the size of a full-sized violin? I know. It’s true. We went back to the same guy who sold us the first one and he fitted her out for a new one and even took the old one back for trade-in. He also let us keep the old one for a while, since we figured that switching violins a week before a concert was probably not wise.

Tabitha, however, decided that she loved this new violin (“Benjamin,” by name) and worked to get her piece up and ready on it, to the satisfaction of her teacher. And in truth, it does have a nicer tone – fuller, rounder, and generally more pleasant. It’s just a matter of space – there’s only so much tone you can get out of a smaller instrument.

Lauren’s wrinkle was that this spring she decided that she was old enough not to need my help with her practicing. On the one hand this meant that practicing got a lot easier for me, as all I had to do was say, “Lauren, go practice!” five or six times and it would get done. On the other hand, it did mean that she was on her own for correcting misconceptions.

But fear not, for I bring tidings of great music.

We arrived early, cookies, girls and violin in hand (the place comes with a piano) and milled about until it was time for the show. Eventually music started and the program worked its way down to us, and off they went.

Both Lauren and Tabitha did a nice job, it must be said.

But you know what impressed me more than how well they did? They both made fairly big mistakes in their pieces, as sometimes happens, but they both covered them and kept right on playing – I doubt anyone other than me and their teacher really knew what had happened. And that, more than anything else, is the definition of performance success.