SMALL FAVORS
Ivins, Molly
SMALL FAVORS Molly Ivins Up the Rebels! How serendipitous that as we celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution, we should all be treated to the spectacle of Robert Bork trying to prove he's...
...Bork wrote, "The First Amendment, like the rest of the Bill of Rights, appears to have been a hastily drafted document upon which little thought was expended...
...Perhaps the most troubling line of argument is that the debate itself is somehow illegitimate...
...They apparently commune with the Founders concerning Original Intent by the same means that Oral Roberts receives instructions from the Lord...
...Lehrer people ever found them, but it turns out they are mass-produced by the Heritage Foundation and readily available...
...But the reverence of many of our fellow citizens for the work of the Founders is such that they wish to see it altered neither jot nor tittle...
...The Original Intenters are not, however, above correcting the Founders when necessary...
...By what possible standard could the appointment of such a man be regarded as beyond controversy...
...say 82.7 per cent of the citizenry...
...As Calvin Trillin points out, one of the joys of living in this Great Nation is our penchant for taking polls showing how stupid we are...
...First the Reaganites claimed the judge should be confirmed without question, absent any glaring ethical defects or proof that he slobbers at the mouth...
...Specimens of this camp may be observed frequently on the MacNeil/ Lehrer program wearing three-piece suits and horn-rimmed glasses...
...How serendipitous that as we celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution, we should all be treated to the spectacle of Robert Bork trying to prove he's fit to sit on the Supreme Court...
...I used to wonder where the MacNeil/ Molly Ivins, a columnist for the Dallas Times Herald, appears in this space every month...
...What communist swill...
...We seem, in this bicentennial year, to fall roughly into three categories regarding the fundamental document of our democracy...
...I look forward to it and I'll tell you why...
...In the second group, we find the many citizens who have yet to hear about the Bill of Rights...
...It truly astounds me that anyone would argue there is no basis for concern about this man...
...No need for tedious argument about the famous 1960s concept of the "relevance" of the musty old document...
...At the national convention of the American Civil Liberties Union in Philadelphia this summer, the ACLU presented an award to Joe Rauh, the lawyer who defended so many during the scoundrel time...
...So now it is up to us to fight for freedom once more...
...There are those who consider the thing perfect as written...
...So high is their regard for the work of the Framers that they are not only rendered bilious by the emancipation of the slaves and the enfranchisement of women, but they are still dyspeptic over the direct election of Senators and deeply grumpy over our ever having granted the vote to nonpropertied white males...
...I don't know about the rest of you, but I became hysterical over Bork's nomination after I read a considerable portion of what he has written over the years...
...Next came the dismissal of concern over these very matters as "hysterical...
...And you know in your heart if they had been alive at the time of the American Revolution, they all would have been Tories anyway...
...The friend had gone to visit Rauh and asked, "What do you want me to tell these people when I accept the award for you...
...By this novel reasoning, neither Bork's political nor his judicial philosophy is relevant to his confirmation, never mind his record...
...We have been in a time of retrenchment in this country, with' opportunity becoming more restricted, with both chance and hope fading for those who are not wellborn...
...They were, one and all, ever ready and happy to do battle and raise hell...
...Then there are the rest of us...
...In color...
...Indeed, it is awesome to dwell on how much political wisdom chanced to be thrown together on the thin edge of an uncivilized continent 200 years ago in a young nation that had the population of Peoria...
...They are not numbered among the Founding Fathers, but they have made the Constitution magnificent...
...He may have changed his mind about many things, he may no longer believe what he said he believed in the 1960s and the 1970s and the early 1980s, but surely a man with his record is the object of legitimate question...
...It's difficult to believe any of these brickheads have actually read what the Founders wrote—from Jefferson's essays to Jamie Madison's notes...
...You can count on us as a people to be unable to correctly put any nation on a map of the globe, to fail miserably at identifying foreign leaders, and to believe Tolstoy is a boxer in the light-heavyweight division...
...Almost every week brings a fresh report on some study proving once more we are hopeless dunces...
...Whenever they run one of these dunce-tests on the Bill of Rights, the result is always the same: upon being presented with the document, the majority of our fellow citizens instantly identify it as the work of Karl Marx...
...Sixty-six percent of the American people identified Mao Zedong as a shrimp-noodle dish in a recent survey taken by Whoopee Pollsters...
...Rauh said, "Tell 'em how much fun it was, tell 'em how much fun it was...
...It's been a curious debate, this Bork business...
...In their number were John Peter Zenger, Lincoln Steffens, Mother Jones, Big Bill Haywood, Clarence Darrow, Thomas Paine, Susan B. Anthony, Martin Luther King, Emma Goldman, Jeannette Rankin, Harriet Tubman, Sam Houston, Frederick Douglass, Samuel Gompers, and so many, many more...
...Then we all sit around clucking in alarm over what morons we are...
...The other half of the credit goes to 200 years' worth of American misfits, troublemakers, rebels, eccentrics, mavericks, anti-Establishmentari-ans, outsiders, and a nice old drunk named Clarence Gideon...
...Not a single goddamn one of them ever would have been asked to join the Dallas Country Club, but what a glorious time they had...
...The Constitution, Live...
...Win, lose, or draw, it's an interesting example of the Old Charter in action...
...they are distinguished by an air of premature pomposity...
...Rauh was ill and unable to come and sent an old friend in his stead...
...The real freedom fighters...
...And it will be...
...I submit to you that only half the reason the Constitution of the United States is a great and living document is because the founding daddies were among the smartest sumbitches who ever walked, and because they made provision for change in the Constitution itself...
Vol. 51 • November 1987 • No. 11
