After The Fireworks

I watched the colorful explosions last night from a relatively secluded spot at a small inlet on Sarasota Bay. The boom, boom of miniature bombs, the flags hung out all over town, and the commentary, earlier in the day, from media pundits about our founding fathers, all seemed to flow together but not in the way intended.

What Thomas Jefferson wrote in our Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, was as hypocritical, in its own way, as George W. Bush’s declaration of war against Iraq on March 19, 2003.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all 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.”

Jefferson intended that only some men should enjoy their rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, not all. He and other founders, indignantly declaring their independence, did their best to ensure that their slave population enjoyed no rights of any kind.

In building a nation independent of an unjust monarch, the founders poured this much graver injustice into the foundation of the newly declared United States. And, what has been built since then, sags from that defect.

Our constitution, a model document in other respects, created an electoral college to pick our president. The number of electors for each state was determined, not by the number of eligible voters in each of the states, but by population, whether free or slave. Each of the half-million slaves was counted as three-fifths of a person so that, in the south, where population was swelled by slaves, free men got more bang for each vote. The more slaves that slave states held in captivity, the more electoral votes it got.

Another of our revered founders, James Madison, proposed this system, instead of direct election. In an argument we’d easily see as essentially evil if suggested anywhere in the world today, this man we treat almost like a secular saint, demanded that slave owners get the right to use their slaves’ circumstances to perpetuate those circumstances.

Which brings us to today and George W. Bush. No matter how loyal Bushies had manipulated the situation in Florida in 2000, Bush wouldn’t be president if not for slavery. The electoral college vote, designed to create an inequitable system, did so again. It rendered moot Al Gore’s popular vote lead of about a half-million votes.

So, if not for slavery, we would not be in Iraq.

Of course, a great many other things would have been different throughout American history as well. Thomas Jefferson would never have been president, for example, if not Virginia's massive slave population — and the extra electoral college votes granted to Jefferson as a result. It’s impossible to guess what that alternate America and world would have looked like.

But if we finished, for another year, with the July 4th explosion of fireworks, the flag-waving and singing of “God Bless America,” that gets everyone all misty-eyed, we should look with clearer eyes at what we claim is so blessed.