The Universal Joint of American Democracy
As a cash-strapped student, I drove the kinds of cars cash-strapped students drive, to get me to and from work and classes. I particularly remember a Chevy Nova that had a totally solid engine, but an affinity for breaking and losing peripheral bits. Like mufflers. Or the steering wheel, which came off in my hands while trying to parallel-park into the last available space outside the location of the class I was trying desperately not to be late for.
For the most part, my stepfather, who picked out the car for me and helped me buy it, left me to deal with such things on my own. (He did recommend, after it had dumped the second muffler onto the highway, that I take it to Midas. I got two free mufflers from them.)
For the most part, I let what I considered "non-essential" repairs wait until I had the cash. And my stepfather let me, even when it meant getting an expensive noise ticket for one of the bad mufflers, or having to bundle up into three layers of down outerwear to commute, the winter the heater fan went kaput. My car, my cash, my priorities.
But then one day, apropos the casual "How's the car running" regular query, I mentioned how the current repair-on-hold was connected with something called a (if I recall correctly) "universal joint." The mechanic had recommended it be fixed as soon as possible, but it was a pricey repair, and the car, after all, still ran pretty good.
You gearheads reading this probably reacted just like my stepfather. He wanted me to hand over my keys, NOW. When he calmed down, he agreed to help pay for a tow (the Nova was in his driveway) and work out a loan for the repair.
"Sure, you can keep the car on the road... until it kills the car AND you."
The Constitution of the United States is an amazing document. It lays out a meta-structure for self-government of a geographically and culturally heterodox group of fiercely independent former colonies that had little real trust among themselves and all kinds of intra-group economic and social conflicts already baked in.
And it's kept the old girl on the road for more than two centuries.
But the "universal joint" of the Constitution leaves it with a built-in failure point. To bring those colonies together into a viable unity, the framers HAD to work from common ground.
And the common ground they had most of, naturally, was Y chomosomes, melanin deficiency, and real estate assets.
It's not that they didn't BELIEVE in the Equality of Man. They did, devoutly. They wanted our Constitution to reflect that. So they wrote it, in English, a language which structurally renders a full half of humanity invisible and disregarded by its very pronouns.
The "Equality of Man", indeed. Because, after all, "man" includes women, who are the possessions, objects, adjuncts of their male paterfamilias.
They squirmed a bit harder on the melanin deficiency parts.
And they got called earlier, and more effectively, on the real estate assets business.
But if you look at the document today, with all of its various amendments over the past 230 years, it becomes clearer and clearer. A repair here, a patch there, some tightening up on the nuts and bolts... they've kept it on the road, although for those of us who were never part of that initial "common ground," the vibration has been obvious all along.
For all its strengths, the Constitution was essentially written to allow white male property owners to run things among themselves. Hopefully, with plenty of high-toned roses to be flung at the rest of us, at least enough to keep us quiet.
But now the roses are withered, the vibration is clanking and the steering is juddering, and we're in the heavy traffic of an increasingly chaotic, conflicted, and nationalist world.
And the white, male property owner who's been handed the keys sees no problem, no problem at all.
forebodingly,
Bright
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