Yesterday I had just put down a new biography of George Mason, the Founding Father neighbor of George Washington, when I turned to less elevating contemporary goings on. And sure enough, there a headline sat, above the online fold, in which another George was comparing our own Revolutionary War to the amorphous "war on terror." Things went downhill from there.
''Today,'' said George Bush at a Mount Vernon celebration of the first George's 275th birthday, "we're fighting a new war to defend our liberty and our people and our way of life. And as we work to advance the cause of freedom around the world, we remember that the father of our country believed that the freedoms we secured in our revolution were not meant for Americans alone.''
POTUS 43, ever the adman for his peculiar war. Even poor, dead Mr. Washington isn't safe from the exploitation.
"George Washington's calm hand and determination," George III continued, "kept the cause of independence and the principles of our Declaration alive." Time frame, please? Did those principles come with an expiration date?
"As president, George Washington understood that his decisions would shape the future of our young nation and set precedent.... Over the centuries, America has succeeded because we have always tried to maintain the decency and the honor of our first president.''
Well, some of us, anyway.
George Mason, the subject of my preceding attention before turning to Mr. Bush, was the architect of the Virginia Constitution and, in the revolutionary year of 1776, his state's "Declaration of Rights." As a neighbor of, and frequent correspondent with, George Washington, his writings characterized the revolutionary spirit -- "the decency and the honor" -- of our first president's governing sentiments that Mr. Bush so proudly referenced.
It would be a pleasant thing indeed if the currently sitting George understood and honored the motivating substance of the former George's era, rather than simply selling platitudes about times past, and, sadly and more critically, the spirit that has passed as well. To make this point, permit me to briefly quote from Professor Jeff Broadwater's George Mason: Forgotten Founder.
"Mason's first draft of the Declaration of Rights combined a succinct statement of the republican principles that underlay the Revolution with a smattering of constitutional doctrine and separate provisions designed to protect individual civil liberties." Take note, Mr. Bush, of those two short but powerful phrases, constitutional doctrine and civil liberties.
His "second article declared that [government officials] derived their powers from the people." Nothing exclusively "unitary" about that.
Mason also guaranteed the "right to confront one's accusers." He omitted exceptions to the right: no overruling exigencies, no consideration of a superior right of governmental secrets, no homeland territories excluded.
And interestingly enough, he "banned the use of ... 'the suspension of Laws,' a rebuke of the crown's practice of setting aside colonial legislation," which fellow revolutionary Edmund Randolph also condemned as "an arbitary practice of the king of England before the Revolution in 1688." Runaway signing statements, anyone?
Last, Mason's eighth drafted article I regard as the most sweepingly pertinent to what we've watched go down the tubes during the last few years. In it he wrote that "no free Government, or the Blessing of Liberty can be preserved to any People, but by a firm adherence to Justice, Moderation, Temperance, Frugality, and Virtue and by frequent Recurrance to fundamental principles."
I won't belabor those points. They're too obvious. I shall only suggest that Professor Broadwater could just as thoughtfully have subtitled his book, Forgotten Foundings.
Maybe someday the "fundamental principles" will be remembered and actually honored, rather than just sloganeered in the latest ad campaign.
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