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Clinton, Bush and the Constitution By Hal Jamison Clinton evidently was over-sexed. His successor gives disturbing signs of being a sociopath. How else classify someone who made his chief mark in Texas as a proponent of legalized murder, i.e., capital punishment, then in his first day as president took vengeful steps to persecute millions of women worldwide by cutting off aid for birth control and pre-natal counseling? There is some consistency there. Also, how else classify someone who assembles a frightening array of racists, Confederacy (circa 1860) lovers, people who have made their mark as environmental despoilers, a military chieftain who distinguished himself by covering up a retaliatory massacre of civilians in Vietnam and supervising "turkey shoots" of Iraqi soldiers in the so-called Gulf War as a cabinet, and simultaneously identifies himself as Christian? Sociopaths are directed by unreasoning aggression, and aggression for aggression's sake; however, they can present a dual semblance, with malarkey about compassion. So what do we have to blame for this de facto monarch with his four year reign coming up? Money, of course. Money has no morals. If we look a little deeper, we come to the electoral college and the disenfranchisement of black and other off-white Americans systematically undertaken under supervision of the brother (whose record as enthusiast for the death penalty, too, suggests sociopathy may be genetic in the Bush line.) Deeper still, we come to that revered document, the Constitution, and to the heritage of slavery which we as a country persist in thinking of as past history that leaves no tarnishing marks on our current actions and consciousness. Consider that during the slavery years most Americans, living in whatever part of the country, got along comfortably with the inhuman institution. That includes most of the eminent from presidents: Jefferson, Washington, Jackson to those whose names we can't remember: writers, Hawthorne, scholar/philosophers, Emerson, religious leaders, William Ellery Channing, environment protectors, Thoreau. (In justice: all of these, I believe, did, momentarily or late, denounce slavery, even though living comfortably with it most of their lives.) Still, who would dare set Clinton and Bush alongside Washington and Jefferson? A difference is that the latter were not pathological hypocrites eliding reality. History is always with us. Do we accept it, try to understand it, and overcome the evil aspects of the heritage, or do we evade it? The heritage of slavery and racism, of Jim Crow, we have by and large as a country, surreptitiously expunged from our moral awareness, with the help of such as Justice Thomas, placed on the Supreme Court for that very purpose, (and with the emergence of a black middle class, aided by allies such as the freedom fighters of the 60s). At the root of the root we find the Constitution. A document which provides defense in depth against democracy, the electoral college being only a forward redoubt. It's the Constitution that with a few cheap words at the start establishes a Maginot Line against democracy: distant and centralized national government, actually strengthened with passage of time by states' rights sectarianism (much transformed from the spirit that gave the country the Declaration of Independence and the soldiers who fought the Revolutionary War); two legislative chambers, elected on different bases and for non-corresponding terms, to get in each other's way and ease potential obstructions to the presidential will; a president/commander-in-chief (monarch in fact for four years because of independence from both legislature and populace); and a Supreme Court irresponsible and unaccountable. Americans have deluded themselves throughout all our history that the court was above politics as Thomas, actually allowed to take the place symbolically of the great Marshall, averred a few hours after he had betrayed his own cultural, ethnic kin, doing as Scalia directed thus helping place the sociopath in the White House. Ask not, why Clinton? Nor why Bush? Start your study with the U.S. Constitution and its soothsayers, the U.S. Supreme Court. Hal Jamison lives in Ashland and is a frequent contributor to the Tidings' editorial pages. Visit our back issue library Email your... Technical questions & comments to: WebMaster Daily Tidings editorial comments & questions to: Editor Visit our other Western Oregon Newspapers... | Albany Democrat-Herald | Ashland Daily Tidings | Corvallis Gazette-Times | | Lebanon Express | Newport News-Times | Springfield News | Cottage Grove Sentinel | Ashland Daily Tidings 1661 Siskiyou Blvd. Ashland, OR 97520 Telephone 541-482-3456 © Copyright 2001 Lee Northwest Publishing