There is a great bruhaha about the fact that, in drafting the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson wrote the word “subjects,” scratched it out, and then substituted “citizens” for it. Mommy Professor has become such a complete Time Provincial that that is a bit of news.
The decision to write the Declaration was entirely one of deciding not to be subjects of the Crown any more. Until then, the colonies insisted that they had “The Rights of Englishmen.” But they insisted that they were not subject to the Parliament, and only their own legislatures could tax them.
In other words, they were united with England not by Parliament, but as subjects of a the Crown. It isn’t surprising that, after arguing that for YEARS, Jefferson would have used the word “subjects” at first.
None of this will surprise our BUGS British contingent. In my youth, Brits far more often referred to themselves as “British subjects” than as “citizens.”
It may also be added that when Jefferson decided he was a citizen, he was not declaring himself a citizen of the United States. Until his inauguration as the first president, Washington always referred to “my country” as Virginia. Jefferson did the same.
In fact the Act of Union of 1800 with Ireland was not passed until twenty-four years after Jefferson wrote. Until a similar Act passed in 1708, for a century Scotsmen and Englishmen were in entirely different countries and each had its own sovereign parliament. They were British subjects, not British citizens, because they were British only in that they had the same king.
That was the world view Jefferson had lived in a third of a decade before 1776.
Historians are supposed to know all this, but it isn’t mentioned in the discussion of the change of wording in 1776 from subject to citizen. In the real world it is remarkable that Jefferson only did it once.
Even the term “United States of America” had been invented a year before Jefferson wrote that draft. The term “United States of America” was first used by Thomas Paine in his 1775 book, Common Sense.
It is not surprisingly that the term “United States of America” was coined by a Paine, who was born and raised in England and had relatively recently moved to America. As a foreigner, he saw “America” as a whole, just as Jews see “humanity” outside Judaism as a whole.
Alexander Hamilton only came to America in 1772 and he, too, thought of America as a single unit.
This was a very alien idea to Virginians, New Yorkers, and South Carolinians.
A Wordist cannot see this because he thinks that all men have always thought as he does, that a person is one individual in a world society. The problem is that each of the thousands of Wordist faiths sees all the other Wordists as aliens.
And all the Mommy Professors see the real Jefferson as an alien because his loyalties were utterly alien to THEM. Mommy Professor and other Wordists cannot see Jefferson as just sitting down to write a completely new definition of the loyalty of his fellow Americans. They think he was writing for himself.
Mommy Professor looks at the words Jefferson wrote at that moment in history as the only indication THEY CAN UNDERSTAND of his entire world view in 1776. If you ask anyone today what Jefferson was really thinking when he sat at the table in Philadelphia, they will honestly go to the words he wrote and dissect them one by one to get at his “meaning.”
So they think that the fact that he wrote subject and scratched it out shows a profound change in his thinking.
Jefferson was not writing his own Declaration.
Jefferson had been instructed by congress to DRAFT a declaration that America had declared itself independent, no longer subjects of a common Crown, no longer Englishmen Abroad.
That was hell of an assignment. He was NOT told, “Thomas, why don’t you write up your own personal World View?” He was told to write the best argument he could to the whole world.
And it had to be a document every single state delegation could agree to.
If Jefferson HAD written only his honest personal view of the world, he would have violated the trust put in him. But no historian today sees it that way.
A Wordist cannot understand history.
#1 by Dave on 07/07/2010 - 10:29 am
When one man’s political rights lessen another’s, you cannot accept that we are all in this together.
This is the heart of racial conflict.
Wordists are blind to what is prior to words. Conflict precedes words.
So words become markers for what is ceded and who has dominion. That defines orthodoxy.
But Wordists ignore this because of the real politics involved.
If you are going to play this game you have to become a practitioner of philosophy, especially when it comes to insisting upon it in those you dominate.
The world is full of really dumb people who are blind to these elementary facts. These people are in the game just to hear themselves talk. They haven’t a clue as to what is really going on.
#2 by Simmons on 07/07/2010 - 11:11 am
When dealing with these cultists (mini or mega cults) Bob’s words, “I don’t believe you” are devastating.
Of course people shy away from using them because to a cultist living out his/her wordism they are fighting words that threaten the walls of their existence, and to utter them is to risk having a Big Momma turn into a complete Crazy Aunt Sally with all the theatrics.
So it is why our side insists on using basic facts of some intellectual pursuit so as to be gentle to a complete nutter who at anytime could turn into an unpleasant violent maniac if their “existence” is threatened.
“Facts” are for our side, the phrase “I don’t believe you” is to destroy the wordist cults. Our side is going to have to realize this won’t be painless for Big Momma, Crazy Aunt Sally and feckless Big Papa Conservative. We’ll get over it.
#3 by BGLass on 07/07/2010 - 11:30 am
Once, I said to an old NY Jewish lady that many West Virginians never acknowledged their own state, and still felt –or more aptly put, had the living/historical sensibility imbedded in them through living– that Virginia was still their state, and in fact, country. She was stunned b/c she’d heard that West Virginia was a good state and the people there were better than the Virginians b/c they had been against slavery and had fought with the north, which meant her, and so they were nice and moral.
I’m no historian and everything I know is hearsay, but you could see that the idea that they were just people who lived there and had many views, not really necessarily uniform, and that the west had mountains which would logically make plantations sort of impossible, anyway, lol, and they endured military occupations and so on–was not something she could think about at all, no matter how much explaining of the general idea of just how human people sort of ARE.
There was a time when people were allowed to say their real life experience more, it seems, and they were not condemned for doing so.
Once people quit that— anything that fits outside a narrow, programmatic response seems to make wordists freak out completely. The crazy aunt Sally thing mentioned above. It’s like you push a button and they dis-integrate or something.
Frankly, it’s sort of creepy.
#4 by Simmons on 07/07/2010 - 2:38 pm
That is why the left’s cults are rigidly segregated. At Kos I witnessed a thread dealing with a small dispute between Feminist Kos and Black Kos over some African voodoo and it literally consumed hundreds of posts of emotionally disturbed people trying to out guilt and out cry on another.
I would go a step farther than Bob, a wordist cult member not only not understand history they cannot even understand their own cult’s logic or reason for existence, outside of the emotional comfort of belonging.
On the Planet Green channel Monday they had a show on called “Buffalo Battle” which showcased a poor destitute cult located on the Western edge of Yellowstone Park that involves itself in where the buffalo roam.
It was basically run for a Big Momma and Big Poppa Liberal, and while they could articulate shards of logic the followers were an emotionally destitute band of cripples who glommed onto this lost cause seemingly to do something to relieve themselves of “guilt.” Two cute white girls were seemingly cast as “two white girls who cry alot”, two white men cast as “breathless fools in the way of buffalo doing what is natural.” It was hilarious.
In summation they are weak, all of them are weak, if their supporters are saddled with “responsibility” then the cult will fail.