“What do you do when you’re not buying stereos, Nick? Finance revolutions?” – Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels
I guess the taxes were too steep.
In honor of the holiday, here are some facts that I made up about the Declaration of Independence:
- John Adams felt that July 2 would be the national holiday, but just to spite him because he was a tool, it was changed to July 4.
- The Continental Congress could not afford air conditioning, so Thomas Jefferson used his sweat as the liquid in the ink.
- The original Declaration of Independence was stored at the Pearl Harbor naval base until 1941 in a rusty footlocker, but was moved back to Washington, D.C., because John Wayne told “that pinko” FDR to bring it back.
They were going to name a street after John Wayne, but then realized that no one could cross John Wayne and live.
- Thomas Jefferson was originally going to have the Declaration printed, but because his HP™ printer kept flashing “replace black ink cartridge” and because Office Depot™ would not exist for another 200 years, he wrote the whole thing out by hand.
- The Declaration has a secret message written on the back, that, when translated said, “D-R-I-N-K-Y-O-U-R-O-V-A-L-T-I-N-E. No one knows what that means.
- Disney® tried to buy the rights to the Declaration in order to make a cartoon, and then a live action version of the document, replacing Thomas Jefferson with Jada Pinkett Smith.
- Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on the same day, and their bodies regenerated in a secret lab of Benjamin Franklin’s where they were combined with parts from a cotton gin to become MechaAdamson who took the lead in opening trade relations with Japan, and whose portrait is on the $1500 bill.
Okay, on to the more serious bit.
It has been 248 years since the Declaration of Independence was signed. Obviously, it was written the night before, because Jefferson was cramming for the final. We often think of the Founding Fathers as Old Dead Guys, because they are, but let’s go back in time to 1776:
Thomas Jefferson was 33. In 2024, that would mean that in 2024 he would still be saving for a downpayment on a house, but when he was 13, he inherited nearly eight square miles of productive farmland.
Jefferson wasn’t very old, but I think he did the job of writing this amazingly subversive document very, very well. John Adams, who was 40 at the time, convinced the committee (yes, the Declaration was the result of a committee) that Jefferson should write it because everyone liked Jefferson, and everyone thought that Adams was a tool. Adams said that.
“The problem with doing nothing is not knowing when you’re finished. – Benjamin Franklin”
So, if a Jefferson would be alive today to write up a new Declaration, he’d have been born in 1991 and would be younger than Teen Spirit.
Jefferson was a genius, but how big a bag did they have to pick from to find him? 2.5 million people were the total number of citizens in the colonies. Today, all but fourteen states each have more people than the colonies did, and yet they produced a Franklin, a Jefferson, a couple of Adams boys, and a Washington.
The point I’m trying to convey is that even though we look back at the bravery and genius and learning of the Founding Fathers, we sometimes overlook the fact that they were ordinary men in an extraordinary time. I would bet that in any population of 2.5 million Americans of similar stock in the United States today that you’d find men of Washington’s bravery and ability; Franklin’s learning, cunning and sense of humor; Adam’s stoic stubbornness; and Jefferson’s erratic brilliance.
What was Thomas Jefferson’s father’s name? Thomas Jefferdad.
Keep in mind, too, that the whole proposition of “standing up to the world’s biggest empire” was pretty risky. War had been ongoing sporadically with Great Britain for the better part of a year, but up until the Declaration, the idea and hope was for a reconciliation with the Mother Country, although one built upon respect for the Colonies.
Obviously, that didn’t happen. Once the committee tasked with drafting the Declaration was done, Congress itself edited the document, word by word, and sentence by sentence. This chopped a bunch out, and Jefferson was miffed. Regardless of Jefferson’s butthurt, on July 2, the Declaration was adopted on a 12-0-1 vote, with New York being in a dither, as usual that finally changed its vote due to peer pressure from the cool kids, eventually making it 13-0.
When it was time to check out of the empire, they all checked out.
I have said before that the United States of our forefathers, even the United States of my youth is dead – heck, one wag even said, “we all die in a foreign country”. But I have also said, and I will stand by that, although we may not live to see it, we stand ready for the seeds of a new, and hopefully more glorious Republic in the future.
It will require the burial of nearly 200,000 pages of federal regulations. There will certainly be depravation, and likely more than one horrific battle. It took decades to get the United States into this mess, and digging out will be the task of generations: keep in mind that from 1775 (the real start of the Revolutionary War) to the first presidential election was 13 years, and that we’re not even to 1775 yet – I peg us at somewhere between 1765 and 1773, and I think the Revolutionary War will look easy in comparison.
I accidently signed up for the company 401k – I don’t think I can run that far.
Along the way, a new form of government will be born, hopefully with an eye to the freedoms we have lost and with sure prohibitions (I can think of another dozen amendments today of what government should never be allowed to do) to keep government in check and make it take at least another 200 years before the rotten edifice of regulation and emanations and penumbras can be reconstituted. Maybe we’ll add a third house of Congress that can repeal any legislation with a 33% vote, I mean, if 33% of the country hate a law, why keep it?
America is dead, but also waiting to be born. Come with me.
Let us go and find her.