1786 Shay's Rebellion

Suffering high rates of debt, taxes, and foreclosures, farmers in Massachusetts took up arms in rebellion in 1786, and the scent of radical politics was in the air. Government under the Articles of Confederation was proving inadequate.

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Shay’s rebellion thrust to the fore economic issues [...] as did an extremist movement in Rhode Island that beat the drum for abolishing debt and dividing wealth equally. The Massachusetts uprising shocked many who wondered just how far the rebels would go.

“Good God!” Washington proclaimed of the rebellion, aghast that some protesters regarded America’s land “to be the common property of all.” [...]

Where Madison though a weak republic would only invite disorder, Jefferson reacted to the turmoil with aplomb. “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing,” he told Madison loftily from Paris, “and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” To Colonel William Smith, Jefferson sent his famous reassurance: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

While Hamilton feared that disorder would feed on itself, the more hopeful and complacent Jefferson thought that periodic excesses would correct themselves.

-- Ron Chernow, “Alexander Hamilton”

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Baudelaire

You read through his journals, and discover this isolated joke: “On the day when a young writer corrects his first proof-sheet he is as proud as a schoolboy who has just got his first dose of pox.” And you realize that the essence of this apparently casual joke is that both the schoolboy and the writer are proud of an imperfection that confirms their loss of innocence, their natural state of everyday corruption. This is not an isolated moment. This kind of fall happens constantly in Baudelaire’s writing. The investigation of tone in Baudelaire is an investigation into humiliation; and this humiliation, in Baudelaire’s theory, is the result of his conviction—to us, perhaps, counter-intuitive—that everything natural is corrupt.

-- Adam Thirlwell, reviewing Roberto Calasso's "The Madness of Baudelaire

It is an interesting, pessimistic perspective, which is always understandable when one thinks about life and what life does to us, or doesn't do to us. But it begs the question: corrupt from what? Today, of course, we just say, it is what it is, nothing more and nothing less. And we can make of it what we will.

Supreme Court and the Voting Rights Act

The Voting Rights Act is up before the Suupreme Court, and Court watchers are a little worried about what this conservative Court will do.

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WASHINGTON, DC — There were audible gasps in the Supreme Court’s lawyers’ lounge, where audio of the oral argument is pumped in for members of the Supreme Court bar, when Justice Antonin Scalia offered his assessment of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. He called it a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.”

The comment came as part of a larger riff on a comment Scalia made the last time the landmark voting law was before the justices. Noting the fact that the Voting Rights Act reauthorization passed 98-0 when it was before the Senate in 2006, Scalia claimed four years ago that this unopposed vote actually undermines the law: “The Israeli supreme court, the Sanhedrin, used to have a rule that if the death penalty was pronounced unanimously, it was invalid, because there must be something wrong there.”

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It should be noted that even one of Scalia’s fellow justices felt the need to call out his remark. Justice Sotomayor asked the attorney challenging the Voting Right Act whether he thought voting rights are a racial entitlement as soon as he took the podium for rebuttal.

-- News-LJ

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I actually have some faith that this is just some Conservatives kvetching, and the law will certainly stand, but...

Daily Fun

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