Sounding Brass

I had been invited to speak at what was promoted as the Second Tea Party rally and I feel compelled to make some observations and this seems as good as any place to intrude. So let me then make my presence felt here.

Judging from a pre-talk meeting and some of the presentations during the next day, the rally basically centered on singing to the choir and shouting the Feds are coming. Lest I be misunderstood let me quickly hasten here to insist that I find nothing, nothing at all, wrong with singing to the choir and shouting the Feds are coming. However, I do find it impeachable that virtually all, unlike the Founding Fathers, stop here; no one seems able or willing to go beyond. The Founding Fathers, especially the author of the Declaration of Independence, also sang to the choir and shouted the Feds, that is the British, are coming, but they described, defined, and then dealt with the reasons for their lament.

Admittedly the premise on which their complaints were based was different then, but that difference can be defined and understood. In fact it must be understood, thoroughly understood, otherwise no singing and no shouting will deliver us from the abyss. We must come to fully comprehend the devastation a distorted premise can impose on any effort.

We cannot hope for deliverance appealing to yesterday's Constitutional premise with today's understanding of it, for today's understanding does not allow for a divinely imposed sovereignty on the American citizen. Liberty thieves do accept the Constitution to be supreme law of the land, but only with today’s premise, which allows them to rank it to be below another law, when in the interest of something called peace. Thus absurdity is defined, madness is on a rampage, and two plus two no longer yields the old, familiar answer.

Two plus two equals four. This everyone knows. But what very few, if any, ever keep in mind is that two plus two equals four only in a number system whose base is ten. If the base, the premise, is changed, two plus two will no longer equal four.

The same holds true for any other field of consideration: be that law, engineering, medicine, and especially Americanism. For me it is extremely scintillating listening to erudite debates on Constitutional precepts, but that can turn quickly into deep disappointment and consternation, when I must realize the debate ignores the old number system, the old premise, now no longer in use. Constitutional ecstasy is uplifting, but only when the old Constitutional premise is employed, and when not, as now is the case, it is saddening beyond belief. Because of this the entire freedom movement is distorted and patriots have become divided and fractured to a degree scarcely comprehensible. Bizarre Constitutional assertions are now promoted and inserted into Constitutional perceptions, never intended to be there, which leave even the most absurd allegations cloaked in Constitutional sanctity, only because they have come to be based on a Constitutional premise, which has supplanted the old.

Patriots, well meaning patriots indeed, have become distracted from the only purpose that would give greatness to their aim, but uncontrollable rage has now deflected their aim. Consider the deep controversy engulfing the Bush v Kerry stance and add to that the endless persuasions seeking to dress conspiracy beliefs with reality, some of which seem, even to me, the original conspiracy kid, extremely spurious.

A veritable plethora of conspiracy notions has now expanded into dizzying insistencies. Fluoride, to name one, is now of major concern. Hitler is alleged to have used it to render concentration camp and other inmates docile. How one explains uprisings, especially such as the April 19th, 1943, Jewish uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, I cannot tell.

Another, if I understood it correctly, had a hominid and a reptile engage in a coital relationship in the gray distant past that today renders some of the human species proclivitous toward predation and others to be prey. I have difficulties with that seeing that all members of the human race will prey on each other; the slightest sign of weakness will promote it.

But for me, unfortunately and apparently not for most, it is the distinction not made between unalienable and inalienable that I consider to be the most incredibly destructive distortion inflicted on the Constitution, when its true premise came to be overthrown. The callousness with which this distinction is ignored flays my sentiments, seeing it epitomizes the very root of our undoing.

Jefferson, in all his drafts, including the final one, used inalienable and used it for a very specific reason; it was by no means an arbitrary choice. Yet every replication since 1968, the earliest one I have, uses unalienable. The distinction is enormous. Unalienable means cannot be altered and inalienable, Jefferson's use, means cannot be transferred. The meaning of unalienable thus is inclusive to inalienable. This shows how subtle the perversion of a premise can be. Government can readily admit rights to be unalienable, because unalienable, as such, guarantees no unalienability status to the momentary possessor. If unalienable is all that a right is, it can then be possessed as such by anyone, including government. But inalienable not only cannot be removed from him who possess it, but because of that can also not be altered.

So we can see then how devastating perceptions and conclusions can become, when the Constitutional premise is altered. For example, when the actual Constitutional premise is employed, the concept of civil rights - now expanded to find respectability and acceptance for homosexual liaisons - has no legal bearing, because the citizen’s personal sovereignty restricted government's sole function to just protect the liberties of the people. But when that premise is altered, as it now is, the assertion of civil rights can easily be inserted into Constitutional reasoning and then become dressed in plausibility, because government is now democratized and civil rights has become democratic sloganeering in general and Nazi nomenclature in particular. Thus it is crucial to understand the premise on which any argumentation is based. The thrust conspiracy notions employs is absolutely correct, but when based on the intended and true Constitutional premise it falters and becomes disruptive, because it does not expose the incredible insignificance such debates entail. What difference, for instance, would it make if we were to remove Bush and substituted Kerry? None, none at all! Bush is not our problem! Neither is Kerry! Even government, that is democracy itself, is not our problem; government is just the implementation for it!

What has conspiracy talk availed us? I am, as I said, probably the original conspiracy kid. I have no doubts whatsoever that somewhere in the deep bowels of government a cabal plies its awesome trade orchestrating crisis after crisis in order to sustain the democracy. That is what democracy does. As it is natural for birds to fly, for fishes to swim, for fire to be hot, so it is natural for democracy to steal liberties. That is why democracy is an illegitimate form of government and, therefore, is ever on the alert to safeguard its power and crises, real or imagined, true or contrived, provide the tools with which to achieve it. For the longest time these were war, crime, and social conditions. In the last forty years or so two more have been added: environment and terrorism, in that order.

People, not just patriots, have noticed and rung the tocsin. For forty years or so incredible numbers of concerned Americans have raised their voices, shouting the Feds are coming, the Feds are coming, but only a few have noticed that all this has ever accomplished is counting maggots and singing to the choir. It has not stopped the Feds from coming, has it?

Nowhere can the devastating effect of a perverted Constitutional premise be seen more poignantly displayed than in the “gun and liberty” debate. To the gun hater or liberty thief, as some would justly call him, guns are at best a nuisance and a menace at worst. They make noise, which terrifies him, and they “kill”, which is abhorrent to him. Using guns to shoot at targets or beer cans is of too insufficient a reason for him to tolerate them. And so, prompted only by his emotions, totally bereft of common sense, he will see them abolished, because the Constitution now has lost its ancient premise, a change of which he chooses to be ignorant. Thus he cannot make the connection between liberty and guns, because he cannot see the connection between his personal sovereignty and the Second Amendment and he will not even come to hear it, because the patriot, who confronts him, cannot tell him because, tragically, he too does not see it.

Thus neither of them sees the perversion of our Constitution’s old premise that once had the citizen sovereign over his governments - the crown jewel of the Great Republic - to the present premise that now has government sovereign over the citizen - the crown jewel of democracy.

So I must ask here again, as I have many times before, why is it not clear that something must change? Let us suppose some spark were to ignite a firestorm among patriots and open conflict had become our fate, what would the general popular reaction be? Would the people not just simply think that a bunch of gun kooks just wanted to keep their guns so they could shoot at beer cans? Is it not clear then that we need popular support, for without it we could only fail?

So let us then begin to realize that the original Constitutional premise is gone and needs to be restored. It was then resolutely proclaimed by a personal sovereignty of the American citizen unequivocally coupled with a designated posture of servitude on all American governments, both duly imposed and confirmed by the Author of Liberty by means of the Second Amendment. We must come to understand this, otherwise we will not be able to communicate what the Founding Fathers had intended and without that understanding we will only be like sounding brass, like tinkling cymbals.

Dieter H. Dahmen

Body and Soul American

April 2004