Thursday, July 8, 2021

A Précis of the American Constitution (Before Going through Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass)

 

America is the land

that has its vastest spans

                        and deepest depths

expressed in this one keystone phrase:

 

            We hold these truths to be self-evident,

that all men are created equal…

endowed by their Creator

with unalienable Rights—

Liberty, Life and

the Pursuit of Happiness.”

 

                        In its original draft

by Thomas Jefferson

(when he was just 33,

                                    the holy number of the esoteric fraters

and Christ’s mortal age)

the line had:

“We hold these truths to be sacred and un-deniable...”

 

In Benjamin Franklin’s approved edit,

the sacred and the undeniable

            was condensed to        “self-evident”— 

 

            And so the Geist spoke,

                                                and America became

 

the world’s most singular Land

 

of Grand and Obvious Truths.

 

The Land of the Obvious—

 

                                                that holds and hides inside

                        the Jeffersonian original of the sacred

and the undeniable—

                        that, above all, is held to be four-fold:

 

Equality,          Liberty,           Life                 and Human Happiness.

 

            These four words spelled the abrogation of the old world order,

                        the old thousand-year old feudal system

of serfs and masters

based on Jesus

& man’s original sin

and illiteracy of the masses

as property of their lords

for whom liberty         and equality of the people

                        was abhorrence,

mockery,

Satan’s anathema.

 

                        Thus a new Republic was born—

by a vote

on new political thinking.

A new Republic

                                    and the first government and state

                        that declared

                                                that human happiness for all

                                    here on earth

                        is its promise

            and its goal,

 

thus overturning

                                    the previous rule that justified all and any tyranny

                        by recasting life of man and woman

as an earned and justified temporary penal colony

                                    penitentiary, Vale of Tears,   

labor & reeducation camp

for utterly damned and worthless sinners,

a priori so and if only

because of the tale

about an apple

and the ignorant and naked,

Adam and Eve,

by God himself made

superb and perfect,

                        so that the world,

            so decreed

and masterfully engineered,

was merely a large waiting,

concentration center

for the Apocalypse,

                        the end of the world,

and God’s terrible judgment

for which the graves    were to give back

all the rotten corpses

                                    interred over all the ages

            for the last and closing sentence

on everyone’s fate.

           

This Jeffersonian pronouncement

by a committee of men

was the first act by any state

to base its existence

on the avowal                         of natural rights

or creeds moored in a twin appeal

to reason and God,

                        which each of the two

taken to stand              for mankind’s 

universal common sense.

 

                        And thus

toward the end of the second millennium

of Christian faith,

                                    the emphasis rocked and altered—

            away from the original sin,

the lynchpin

                        used to hold man down and shackled

                                                as a fallen, corrupt, worthless man

                                    to the idea of man,

the source of his restored pride

and new supreme confidence

in being, in the words of John Milton

                        from The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649),

 

            “the image and resemblance of God himself.”

 

And on this human nature’s God-like view

the new daring and venture,

the rediscovered claim

to liberty and equality of all

just by coming into existence

was created and hoisted.

 

America is where these truths

                                                became self-evident

            in the characters of those pouring in

from overseas

            and by virtue of them running            from the other and old way.

 

America is there these truths

                                    were adopted and approved

by Congress’ one abstention

and twelve affirmative votes,

                        the twelve apostles

                                                            of the New Dispensation

that took to its heart

                                    the creed that, deep down,

            human nature,

even if far from infallible,

 

                        is inalienably divine,

 

and, with this divinity within,

                                                thus free and equal—in all,

 

            and whoever harms these human natural rights

                                                shall be subject to resistance

 

for even revolution is then justified

                                    in defense and respect of such rights—

 

                        and the liberty to pursue one’s own happiness.

 

            And these rights and truths

                                                came to stand

sacrosanct and obvious—

                                    without a need for any further proof—

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