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12/05/2004: "How the Founding Fathers Stuck it to George III"

I’ve been reading a book called Quicksilver from one of my favorite authors, Neil Stephenson. It’s the story of Daniel Waterhouse, founder of MIT. As a young man in England, he interacted with great minds like Newton (his roommate at Cambridge). The book is really about the birth of modern science. At that point in history it was called Natural Philosophy, and was seen as the systematic examination of God’s handiwork. One of the most interesting features of the story is how virtually every country in the civilized world had a single established church, and England was no exception. What made England unique, though, was that the established church changed every few years when the new monarch had a different religious affiliation from the prior one. This is the origin of the nursery rhyme “Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over the candlestick,” referring to ministers who had to change their affiliation. Fast forward to 1776, where men with the same scientific interests as Waterhouse were rebelling against England. I often picture Jefferson sitting down to write the Declaration he knows will be read by King George III and the rest of the royalty in Europe. (Here’s a hint about how I feel about Jefferson – I have his bust prominently displayed in the den). I imagine him wondering how he can really stick it to George; after all, they considered him the Saddam Hussein of his age. I picture the moment the answer came to him – to mock the divine right of kings that George uses to justify his despotism, instead proposing a divine right to rebel against tyranny. I sometimes imagine that the joy Jefferson felt at this great idea is like how I feel when I come up with a particularly good Dittohead definition (Dulles, for example). The irony of it all is that Jefferson’s mocking of the divine right of kings in the Declaration of Independence has backfired against the even greater accomplishment of the Founding Fathers, the Constitution. There they enshrined their distaste for the entanglement of religion with civil power, entanglement that took its most powerful form as Kings who held that they were God’s representatives on earth. So what has happened? The Right Wing now points to the Declaration’s references to a divine right to rebel against sanctimonious tyrants to support their obsession with establishing a more sanctimonious government. The Founding Fathers must be spinning in their graves!