The Forgotten Founding Father–Forgotten No More?:
Early one evening in August 1798, a sitting justice of the Supreme Court named James Wilson died in a sparsely furnished boarding room on the second floor of a North Carolina tavern. He had been holed up there for nearly a year to avoid creditors, to whom he owed unspeakable debts from land speculation. Delirious and destitute, he died from malarial fever, which burned through the Carolinas every summer.
There was no public announcement of Wilson’s death. It was an ignominious end to a man who was not only a Supreme Court justice but also arguably the most influential, prescient, and democratic drafter of the Constitution, one of only six men to sign both that document and the Declaration of Independence.
The other Founders had acolytes who promoted their legacy and preserved their records, but Wilson died a pariah, which kept him out of history books as the conventional narrative of the founding took shape. Even today, his headstone in Philadelphia lists the wrong date for his death. Recovering his role in creating America is essential if the nation is to recommit itself to the ideals of democracy and popular sovereignty, which he championed with greater force than any of his contemporaries did.
Wilson first arrived in Philadelphia as a poor 23-year-old immigrant from Scotland. Two decades later, after becoming one of the most celebrated lawyers in America, he attended the 1787 Constitutional Convention in the same city. Wilson spoke more than all but one of his fellow delegates. From the start, his guiding principle was the power of regular people, whom he saw as “the legitimate source of all authority.”
“The general government is not an assemblage of states, but of individuals,” Wilson declared in his Scottish brogue. “It is not meant for the states, but for the individuals composing them: The individuals, therefore, not the States, ought to be represented in it.”
To many delegates, this was unconscionable. “The people should have as little to do as may be about the government,” Roger Sherman of Connecticut said in the convention’s opening days, as the delegates debated how to select members of Congress. Sherman wanted them to be chosen by state legislators rather than the public, who “are constantly liable to be misled.” Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts seconded the point. “The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy,” Gerry said. “The people do not want virtue; but are the dupes of pretended patriots.” (Turns out he had a point…)
Wilson rejected these characterizations outright. No other delegate was more persistent in defending the wisdom of the people or their right to exercise political authority in accordance with their numbers; he was the convention’s strongest advocate of proportional representation. Wilson also called repeatedly for direct popular elections to Congress, as well as for the allocation of representatives in both houses to be based on population. Delegates from the smaller states in particular were aghast at this latter proposal. William Paterson of New Jersey said that he would “rather submit to a monarch, to a despot, than to such a fate,” arguing instead that each state needed equal representation in Congress. Wilson countered that giving states equal power would endanger the entire American project. It would be “a fundamental and a perpetual error,” he said, one that “must be followed by disease, convulsions, and finally death itself.”
Quite an interesting piece. Read it. Learn ya something about history.
Not One, But Two, Really Interesting Conversations From the NYTimes.
First, this one with Ezra Klein and author Gary Shteyngart (had to cut-‘n-paste that one) on his dystopian and prescient 2010 novel ‘Super Sad True Love Story’:
For those who haven’t read it, can you just describe the world you create in that book?
Everyone carries a device called the äppärät, and wherever they go, it constantly ranks them.
But the germ of “Super Sad True Love Story” is that the main character, Lenny Abramov, will walk into a bar or restaurant, and immediately he is ranked as, say, the 23rd ugliest man in the room. That’s his thing.
At one point, he walks in, and he’s the second ugliest man in the room, and the ugliest man can’t take it, and he leaves — so that Lenny becomes the ugliest man in the room.
You’re constantly being ranked everywhere. You’re being ranked even as you walk down the street. There are giant credit poles that showcase your credit, and then you can tell Gary has 600 out of 800 points in credit. He needs to save more.
So even on that level, society is so intrusive that it tells you you need to save more. Some people need to spend more. It just constantly wants to keep people in equilibrium.
Women are very sexualized, even more so than in our world. America is run by a, well, fascist leader who has started a war in Venezuela, etc. So a lot of familiar stuff is happening.
There are two main characters. Lenny is kind of like me, a neo-nebbish who’s from Gen X, which is this interesting generation that’s a bridge between the analog and the digital worlds.
And Eunice is 10, 15 years younger than him, but she’s already a full digital native, so probably a millennial or something like that.
This is a very unlikely love affair between two people, and I think the biggest thing that holds them back is the fact that they live in two different worlds.
You can either read, or listen to, the entire conversation. I found it fascinating.
How much was “The Righteous Gemstones” an outgrowth of your church experience? You know, it was. I left Los Angeles in 2017. My son was about to go into kindergarten. I was looking around the city and wasn’t sure how I was going to raise my kids there. We lived off Mulholland Drive, and I remember my son wanted to learn how to ride a bike, and my thought was: “Why? You’re never going to ride a bike down Mulholland. That’s silly.” But it got me thinking: “Do I want to try to give them something similar to what I had? Do I want to see what it would be like for them to live in a smaller town, live somewhere where they can ride a bike down the road?” That’s what brought us to Charleston. I started looking around and seeing all the churches that were in Charleston. There were so many, and every other radio station here is a religious radio station. It just got me thinking about when I was a kid and going to church. I got curious about how church had changed, and I started doing research. That’s when I started finding out about the megachurches. It just became fascinating to dive in and see how different everything was.
What was the most interesting feedback you got about “The Righteous Gemstones” from a churchgoer? Before I did the show, I interviewed a bunch of different megachurch pastors. I didn’t tell them what I was working on, but everybody was gracious. People opened up their doors to me. And I wasn’t asking questions about religion. I was asking questions about the business: when it’s time to expand, or when it’s time to do another one, or when to shut one down. You would think they would decide to put a church somewhere because there are no churches in that town — it’s the exact opposite. You put a church where there’s already a bunch of people going to church because you know you have the audience there. So even thinking about planting churches in such a business way, that felt rich, that felt like what I wanted to make the show about. But in doing that, I met all these different pastors, and I always wondered when it was over with, if they put two and two together or what they thought of it. One time I was out, and I ran into one of the pastors I talked to, and he just came up to me and whispered in my ear, “I can’t tell anyone I watched it, but you nailed it.”
All this, and ‘puppet ministry’, too.
How Hunters Kill Condors Without Even Trying To Shoot Them:
When it comes to conserving the California condor, progress is precarious. One wild pair recently laid the first egg in northern California for the first time in a century, and there are now more than 400 condors in the wild, up from 26 in 1987. It sounds like the start of a comeback story.
But as a new study in Nature Communications highlights, condors are still threatened by a stubborn, surprising enemy: lead poisoning. The birds are not ingesting lead directly, but they feed on animals that were shot by hunters and left on the landscape.“One little fleck of lead gets in, and this great, tough, resilient animal just crumples,” says study co-author Joe Burnett, a biologist for the nonprofit Ventana Wildlife Society and a National Geographic Explorer who’s been working with condors for more than 30 years.
When ingested, lead absorbs into the birds’ blood. It can disrupt their eating, make them anemic, and cause their kidneys and heart to fail. If enough lead accumulates, these symptoms can be severe and eventually fatal. Condor #168, a 29-year-old Californian condor known as Beak Boy, is a poster child for the effects of this toxic metal. Condors are supposed to mate for life, but he’s had two mates. Both died of lead poisoning.
“They’re very social animals. They’re supposed to have these lifelong bonds,” says Burnett. He notes that lead poisoning affects the flock in multiple ways. “The clearest one is mortality. But it also impacts the social fabric that can keep a flock so strong.”To end this cycle of lead poisoning in condors and other wildlife, California began a phase-out of lead ammunition in 2013, and a statewide ban went into effect in 2019. It’s the only such ban in the country. (Legislation to limit the federal government’s ability to ban lead ammunition on some federal land is currently being considered in the U.S. Senate.)
But even after the lead ban, biologists kept finding condors dead in the field, and necropsies revealed lead poisoning, says Victoria Bakker, an ecologist at Montana State University who led the new study. “It was so discouraging,” Bakker says. “How could that be when we have lead bans?” The answer, as Bakker and Burnett’s new paper suggests, is simple. Bans are only effective when they’re followed.
Our exit music is as obvious as it is profound. The melody is more that a century old:
