Jefferson, Giants and Jealousy
I was recently in Washington D.C. for the second time in my life. The first time, as with this time, the most pristine memories flew to me when standing in the Jefferson Monument. His words are powerful and beautiful, he is inspired by Heaven and optimism. The monument is a bit of a walk from the main Mall, the distance is a small test, Jefferson only wants guests, not tourists. I stood at his feet around midnight and alone, at least in my mind, and I looked up to see a giant. Only a statue of those proportions could express and communicate his genius. I stood there with my neck painfully, yet pleasantly, crooked on high…I stood there as a child, I am a child before him. I read his words on the four surrounding walls with slow meter, admiration, wonder, inspiration, and jealousy. The color of the lights in his great hall are a soft orange, eerie as the color of ghosts, & the perfect shade to express his ideas, an enduring burning and not too brightly such that they could not be understood by every human being, alive or dead.
Even if America is someday supplanted as the world’s greatest nation and its physical reign is only 300 or so years, our intellectual reign will be infinite. The influence and courage of our ideas, of Jefferson’s enkindling, will ripple on and improve humanity’s plot in the universe. America embodies liberty, but we do not own liberty, it is a human idea owned only by God. We have and will share liberty and that will be America’s enduring empire.
Here is one random, yet clarifying quote from him and about him:
An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens….There has never been a moment of my life in which I should have relinquished for it the enjoyments of my family, my farm, my friends & books.
~Thomas Jefferson (letter to John Melish, 13 January 1813)
Comment by tet on 26 July 2007 at 7:35 am:
Amen, Billy Joe, amen.
Whenever someone speaks to me despairing of their hopes in the world, I’m reminded that there were only 29 people who wrote the Constitution of the United States, and earlier, only 56 signers of the Declaration.
They were people of varying ages, but with the optimism of the Enlightenment and the willingness to see the concept of God-given rights to its logical conclusion.
We own not only the good parts of the past two centuries, but also the last, best hope for a bright future to their dreams of a just society.
Tom
Comment by Billy Joe Mills on 26 July 2007 at 7:45 am:
tet, I added a paragraph, inspired in part by what you said. thanks.
Comment by Augur on 26 July 2007 at 7:46 am:
Great photos Billy and even better write up.
“None of us, no not one is perfect. And were we to love none with imperfection, this world would be a desert for our love.” -Thom. Jefferson
The Jefferson Memorial has a quiet solemnity that is only rivaled by the Korean Memorial at certain hours of the night when your only company is a series of life-sized reminders of our forgotten war.
Comment by Billy Joe Mills on 26 July 2007 at 9:31 am:
The color of the lights in his great hall are a soft orange, eerie as the color of ghosts, & the perfect shade to express his ideas, an enduring burning and not too brightly such that they could not be understood by every human being.
Even if America is someday supplanted as the world’s greatest nation and its physical reign is only 300 or so years, our intellectual reign will be infinite. The influence and courage of our ideas will ripple on and improve humanity’s plot in the universe. America embodies liberty, but we do not own liberty, it is a human idea owned only by God. We have and will share liberty and that will be America’s enduring empire.
Comment by tet on 26 July 2007 at 10:16 am:
Not to divert us from your subject matter (for very long, anyway) but the Wall Street Journal has finally caught up with Urbanagora and written an article on the influence of Robert Heinlein on our society.
Actually, since Heinlein wrote extensively both on liberty and the future of humanity, it’s actually right in line with this discussion.
Tom
Comment by JayBandit on 26 July 2007 at 12:27 pm:
I was watching the movie “With Honors” and I have to say that Joe Pesci has a great speech in one scene about how the men who wrote the constitution were great not because of their infinite wisdom, but because they understood that they didn’t know everything, so they left methods for the people to “fix” it later on.
Billy,
I think we need to get you a camera with some more flash…I wanted to see some more detail in those shots!
Comment by tet on 26 July 2007 at 12:36 pm:
Jay, you know that the graduation scene from that movie was filmed in front of the UofI Auditorium? They also reframed some of the walkways on the Quad to more resemble Harvard. A lot of us were extras in that scene.
One of the great things about the Founders’ “fixing” plan was that they made it as incredibly difficult as possible so it would not be done casually. Smart move.
Oh, another quick digression. (I don’t want to write a big thing on any of these, since I don’t want to step on this beautiful piece of Billy Joe’s.)
There’s a new piece in Reason about a meeting going on in Chicago dealing with a bunch of Singularity stuff I’ve been talking about, particularly immortality:
Transhumanism at work
Be very careful in what you create in the next twenty years. You might have to deal with the future for a very, very long time.
Tom
Comment by Augur on 26 July 2007 at 1:58 pm:
Speaking of good ideas in constitutional drafting, one of the few things IL did right is make it easy to revoke an amendment while it’s still pending. I don’t remember the exact ratios, and I’m too busy to check at the moment, but essentially in IL you have to have a super majority to amend the IL constitution, say 3/4 After both houses pass the amendment it takes a year or two to go into effect (cant remember which), in the time that it is pending, it can be revoked by a simple majority. Now that is a good idea!
Comment by tet on 26 July 2007 at 2:10 pm:
If they’d do that with government taxes and spending, Augur, I’d have a lot less trouble with that on a Federal level.
Tom
Comment by JayBandit on 28 July 2007 at 1:39 pm:
Tet,
Very cool info; I love hearing the little movie tidbits like that. I impressed some people out here with my knowledge that the movie Groundhog Day was actually filmed in Woodstock, Illinois, rather than Punxsutawney, which is only a short hour drive from my home (we’re planning on going there one of these years to see the big event). One of my new friends out here in the steel city has been in probably a dozen major pictures; including Dogma, Kingpin, and my favorite (jokingly): Sudden Death.
I hate the last movie both because it is an awful Van Damn movie and because it reminds me every time how the Penguins swept the Blackhawks in the Stanley Cup Finals that year…::tears::