Move Over Barack - Elizabeth is Not the Queen!

President Obama is not the only world leader to have his legitimacy questioned in recent years. While looking up something on You Tube concerning the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953 I ran across this intriguing short documentary. Basically, it follows the family lineage of Queen Elizabeth back through the centuries in order to prove that Elizabeth is not the rightful heir to the throne of England.

Ordinarily I would not really have spent much time watching the video, but it is pretty interesting. Not in respects to the purpose stated; that Elizabeth is not the rightful heir; but for the wealth of English history contained in the film. For Americans, English history can be a bit confusing, but this neatly constructed video forms a tight little package covering the years of the English Civil War and Cromwell’s March; both seminal events in the understanding of both England as a world Empire, and the Britain of today.

You have to wonder if this film has been of any comfort to President Obama. He has been under attack about that birth certificate for so long now that this film must surely have the effect of making him feel not so alone anymore. I’m glad I’m not a politician, or a world leader in any respect. It would be so difficult to wake up one day and find out that I’m not really me!

"American Epic" by Garrett Epps (2013)

I don’t often take exception with a book I have read. I either like it, or I don’t. The rare time that I do give a bad review to a book is usually a reaction on my part to some misinterpretation; or attempt at indoctrination; in a book which concerns history. This reaction is intensified when that book is about the United States Constitution. So, let’s just say that this book; while not an out and out misrepresentation; is, in my opinion, an attempt at indoctrination of the reader to the author’s point of view. And quite simply, that view is that the Constitution is flawed; and though it is never stated; the author seems to find it damaged enough to need replacing.

Whenever you read a book about the Constitution you should look for one thing immediately; the placement, or exclusion of the document about which the author is writing. If it is entirely missing from the book; as it was with Ray Raphael’s “Constitutional Myths”, which I reviewed here earlier this year; then you know something is wrong, as the author doesn't want you to see the real document in question.  

That review is here; http://robertwilliamsofbrooklyn.blogspot.com/2013/07/constitutional-myths-by-ray-raphael-2013.html

The second way to keep people from diligently comparing what the author wants you to believe with the actual text in question, is to bury that document in the back of the book as part of the Appendix, as Mr. Epps has done here. This has the effect on the reader of reading the indoctrination portion first, then the actual document; which is now perceived to be “flawed”; afterwards.

Mr. Epps takes the Constitution apart Article by Article; Amendment by Amendment; telling us all what the founding fathers really meant to write. He even tells us why. I find this fascinating, that he; and only he; can divine the true intentions of the daring and learned men who risked it all to found our nation.

The rewriting of the Constitution as envisioned by Mr. Epps begins with the very first Article in the Constitution; well; actually before that when he claims the Constitution was forced upon the States without any input from the people. This is an absurd claim, bolstered only by small anecdotal stories which are not borne out by the outcome of history. This is the same reasoning which allows people to claim that the Constitution usurped the Federalist Papers; which were a temporary and imperfect way to govern our newly formed nation, though they did serve a purpose while the Constitution came into being.

Mr. Epps claims; in a very narrow reading of events; that the Representatives of the individual States had no idea that they were assembling to write a new Constitution. They were there to amend only the existing set of rules which pre-dated the Constitution. It was all a secret cabal; a plot of which no one was aware. Not even the legislators themselves. He would have you believe that it was all so hush-hush that when these representatives went home, and the Constitution was finally ratified by all the states, no one took notice of that change.

I’ll use just a few instances to outline what I perceive to be very narrow readings of the Constitution on the part of the author;

Page 22; paragraph 3 states that nothing in Article 1 Section 8 applies to the territories annexed after 1787. That’s right; he actually says that. I do not think a response, or criticism is in order here. Just take a trip to any state which has been annexed since that time and you will see that America is whole. We may not agree on things, but the country is governed, on the whole, by the United States Constitution. I think it would be hard to find many people who would dispute that.

Page 71; paragraph 4 quotes Article 4 Section 3 as stating “no new state shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other state; nor any state be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or parts of States, without the consent of the legislatures of the States  concerned as well as that of Congress.” He then moves the semi-colon and attributes new grammatical meaning upon the whole Article based on a very narrow reading of that semi-colon. Clearly, the purpose of the Article was to bind the Colonies together as one, without having the Northeast break away from the southern states at a time when dissolving our new democracy would have been disastrous.

This was also the basis for denying the right to leave the Union to the Southern States in 1861. Had the founding Fathers not included this Article there would have been no legal basis to keep the country whole and weather the storm of the Civil War. Wise men indeed were these founding fathers of ours. I suppose; according to Mr. Epps; that West Virginia does not have the right to exist; since it violates that Article. But that would be a very narrow reading; ignoring the fact that West Virginia left Virginia when Virginia violated that Article to become the capitol of the Confederate States.

I’m going to skip forward a bit, or else this review will be enormously long. On page 174 Mr. Epps finds what he perceives to be the first time the words “the Right to Vote” appear in the Constitution, as Part of the 14^th Amendment. Technically this is true. But if you skip back to Article One Section 2 of the Constitution you will find that “The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second year by the people of the several states…” The italics are mine. The meaning is clear; the people shall chose; or vote; for their representatives. Of course the 14^th Amendment was one of the so-called Reconstruction Amendments, composed after the end of the Civil War, but the difference in language aside, the intent is clear on both occasions; the people shall chose; or vote, for their representatives.

This was a difficult book for me to read and to review. The difficulty in reading it was due to the feeling that, in my opinion, this book was written with the agenda of undermining the people’s faith in the Constitution. The difficulty in reviewing it is that I dislike giving a bad review. This is probably only the 4^th such one I have done in 5 years.

Don’t take me wrong; there is much going wrong in Washington, D.C. at the present time. With that assertion I cannot disagree with Mr. Epps. But the Constitution is not the problem. The problem lies with those people in power who ignore it, and abuse it for their own gain. The answer, therefore, lies in changing those people, and not the Constitution; except, of course, by Amendment.

"The Untold History of the United States" by Michael Moore (2012)

I don’t give many bad reviews. As a matter of fact, in the 4 and a half years in which I have been doing this, there have only been three books which I have reviewed negatively. It is no coincidence that these 3 books were all written with an agenda to misinform. One was written by an Islamic, one was written by a Conservative, and now this one written by Michael Moore; no explanation of his agenda necessary. I offer this as proof on my consistency in reasoning.

As he takes us on a whirlwind tour of our American misadventures, concluding that we have met the “Evil Empire” and it is us, he neglects to position his arguments against the backdrop of history as he deplores, page after page, our imperialistic designs. His take on the acquisition of Hawaii is that we were bent on world domination. Completely ignored is the fact that Russia and Japan were already rattling sabers at one another, and would fight a horrific war between them over domination of the Pacific; its resources; and of course Hawaii. Had we not gained possession of Hawaii when we did, then Japan would have been able to launch her planes from carriers based there against San Francisco. But details have never bothered Mr. Moore before, so why was I expecting something different from this book?

Our domination of the Philippine Islands is fairly accurate, though he does seem to gloss over the fact that we did grant them Independence after helping them to defeat the Japanese. And although there have been problems with our still having troops and ships stationed there, for the most part, the people and government of the Philippines seem to regard our presence in the area as more of a positive than a negative.

This is likewise in just about every one of the 132 countries which Mr. Moore laments about, where we have troops stationed. His thinking seems parallel to that of most Conservatives, who continually lament that we cannot be the “world’s policeman.” This is odd reasoning for an avowed liberal such as Mr. Moore claims to be. It gives one pause to think about just why he writes what he does. Is it how he really feels, or just the lure of easy money? By the way, the lure of easy money is one of the things Mr. Moore complains about the most, blaming many of the world’s ills upon it.

Like a reverse image of Rush Limbaugh, Mr. Moore goes charging through the history of America with an agenda. Where Mr. Limbaugh would have you think us Gods; Mr. Moore paints us as devils. He even takes our country to task over the Cuban Missile Crisis, labeling us as the reckless aggressors, even while acknowledging the massive buildup of tactical nuclear weapons which we did not know about at the time. Had we invaded, we would have been wiped out. The policy Of Mutual Assured Destruction, often derided as MAD, is also something which Mr. Moore fails to realize actually saved us from coming to actual nuclear war. Had one side only been able to launch a first strike, there would have been a nuclear war.

Only the fact that neither side could afford to pull the nuclear trigger on the other saved us from catastrophe. Contrast that against today’s post-Cold War world, with rogue nations; and terrorists ones such as Pakistan; in possession of nuclear unarms. Do you feel safer now? Under the policy of M.A.D., there was never a nuclear confrontation after the bombing of Japan at the conclusion of the Second World War. This is something which the author fails to acknowledge, or even mention.

While taking careful and deliberate aim at the policies of the United States in the 1950’s, Mr. Moore paints a bleak picture of the hare brained schemes being considered by the scientific community. Some of these plans were outright wacky; such as the plan to use nuclear weaponry to hasten the melting of the Polar Ice Caps, raising the world’s temperature by 10 degrees; or the scheme to use the atomic bomb to change the course of hurricanes, regardless of the fallout which would occur. There was also thought given to Project Chariot, which would have had the United States military blast holes in Alaska to harvest the shale oil beneath the frozen surface. What he never tells you is that these plans were never implemented, just tossed about. In Mr. Moore’s world, even ideas are prohibited.

The book is not all negative. But even where his facts are correct, he never gives America the credit it is due for the good things she has done. For instance, what other nation in the world would go to the lengths which we did during the Bosnia-Serbian War, when we helped Islamic people from genocide at the hands of their Christian neighbors? And, we did that at a time when tensions were reaching an all-time high between America, which was being billed as the Great Satan, and most of the other Islamic nations of the world. Where was their help in the aftermath of 9/11, when they danced in the streets, while hiding Bin Laden for 10 years?

When it comes time to examine the Second World War, once again we are the evil ones who firebombed cities, which was even worse than the atomic bomb, notwithstanding that had we not done so, the world today would be desolate place as far as freedom is concerned.

In typical fashion, Mr. Moore laments that the bomb was built without necessity, since we already knew that the Germans had abandoned their efforts at gaining such a weapon in favor of further developing the V1 and V2 rockets which they were using to kill civilians in Britain. He seems not to realize that once the tide of the war had changed back in favor of the Germans, they would have continued the experiments towards obtaining a nuclear weapon, if only to subjugate the Soviets.

As a matter of fact; Mr. Moore inadvertently tips his hand here; as it was only the pressure exerted on Roosevelt by the 3 main scientists who had fled Germany, including Einstein, that the bomb was an absolute necessity if we were to win the war. They even corroborated the fact that Germany was then, indeed, working on such a weapon herself, thus fueling the Roosevelt administration’s decision to go ahead with the bomb. It was only Oppenheimer and Davis who slowed the pace down enough to ascertain that the bomb would not ignite the earth’s atmosphere and destroy all life on the planet before proceeding with the experiments. So, one might conclude that the German scientists on both sides were pushing their respective governments to obtain this new weapons technology. Therefore, it is absurd to place the blame for the resultant Cold War on any one leader’s shoulders. This whole section had me wondering about Mr. Moore squares this view of Roosevelt with his hero of the New Deal? Me, I don’t have that problem; I think he was right on both occasions.

As far as the decision to drop the bomb which ushered in the Cold War, without it we would have lost at least 100,000 more Americans in order to take the island fortress of Japan.

By page 392 it becomes apparent that this book will never cease to amaze me. The author blames the policies of Henry Kissinger for the ruin of America’s stature in the world, and uses that as a pretext for the failed Presidency of Jimmy Carter. He uses the logic that the same people were still calling the shots for the White House. Jimmy was a well-intentioned, but un-involved bystander. By this logic, Reagan was innocent of any wrongdoing during the Iran-Contra affair, and Bush was misled into the war in Iraq by faulty advisers with agendas of their own.

This is an interesting book, with a lot of information in it. As such, it needs to be read carefully. Facts are funny things, and in the hands of professional writers and movie makers such as Mr. Moore, can be bent to support whatever conclusion you care to make them support. But, in the end, this book is mainly an apology for being American, and though my government may be temporarily in the hands of idiots, being born American is one thing for which I will never apologize.