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Bathtub Nation

The "Founding Fathers" (Get used to it!  There were no women, then!) were in favor of big government.  They had small governments--the Colonies, the States, the Territories--and they knew what was needed was a bigger government; big enough to manage the whole nation.  

 "We the People, in order to form a more perfect union. . . ."

 All the current nonsense that seems to assume that a more perfect union would consist of a federal government small enough to drown in a wooden bucket in South Carolina ignores the simple fact that the Founding Genders knew that we needed a legal way to affirm a national identity.  

 We had a terrible Civil War about a hundred and fifty years ago that tested whether we were a nation, and not two nations, or just a conglomeration of States, some of which wanted to preserve human slavery, and some of which despised the practice.  We affirmed our nationhood.  

 All the baloney about seceding from the nation that delights boneheads with leftover racist yearnings runs contrary to the very reason for wanting to form a more perfect union:  a nation.  Texas is not going to become a nation.  If it did, it would soon become precisely what it does not want to be:  a Spanish-speaking nation.  And the Panhandle of Idaho would become a tree farm, probably owned by Weyerhaeuser Timber Company.  

 It is the binding together of the smaller places with particular character and peculiar ideas that makes nationhood:  that is to say, that affirms that we belong to something larger than a shale-oil field in North Dakota.  

 We are larger than the Old South, or the Old North, or than the Great and Sovereign State of Massachusetts.  If there be glory here, it is in having achieved and preserved nationhood; something larger and kinder and finer than what we can be in a bathtub.  

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