Awhile ago, I would have agreed with Henry Ford when he said “History is bunk". If I could have troubled myself to find out who Henry Ford was or why he said that. Yesterday, said I, doesn’t tell me what I need to know today. History is a hobby for old farts.

So I’m an old fart now. I find history fascinating. I find it fascinating that the authors of “freedom of speech" (1st Amendment of our Constitution) were all survivors of our Revolution, were all under sentence of hanging for speaking out against their Government (i.e., England), had the Revolutionary War been lost. Their freedom of speech was political, and a matter of life and death. Martin Luther King fought for it. It is this freedom to which the 1st Amendment speaks.

Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the 1st Amendment (and the rest of our Bill of Rights, Amendments 1-10), would have hated South Park. Indeed he would have denied most of its audience the right to vote – he thought that anyone not a white male property owner was unfit for the franchise. To grant true universal suffrage, said he, was to invite the fate of 5th century BCE Athenian democracy, the fate of the 1st century BCE Roman republic. In both cases, mobs, driven on by demagogues, seized governments (in the case of Athens, literally through the ballot box) and destroyed them, largely by pandering to fads popular with their constituencies. In both cases, rule “by the people" was replaced by military dictatorships, and in the case of Rome, by a hereditary, absolute, emperor. Oh, by the way, the Athenian empire is no more, and Rome fell. Perhaps you’ve heard.

I am not fond of illiterate pornography. I am equally unfond of prudery. I find the argument between the two camps over South Park unseemly. Is this a freedom of speech issue? Perhaps – but in my opinion it is a distraction. For meanwhile there is Iraq, a conflict urged by a demagogue with the roaring consent of the mob – or did none of you try to speak out against Afghanistan or Iraq in the days after 9/11? Did none remind the “Christians" among you, a large number of whom were old enough to have lived through Vietnam and should have known better, that the Bible has these wonderful lines like “Vengeance is mine, says the LORD" and “If one strikes you on the cheek, turn the other cheek" and see how far you got? Like maybe a CIA wiretap?

Yes indeed, I do find history fascinating. Maybe you’ve even heard this line describing it: “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it." See Rome, above.

  - O Ceallaigh

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