Does anyone remember Edward G Robinson's character Dathan in "The Ten Commandments"? He was the house "colored man" before slavery was turned into an all-black cultural memory. If the Egyptian Captivity could be called a prison, he was a "trustee". When Moses came to ask Pharaoh to let my people go, he was against it. He had a cush life and job serving as go-between slave holder and slave. Even after the miracle of the Passover (you might want to bone up on that story, if you aren't Jewish), and Pharaoh finally let them go, he had to be drug kicking and screaming to join the rest of the children of Israel as they headed toward the Red Sea.. And even after seeing miraculous event after miraculous event, still, when things got dull in the place, he whispered in everyone's ear that maybe they should go back and Pharaoh would forgive them, or, the final straw, to melt down the gold and build new idols to old gods.
    Hold that thought.

    When I was in college I recall a late night studio public television broadcast (I was sweating off a hangover) in which one segment showed a b&w clip of George Beverly Shea singing "How Great Thou Art", followed by a discussion by various churchmen. Most spoke to Shea's baritone style and the music quality. But one I remember, a Methodist cleric, commented on the song itself, and said it was "theologically shallow." I went out an bought an LP, and played it over and over again, and wondered, not being a theologian, what was so shallow about it?
    A few years later, in a totally unrelated incident, I was in my car thumbing through radio stations and I picked up the tail end of a really happy song. This was the Vietnam War days, so there wasn't a lot of that in the water. A girl was singing about how lucky she was, a husband who loved her, a home, a little house, and how goddamed happy she was. And thankful, too. A complete anachronism for the zeitgeist of the times.
    I searched out the song, it took about a week, and found it was a country song by a girl named Donna Fargo. I got a 45 and loaned it around. "She's a country singer. A hick, " they all said. No one I knew thought much of the song. I scratched my head, listened to the words several times, and wondered, what's hick about being happily married in a home with a spouse who loves you? Still, wanting to be in, I suspended common sense and discarded it. I found it again on a CD collection only a month ago. It resurrected those old memories.
    A few years later I taught American Government in a small business college to young black men and women. I had to carry the show three hours straight, three days a week. It was tough gig. But it ended up the most gratifying three semesters in my life, and today I'd do it for free. You see, I had to "really read" the Constitution, and make it understandable to college students, many of whom had never read a book, and certainly had never had any of this material taught to them when state law required that it be taught to them, in middle school and high school. I decided to try to make it relevent. My one regret was that I couldn't have had them in the 9th grade instead of the 13th.
    Reducing the high-minded to the level of lesser minds is an ignoble pursuit in many peoples' minds, I've found. I've searched Christian, Hebrew, Muslim, and even oriental religions, and can find nowhere that this is discouraged. In fact, it is encouraged. A full 50% of mullahs in the Middle East are illiterate, having committed the Qu'ran to memory. This is a bad thing only if you confuse the Qu'ran with men-who-would-be-kings who wish to hold men in thrall. Christ said "suffer the little children to come unto me" and this likewise has been considered a bad thing by generations of Christian theologians, who found in that one phrase no special place for them.
     Looking at the Bill of Rights with one eye, while watching 22 innocent but cynical black faces with the other, one comes to see the Constitution differently, for it is indeed the highest-minded secular document ever written in anytime, in any place. Yet it was written by men, while learned, could not qualify to sit at a Harvard Club black tie banquet, amongst far lesser men who only sit in iconic praise of them. I've been to such places (having sneaked in), and felt like Captain George Taylor at an ape oratorio.
     The Constitution was written by high-minded men who were not high-brows. And they certainly didn't write it so as to enfranchise an elect levitical class to carry forward its message to the hoi polloi. The Constitution always should have been taught, and just as early and repetitively, as a Sunday School lesson. That it hasn't been taught in this way has alway been intentional, for that would deprive so many vain, but learned snobs their sinecures.

      Somehow this all leads me to Sarah Palin, and back to Dathan.
      The Constitution is a guide to lead men out of slavery. Above all things it must survive...intact. Yet it has been hijacked by a bunch of "house servants" (you can fill in other terms) who only want to hold onto their rice bowls. I'm not just speaking of John Kerry here, but lamentably of Peggy Noonan and Christopher Buckley, whose father would agree with me, not Chris.  I can find all sorts of metaphors to describe how hard it would be to find a leader out of this brood; a leader who can actually lead our children out of the wilderness our own vanities, appetites and lack of faith have condemned us to. Remember, God got so pissed he finally let the Children of Isreal sweat it out in the wilderness until not one of the original captives survived to enter the Promised Land. Hell, even Moses, for all his effort, all he got was a steep climb and glimpse from Mt Pisgah. This may be all we get, too.
      Never, never, never forget the shoulders you stand on...and all of those shoulders, all of them, saw God as George Beverly Shea sang about God, and saw hearth and home, family and happiness as Donna Fargo sang about life, as simple treasures. And all of those shoulders are cut out of the same mold as Sarah Palin.
BernardChumm