Lessons Forgotten From My Old Daddy
Readers are perhaps familiar with my old daddy, as he pops up from time to time in my columns. He’s gone now, some forty years and it seems at the same time inconceivable and very real. Not hard to remember his face or his unselfconscious full-body-hug or the unique way he always smelled of tweed and tobacco.
America has its own old daddies, we keep referring to as founding fathers, but we don’t really believe it. Not all that much history taught anymore about how we came to be a nation.
At the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, when queried as he left Independence Hall on the final day of deliberation, a lady is said to have asked Dr. Benjamin Franklin, “Well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin, already 81 at the time, gave the pre-Churchillian reply, “A republic madame, if you can keep it.”
If we can keep it. We’d like to keep it. Sometimes it seems we don’t try all that hard, no matter the flags we fly on our car antennae or the mumbled words of th…