A most important day.
Thursday, September 17 is Constitution Day. Most people don’t know that. We don’t set off fireworks on September 17. Constitution Day goes by every year largely unnoticed.
But that doesn’t mean it isn’t important. In fact, one might argue that Constitution Day is the anniversary of one of the most important things to happen in all the roughly 5,000 years of recorded history.
Constitution Day marks the observance of the day in Philadelphia in 1787 when 39 of the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention – who had been working since May in a sweltering room in what is now called Independence Hall – put their signatures on the document that we now call the U.S. Constitution.
Those men couldn’t have known it at the time, but they changed the world.
The Constitution is a monument to word economy. The Congress of today that the Constitution created can’t seem to write a law in fewer than 2,000 pages. The men in Philadelphia launched a great nation in approximately 4,500 words.
To my mind, of those 4,500 words, four particularly stand out.
You’d probably guess the first three. They are, “We the People” We’ve all seen the beautiful calligraphy of the Constitution’s preamble. The words, “We the People” are inscribed in script much larger than the text that follows. That’s no accident. It signifies that with respect to the relationship between government and the people, the people stand superior.
That leaves the fourth word. For me, it’s “ordain.” It appears in the final phrase of the preamble and it reads:
[We the People]…do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
The significance of that single word, “ordain” cannot be overstated. In this context, according to Webster, the word means: “To order, establish, or enact something formally by law or high authority.”
In this instance, that high authority is the people themselves, and not a king or emperor or high priest of some sort.
The People.
In that single word, the people claim the authority to create their government. Hereditary title supplies no entitlement to rule them. Military strength supplies no moral warrant. Government’s legitimate authority comes from the people who establish it.
We take that for granted today. It was revolutionary at the time.
To be clear, the Americans of the late 18th century didn’t invent representative government, constitutional restraints, or republicanism. Their achievement was to bring these ideas together at scale. Their innovation was an ambitious federal republic, with a written constitution standing above the ordinary exercise of political power.
We the People identified the source of authority. The institutions that followed divided its exercise. States retain their own governments. No single institution possesses all the instruments of national power.
The Constitution’s shortcomings and contradictions are well documented and often discussed. But too little discussed is the fact that the nation whose government was ordained into existence by its own people became the most prosperous, most successful nation in history.
No, we don’t shoot fireworks or otherwise celebrate that ordination every September 17th. But one might reasonably argue that we should.
As Franklin said after the signing of the Constitution: “We’ve given you a Republic if you can keep it”. Let’s keep the best form of government the world has ever seen.
Paul, this column deserves far more comment and feedback. So beautifully written, makes me proud, very proud, to be an American. Here we have your usual succinctness and clarity coupled with your obvious love for our nation’s Constitution. My apologies form not commenting sooner. In this Donald Trump economy our business is booming, keeping me very busy in all the good ways.
Paul, I want to be direct with you about why I’ve stopped listening to KTBB.
When you tell your audience you’re “sitting down with” someone at the diamond place in Dallas, the audio tells a different story. You sound like you’re in a studio, and your paid sponsor or guest sounds like they’re in an empty warehouse with their voice echoing off the walls. Everyone listening can hear it. It’s not a small production issue. It’s misleading your listeners, and it tells us you think we won’t notice. We do.
Then there’s the commentary. You constantly tell us what we’re thinking, as if you’re inside our heads. You talk about tension in the house over what’s for dinner like it’s something every family struggles with. It isn’t. Not everyone thinks the way you do, and assuming we all do comes across as arrogant and out of touch.
You Tell Me Texas is called an open forum, but it only opens discussion on the topics you choose. There’s no way for a listener to raise something outside of what you’ve already decided to talk about. And the one time a year you ask for suggestions or how we feel about the station isn’t enough. If you truly want to hear from Texas, give people a place to tell you what they think, on their terms, any time of the year.
I’ve reached the point where I’m turning the station off. This isn’t meant to be cruel. It’s meant to be honest. Stop staging conversations, stop speaking for your audience, and start giving us room to speak for ourselves. Until that changes, you’ve lost a listener.
And for the love of God stop telling us your name we get it we know it but every commercial that you do you have to reiterate and restate it as if we’re slow and not getting it, the fact is we understand your voice we know who you are…. Well Paul what say you or is that something you would ask me, even though you don’t know who I am….
Well, Mr./Ms. Anonymous, I hate to lose you.
But let me take your criticisms point by point.
One, when I ask the question of a client that the client answers in a commercial, I am in fact sitting down with him. Those commercials are the distillation of actual, real-life, one-on-one conversations with our advertisers. The fact that for quality sake I restate in post production the question I asked during the actual sit-down doesn’t make a material difference to the content. And I’m proud to say, those commercials have been quite effective and effective advertising is how we get paid.
Second, what’s for dinner and where to get it is a very common dilemma for busy Americans. The American restaurant industry pretty much depends upon the reality of that dilemma. And besides, I qualify the statement in the opening sentence of the commercial anyway. It’s now off the air but when it was airing the opening words were, “I don’t know about you, but one recurring source of tension in my house revolves around the question, ‘what do you want to do about dinner?'” I immediately qualified the statement. I never said that I thought it was something “every family struggles with.”
As to my commentaries here at You Tell Me Texas. Yes, I open the discussion by saying what’s on my mind. I choose the topic for discussion. That hardly makes me unique. It’s what every talk show host and political pundit on cable TV in the country does. That’s kinda how it works.
As to giving a place to tell me what you think, that’s exactly why I named the forum, “You Tell Me.” (Are you not telling me what you think right now?)
And finally, as to your criticism of me stating my name in commercials: I am fortunate enough to have had sufficient success in this business that advertisers want my name in their commercials. I am quite literally being paid by them to state my name because — and I am humbled in saying this — they want the association.
Mr./Ms. Anonymous, I’d have a lot more respect for your criticisms if you were forthright enough to identify yourself. But I nevertheless have enough respect to take the time to offer this response. I’m sorry you’re leaving KTBB. But you will be always be welcome should you decide to return.