Asner Quotes

The treasure shouldn't do the hunting, and you're a treasure.

Raising kids is part joy and part guerilla warfare.

Raising kids is part joy and part guerrilla warfare.

And there you have your Founders and Framers in all their elite glory—the 1 percent of their time. Many spent more than they made. Struggled their entire lives with debt. And, when they could, always married into money. They were—obvious to say—petty, flawed, inconsistent, and all too human. Yet compared to many of our feckless lawmakers of today,XV those rich white guys were indeed like demigods come from Mount Olympus to walk the Earth. Or at least the streets of Philadelphia. Not merely politicians, they were (collectively) inventors, architects, scientists, linguists, and scholars who had studied Greek and Latin; who read Voltaire, John Stuart Mill, and David Hume. More interestingly, Voltaire, John Stuart Mill, and David Hume read them.XVI They were eloquent orators and brilliant writers. They wrote books, political articles, essays, and long, philosophical letters to their wives, friends, and to one another.XVII So who were those guys? They were men of the Enlightenment who valued reason over dogma, tolerance over bigotry, and science over faith. And, unlike the current Right-Wing doomsayers and fearmongers, they were all, truly, apostles of optimism.

Most of the Founders and Framers were Deists. Deism is a religion that believes in a God who really doesn’t give a shit.

Of all the Founders, Adams may have been the most churchgoing. But as a Unitarian, he did not believe in the Holy Trinity, the Holy Ghost, or the divinity of Jesus.XII Adams was a staunch, lifelong believer in religious liberty. As the primary author of the Massachusetts State Constitution, he wrote, “No subject shall be hurt, molested, or restrained in his person . . . for worshipping God in the manner most agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience.” And nary a word about the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Roughly speaking: more than forty held government bonds. More than twenty were moneylenders. Over fifteen were slave owners. The rest an assortment of land and debt speculators. And most dabbled in more than one category. George Washington, for example, was a slave owner, a moneylender, a land speculator, and the largest holder of government IOUs in the country. Who was not at the Convention is as interesting as who was: unrepresented were small farmers, shopkeepers, Revolutionary War veterans, laborers, indentured servants, and, of course, slaves, Indians, and women. What we have instead is a small circle of capitalist elites with George Washington at the center. They were (if we’re to believe only half of what Beard tells us) a rogues’ gallery of scoundrels, scalawags, moneylenders, stockjobbers,XXIX embezzlers, and, as it would turn out, traitors. Not to mention lawyers. Men, it would be fair to say, drawn to the power of their own purses.

I’m not Susan Sarandon or George Clooney for one thing.” “Or Ed Asner, who is very special to me. But you are Walt Booth, and you rank right up there. But be careful, Walt. People will think we’re serious.” He grinned at her. “At the risk of scaring you to death, I’m very serious about you, Muriel. And a good relationship is exactly what I’m in the market for. That, and a decent dishwasher.

Pissed off by the lies, misrepresentations, and outright horseshit, I decided it was time to strike back. It was time to reclaim the Constitution. Besides, if the Righties were wrong about everything else—like health care, climate change, and the corporate tax rate—they had to be wrong about the Constitution. First, I did my homework. I read the Constitution and the amendments; perused The FederalistV and Madison’s notes taken during the Constitutional Convention; surveyed the lives of the Founders and FramersVI; looked over the Supreme Court opinions of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas; and even tried to digest Glenn Beck’s The Original Argument, Mark Levin’s The Liberty Amendments, and Dr. Ben Carson’s A More Perfect Union—three of the best over-the-counter sleep aids on the market. To find out how the mind of a strict constructionist works, I also dipped into Ted Cruz’s autobiography, A Time for Truth, a faith-based romance novel in which the hero falls in love with himself at an early age.