Madam. Sir.

You will forgive the intrusion. I had intended to remain where I was put.

It is not customary for a man to return from the grave to comment upon the housekeeping. But I have been watching for some time, and watching has become insupportable without remark.

I have chosen this day deliberately. Two hundred and thirty-nine years ago, in a closed room in Philadelphia, thirty-eight men signed the Constitution of the United States. A thirty-ninth signature was added on behalf of a delegate who was absent.¹

Franklin, for one, was not entirely delighted with it. His remarks were read aloud to the Convention by James Wilson:

“I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them”²

And then he signed it anyway. That is the whole of the American method, and I have never found a better description of it.

Many readers assume this project is about politics. It is, in fact, about citizenship.

I have no candidate. I have no party. I am not interested in whether you consider yourself of the left hand or the right. I am interested in whether you can name the rights you hold, whether you would notice their absence, and whether you can tell the difference between a government and a performance.

On the evidence, I am not encouraged.

What follows is the first of a weekly accounting. Attend to it or do not.

Item the First

In Which a Performance Is Mistaken for a Government

There is a distinction, once thought elementary, between governing and being seen to govern. The first is difficult, unglamorous, and largely invisible. The second requires a camera and an absence of shame.

You have developed a considerable talent for rewarding the second and then complaining about the scarcity of the first. You express surprise at this arrangement, as though it had befallen you rather than been assembled by you, weekly, out of your own attention.

Attention is a currency. You spend it freely. The men and women you complain of are wealthy in nothing else.

Item the Second

Concerning a Document You Have Not Read

The Constitution can be read in an evening. It is shorter than the terms of service you accepted this morning without reading, thereby agreeing to conditions unknown, imposed by parties unmet, for purposes unstated.

You have consented to more from a telephone application than you have troubled to read of the instrument that establishes the government exercising power in your name.

I do not say this to shame you. I say it because the thing is short, it is free, and it is yours — a combination increasingly rare.

A citizenry that cannot name its rights has not lost them. It has misplaced them, which is how they are usually taken.

Item the Third

The Faction Problem, Revisited by Its Original Complainant

I have been accused of harping. I accept the charge and intend to continue.

In September 1796 I issued my final counsel to the country. On the spirit of party, it

“serves always to distract the Public Councils and enfeeble the Public Administration. It agitates the Community with ill founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another”³

You printed this. You quoted it. You hung it on the wall of a schoolroom. Then you built two enormous machines for the express purpose of doing all three, sorted yourselves into them by temperament, and now regard the other machine’s inhabitants as a foreign population occupying your own country.

They are your neighbors. Some of them are your relations. Do not be so certain that they want the opposite of everything you do. Many profit handsomely from persuading you that they do.

I do not ask you to agree with them. I ask you to remember that the arrangement requires them.

In fairness to the record: I did not think parties uniformly evil. I allowed that in some governments they may serve as useful checks. I did not think that true of a republic like this one.⁴

Item the Fourth

On Borrowing, and Who Is Sent the Bill

A subject that raises little enthusiasm and considerable debt.

Borrowing can solve an immediate problem while creating a long-term obligation. That obligation may fall upon citizens who had no voice in the original decision.

I will leave that where it lies. The arithmetic is not complicated, and the parties who ought to find it uncomfortable are unlikely to be reading.

George’s Approval Rating™

A Final Word from Your Snarky Sentinel

I once wrote, plainly enough, that I was “conscious of a defective education.”⁵ Office did not require me to know everything. It required judgment, duty, and the humility to remember that power is held in trust. I returned mine twice—once with the commission, once with the presidency.⁶

You are not required to be the cleverest person in the room. You are required to know what has been entrusted to you.

Your Faithful Observer,
Gen. G. Washington (Ret.)
I expected better. I brought sources.

Light This Candle

Assignment the First

Read the Constitution. All of it. Not a summary, not a thread, not a man on a screen telling you what is in it.

Read the Preamble and Articles I–VII, then all twenty-seven amendments. Attend to what was changed as well as what was written first. The record contains exclusions and compromises; the amendments form part of the story and require your attention.

Proceed in more than one sitting if necessary. It is free, and it is yours.

Pay particular attention to Article I. The instrument devotes more detailed treatment to Congress than to either of the other branches.⁷ Mr. Madison later argued that the legislature was the department most likely to draw all power into what he called its “impetuous vortex”⁸ — a judgment of his, not a unanimous verdict of the Convention. Read it and decide for yourself whether he was right.

When you have finished, tell one other person that you did it. That is the whole assignment. Civic habits are contagious, and this one has been in remission for some time.