With canny and almost perverse wisdom, the British have instinctively appreciated that written Constitutions are fictional devices that in no way impede or prevent anything from happening.\u00a0 They allow everything.\u00a0 That is the true essence of a written constitution.<\/p>\n
The Soviet Union had a written constitution more glorious and democratic than anything our cynical Founding Fathers would have conceived.\u00a0 Yet it allowed and provided cover for the enforced starvation of eight million people \u2013 men, women, and children.\u00a0 It also gave a legal basis for the murder of millions in forced labor camps.<\/p>\n
The universally celebrated American Constitution, augmented by amendments, and interpreted by the Supreme Court, has allowed social changes in areas that would have confounded, appalled, and repelled its original authors.\u00a0 We are entering a period in which factionalism, irrationality, and declamations have replaced what was once called \u201creasoned thought\u201d or \u201crational thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n
The two most powerful stylists of English prose this nation has ever produced both grew up in extreme poverty – one on the Virginia frontier, the other in Illinois.\u00a0 With limited formal education, each had the ability of re-reading the same book, over and over again, as they had only a few books in boyhood.\u00a0 In the case of John Marshall, it was John Dryden\u2019s poetry, then the most beloved of English poets.\u00a0 Lincoln had six books, which included Pilgrim\u2019s Progress<\/em> and Aesop\u2019s Fables<\/em>.<\/p>\n Armed with their memorized<\/u> familiarity with those works, these men achieved the two highest positions in the United States.\u00a0 Relying entirely on a foundation of English prose and prosody, each made of the American Constitution the document he <\/em>wanted it to be.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>Benito Rakower, Ed.D.<\/strong>, was educated at Queens College and Harvard University, where he received a doctorate in the teaching of English. Before getting his degree at Harvard, Professor Rakower was trained professionally at the piano in German Baroque and French repertoire. This semester Dr. Rakower is teaching a course, “Against the Grain:\u00a0