The Politics of Gene Wolfe

Jeff Wilson · 04 Jul 2010, 13:02 · from 2010-July.txt.gz

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From: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Sun, 04 Jul 2010 08:02:39 -0500
Subject: (urth) The Politics of Gene Wolfe
In-Reply-To: <4C30751E.9080004 at verizon.net>
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Message-ID: <4C30866F.1030909 at io.com>

On 7/4/2010 6:48 AM, David Stockhoff wrote:
> Of course fascism hadn't been invented yet. Nor had lynching and armed
> race riots.

I'm not sure how much of this is humor or rhetoric.

> But I agree that the 2A did not have individual self-defense against
> muggers and burglars in mind, any more than it was intended to secure
> only the state's right to defend itself. It addresses the right of the
> People. Not persons. Not states.

I'm not sure how you distinguish between persons and People. The 4th 
amendment, introduced at the same time on the same piece of paper, uses 
the identical wording "the right of the people". Does this mean that 
persons, houses, papers, and effects are also held under government 
regulation as a collective rather than an individual right? Of course, 
in the idiom of the time, "person" had a much stronger connotation than 
today of the individual's objective physical presence, their physical 
body and the artifacts and space immediately proximate to it. This would 
make it a poorer term of reference for establishing abstract, 
inalienable rights that endure even if the "person" had business 
physically far afield.

I'm pretty sure that Wolfe would agree that the People is made of 
individuals, and while a state can be a sovereign person and not their 
subjects, a literally democratic state is made of individual persons. 
Given his prodigious, endlessly elaborate convolutions of notional 
languages and expressions historic and posthistoric, one can expect him 
to be more than sufficiently informed to take the Constitution as it was 
intended to be read in its time, as a document of its time.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
IEEE Student Chapter Blog at
< http://ieeetamut.org >

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