My sister and brother-in-law know me so well. I saw this book on Christmas Eve in a Borders, pulled it off the shelf, read its summary, sighed, and replaced it. I didn’t have the time or money to add this book to my purchases. Then, Christmas morning, I tear the paper off the very same book. 

I finished it this morning. Lepore’s writing flows, it’s accessible, and she moves fluidly from America’s Revolutionary period to present day, drawing connections between these times while reminding us that Then is not Now and vice versa. Lepore posits that the current TEA Party movement uses the Revolution—as many political parties and groups of all ilks throughout American history have—to advance and justify their cause and their aims. They do this, however, by collapsing the temporal distance between Then and Now, claiming the Founders are rolling in their graves due to the many deplorable things happening in our country today. But they’re not rolling, and we can’t—none of us—presume to know what they’d think of our current actions and legislature, or lack thereof. Times have changed. The Founders didn’t grant suffrage to women, does that mean they’re “rolling in their graves” because I voted? I don’t think so. (That’s partly why legal precedent has always kind of bugged me. Citing a case ruled on long ago [if it was indeed ruled on long ago] takes the present case or dispute out of context. I’m no law student, so maybe there’s another way of approaching the use of precedent, but it irks me. Even in Anatomy of Murder. “Irresistible impulse,” Jimmy?) Anyway, Lepore argues that such a view of history is fundamentalist, that treating the Declaration and Constitution like holy writ is counter to politics, to history, to society (OK, I added some of my own opinion there). 

Now, I didn’t like this book simply because I’m a fairly liberal person and skeptical of TEA Partiers and Glenn Beck and fundamentalism; I liked it because of Lepore’s writing, because I like learning about the American Revolution, because I like anything that casts that period in a new light. And I did like reading more about the TEA Party and how they identify with the people who dumped chests of tea in Boston Harbor. In a way, the continued use of the Founders and revolutionaries as mascots reassures me, in a way. Americans—at least, white Americans—feel a measure of relatability, of connection to those people. That’s almost gratifying. It’s when they say our current situation is exactly like theirs that I raise my eyebrows. We live in a completely different world. Until my indoor plumbing, laptop, and right to vote disappear, our world isn’t like colonial America’s.

This is not to imply TEA Partiers are stupid or misinformed. They hold the Constitution dear and, in Lepore’s book, most of the TEA Party members with which she speaks are able to quote passages from that document. Their interpretations are as valuable as mine. And frankly, I’d rather see a country debating the meaning of its centuries-old instructions for assembly, if you will, than live in a state characterized by ignorance and apathy.

This week on NPR’s Fresh Air, they’re replaying some of their favorite interviews from the year, and in Jon Stewart’s interview he said something important, “I think we always have to remember that people can be opponents, but not enemies. And there are enemies in the world. We just need the news media to help us delineate. And I think that’s where the failing is, that the culture of corruption in the media doesn’t allow us to delineate between enemies and opponents”(http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=130321994).

So the latter half of the quote doesn’t quite pertain to what I’ve been talking about, but the first part is great, for lack of a more suitable term of “I love this”. Stewart gets at something necessary for our culture, for any culture. People can coexist with different opinions, with shades of the same opinions. I’m losing my train of thought. Anyway, read the book. It’s smart, it’s fluid, it’s living.