Franklin. Feynman. Freedom.
It’s over!
Roll up the interstates. Smelt the statues. Crash all the satellites. Clear out Congress. Cash out Wall Street. Deflate all the footballs. Disband the military and expose our breasts to the tender mercies of the CCP. Evict Joe (explain you’re taking him for ice cream) and Kamala (but don’t bother trying to explain).
The United States of America is falling apart.
You can see the signs everywhere: as we idly crunch popcorn while watching (in IMAX with Laser 4K!) American civil warriors dice each other with AR-15s; as we negotiate the conversational minefield that is every Thanksgiving dinner; as our popup army of achingly self-important podcasters tout the virtues of an American divorce to their mom and their Aunt Ruth upstairs who have it on softly in the background while they try to outwit Vanna White; as pro-Hamas protesters in Dearborn, Michigan chant, “Death to America!” and their keffiyeh-clad college comrades are "totally on board with neo-Marxist oppressor-oppressed ideology” and “are driven by an anti-Israeli animus that is also and inextricably an anti-American animus.”
It's clearly over for Lincoln’s “last best hope of earth,” except for one nagging question: Why were those antisemitic, vegan and gluten free, joyously oppressed college protesters wearing masks? I mean, if your goal is to Samson the power structure, why hide? Well, according to the Wall Street Journal, they covered their faces to avoid disciplinary action, facial recognition tech, and – wait for it! – “...to not to limit their future prospects, including employment opportunities.”
In other words, “Can we hold off on the revolution until my recruiter hears back from McKinsey Consulting?”
There it is. That’s the ingenious double helix at the heart of the political stability of the world’s oldest democracy: Our proto-revolutionaries are allowed the freedom of expression to get their Che on, but damn few of them are willing to go so far as to screw up their shot at a corner office.
Even the Freedom to Whine is Essential to Being Free!
For all our embarrassing, raucous, sharp tongued and elbowed, exasperating, cacophonous, and oftentimes stupid public discourse, America endures precisely because of our freedom to engage in that discourse: it releases all our revolutionary steam before it can do any real harm to the Constitution. It’s also why America is both the most entrepreneurial and the most fun place on earth, as even our spoiled, maleducated, and brainwashed elites know; for all their incessant, high-pitched whining, why do you think so few of them ever leave?
Our free clash of ideas also explains why all the other -isms eventually slither back into the sea after their periodic, ballyhooed assaults on the USA; why when Joe Biden threw open our border, millions of desperate people fled their various workers’ paradises for a shot at making it in the one, true workers’ paradise; and why an immigrant from India recently told me that ninety-five percent of the Earth’s inhabitants would rather live in America.
Richard Feynman, the eminent American physicist, understood the importance of our First Amendment freedoms from a scientist’s perspective. In his 1955 essay, The Value of Science, Feynman chides those who ask scientists to provide answers to social problems, explaining that scientists have no magic formula for solving them. Instead, he advocates for the constant churn of new ideas to lead society forward:
Feynman was absolutely right about our Founding Fathers’ devotion to science. You’ll never find a more head over heels advocate for the scientific method than Ben Franklin; his experiments with electricity obsessed him to an almost comic degree. Washington, Adams, Hamilton and Madison were all members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Jefferson, our Citizen Scientist, also believed in the churn of ideas,
“Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.”
Fear, Doubt and the Great American "Churn"!
The threat to our democracy won’t come from the preening Hamasniks beclowning themselves on our wisdom-free campi. Feynman and our Founders knew that the real threat comes from those well-meaning, sincere, soft-spoken, compassionate, for-your-own-gooders who seek to limit our speech rights by eliminating what they deem “disinformation.” All their efforts must be thwarted.
As Feynman wrote, it’s our responsibility, “knowing the great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress that is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom, to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed, and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations.”
On the 248th anniversary of the glorious birth of our country and for the rest of time, God bless the churn!
Photo Credit- National Park Service