Special Opinion to the Cape Charles Mirror by Paul Plante
It is said by some among us, whether sages or village idiots remains to be seen, that the combined Federalist Papers, a collection of 85 articles and essays written under the pseudonym Publius by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay promoting the ratification of the United States Constitution, are totally worthless to us in our times today, and who is to know, perhaps they are right, notwithstanding that historian Richard B. Morris has called them an “incomparable exposition of the Constitution, a classic in political science unsurpassed in both breadth and depth by the product of any later American writer,” and notwithstanding that the Federalist Papers are considered one of the most important sources for interpreting and understanding the original intent of the United States Constitution.
“Get real, man, those dudes are long since dead, and besides, who can understand a word they even said, so who wants to know that ****” is a response I often get when I broach the subject of the “Founding Fathers” to younger people in America today.
For them, Alexander Hamilton is about HIP-HOP, not history.
It’s the beat, stupid, not the words!
Who cares who Alexander Hamilton was, I like the music and that is all that counts.
According to WIKIPEDIA, “Hamilton: An American Musical” is a musical about the life of American Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, with music, lyrics, and book by Lin-Manuel Miranda.
The musical made its Off-Broadway debut at The Public Theater in February 2015, where its engagement was sold out and then the show transferred to Broadway in August 2015 at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, where it received enthusiastic critical reception and unprecedented advance box office sales, so that in 2016, Hamilton received a record-setting 16 Tony nominations, winning 11, including Best Musical, and was also the recipient of the 2016 Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album and the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, while the prior Off-Broadway production of Hamilton won the 2015 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Musical as well as seven other Drama Desk Awards out of 14 total nominated categories.
For those of you who missed it in New York, a production of the musical began previews in Chicago in September 2016 and a national touring production is scheduled to begin in San Francisco in March 2017.
The musical will also be opening in the West End in October 2017, reopening the Victoria Palace Theatre which is currently being refurbished following the closure of the long running show, Billy Elliot.
So how about that, people?
You don’t need to try and read some stuffy old political disquisitions from 229 years ago in 1787 on stuff nobody has cared about in years, not to mention, generations, to know who Alexander Hamilton is today..
You can simply go to a musical, and learn all you need to know about the man, and his role in our history as a Founding Father.
“Founding Father?”
“Founding Father of what?”
“What you talking about there, Willis?”
Hmmmmm, you know, as I look around me, I find I do not have an answer to that question that would make any sense to a modern-day American.
What was Alexander Hamilton a founding father of?
Does anyone out there have a clue?
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We had a vice president, Arron Burr, who won a duel with Alexander Hamilton atop the NJ Pallisades overlookng the Hudson River and our first Secretary of the Treasury lay dead.
Who says history doesn’t repeat itself? Here we are in 2016 with our current vice president, Joe Biden threatening to take on Donald Trump and Trump calling him out.
Thank God fot the smarts of Alexander Hamilton! He is responsible for us having decimal currency and not using the English system of money where you need pencil & paper to convert to the next higher or lower value coin. Pence, shillings, quid, pounds sterling. I never have worked with their money so I am not familiar with how many of one make another, but I know it’s not 10 or 100 or 1000, etc.
The English system of measurement is a nightmare and we brought it toAmerican. Good reason we didn’t set up the Metric System; it didn’t exist yet so Hamilton was WAY ahead of his time & what he came up with is in essence the Metric System.
To this day cloth is referred to as “yard goods” & is sold by the yard. In England, once around a man’s waist was a yard so when buying material go to a fat dealer. If you wanted 3 yards of cloth the dealer wrapped it around his waist 3 times. This was so variable that it was changed from nose to thumb with arm held straight out. For most adult males this is pretty close & all the way from one hand to the other is about 6 ‘ or one fathom. So all would agree the yard stick was created & then it happened that around 3 feet would make a yard, so what the heck! Out of all this comes crazy numbers like 16.5’ make a rod & 160 sq rods an acre. A mile was 1000 paces & an average size man would in marching 1000 paces go very close to 5,000 feet which wouldn’t be very hard to work with bu had it paced off by a 6’7″ palace guard with long leggs & we are stuckwith 5,280 ‘ tothe mile.
Besides being a genius he was a true American Patriot & fought in the Revolutaniary War. He was also the Donald Trump of his day having founded the Bank of New York, an extremely successful bank which is still healthy & hardtyto this very day!
So, who would we replace him with on the Ten Dollar Bill? For a change, let’s leave History alone!
I have to admit that I am one of “those” here in the United States of America who grew up not knowing that founding father Alexander Hamilton was in reality a RAPPER who was a HIP-HOP star.
All I really knew about him when I was young is that he was a dude who came in second-best in a shooting match with a dude who was by far the better shot, and got his *** dead as a result, which story was given to us young folks as a sort of cautionary tale about not having your mouth get your *** into a jam it can’t handle, or you might end up like Alexander Hamilton, dead on a slab at the county morgue.
I didn’t know Alexander Hamilton was a RAPPER and HIP-HOP star because we didn’t have RAP or HIP-HOP where I was when I was young, so I grew up culturally deprived, not knowing anything about either of them as art forms here in the United States of America.
I’m sure they had RAP and HIP-HOP somewhere here in America when I was young if Alexander Hamilton knew about it, probably out in California, because they get all the cool stuff out there way before the rest of us, like the Beach Boys and Surf City and Jan & Dean and the Little Old Ladies from Pasadena, but not where I was, because we didn’t have anything to get it on back then – no TV, no telephone, no mobile devices like the founding fathers must have had, since they were rich and I was poor, like so many in America who were born culturally deprived as a result as I was.
Yes, people, if you can actually believe that, when I was young, I lived in a house with neither internet service nor a computer, so I couldn’t watch the founding fathers on YouTube.
We did have a radio, but that was only AM, and it didn’t pick up any RAP or HIP-HOP stations at all.
You know, farm reports and stuff like that, how much hog bellies or something like that were selling for that day, and what the weather was going to be and such like that.
There was music, of course.
I still to this day remember the thrill I felt every time Dusty Springfield would come on the radio and sing “Silver Threads and Golden Needles Cannot Break This Heart of Mine,” but people in the know about these things say, “pshaw, you old fool, Dusty Springfield wasn’t no RAPPER, and she couldn’t sing HIP-HOP worth a damn, so what are you on about bringing Dusty Springfield into a conversation about RAP and HIP-HOP and the founding fathers, especially when everybody knows Linda Ronstadt is famous for that song, not Dusty Springfield, who was merely copying Linda Ronstadt’s style when she sang it,” and all I can answer in reply is I still like Dusty Springfield better, although Linda Ronstadt does a passable fine version, as well.
It is just that regardless of who came first, I heard Dusty Springfield first, so to me it is she who set the standard, and when I play it on the banjo, it is Dusty Springfield’s voice I am hearing, not Linda Ronstadt’s.
So, my heartfelt thanks to the founding fathers for giving us such a great and exceptional nation that it would have both a Dusty Springfield and a Linda Ronstadt in it, and the freedom to make a choice of our own as to which we like better without having to worry about running afoul of some English king who might not like either of them but who instead was big on Nikki Minaj’s version of it, or maybe Black Chyna’s version, and wanted only that played on the radio because he was into RAP and HIP-HOP like Alexander Hamilton was.
God bless, America, ain’t it, people!
You got to love it that we live in the only country on earth that had as its founders people who could RAP and therefore were cool.
There is not another country like that in the world but us, and that is what makes us truly exceptional today, as well as a nation that is great!
Computers & inter-net, hell. We had an ice man who put ice in the ice box a few times a week & emptied the water pan under the box. A sign in our window with the size of the piece of ice you wanted facing upward so he didn’t need to hike the 18 stairs up the hill to where our house was located. No AC, no TV & as far as I’m concerned no hip-hop, no rap, no boom boxes & no helicopters with one DC-3 an evening flying over our house. Few cars, mostly Model T’s & a lot of deliveries with horse & buggy.
Neighborhood schools. We walked to school, home for lunch, back to school and home at night. No fat kids! We played outdoors & I never heard a kid say he was “bored” or “this is boring” until the sixties. Except for book reports a few times a year I can’t remember HOMEWORK until high school. Oh, our parents had us learning almost 24/7 with memorizing all the arithmetic facts, measurements, spelling, etc & everywhere we went out came FLASH CARDS & any wrong answer was drummed in over & over.
The stories of the Founding Fathers are amazing, They were practical hard working people & not what we have today; a bunch of law school grads, all indoctrinated into the liberal culture, none with any “work” experience, none ever having dirt under their fingernails & none able to even grow a radish, but knowing everything about everything. Washington was a farmer & knew about ground being frozen in the morning & easy to move over but thawing & turning to mud & being difficult. He used this knowledge to advantage in battle. He made good alcoholic beverages & loved ice cream; use your imagination to see how hard that was to make. Ben Franklin was a genius with all he came up with. Post office. Volunteer fire department. Kite, lightning & electricity. Bi-focals. I couldn’t get used to them. The Franklin stove. I bought one when we could no longer afford oil heat & I loved that stove. It had a way to hang a pot so you could make soup or stew while heating & a grill that swung out of the way on which I broiled some fantastic London broils. I had to get rid of that stove because it was far from air tight & used far too much wood and would not hold fire overnight. If a manufacturer like the Fisher Stove Company would have kept all the good features and made it air tight it would be a WINNER!
When it comes to music I am chronologically impaired & I stick with everything pre Jazz. What is disgusting is a boom box going full bore at a gas station or post office, the car unattended, maybe the engine running & sounds you have no interest in being forced into your ears. I happen to like Country & Western but I don’t want to make everyone within 3 miles listen to it.
As I read through the Federalist Papers today, at the age of seventy, I actually have to wonder if Alexander Hamilton believed a single word he wrote, or was he just doing a competent job of putting us on?
Or were people back in those times in America, two-hundred twenty-nine (229) years ago, really that much different from us in America today as to make them seem unreal to a modern-day American today?
Consider this from FEDERALIST No. 33, from the Daily Advertiser, January 3, 1788, to the People of the State of New York, with Alexander Hamilton writing as Publius:
A LAW, by the very meaning of the term, includes supremacy.
It is a rule which those to whom it is prescribed are bound to observe.
end quote
When I read that in the light of the corruption and lawlessness going on in our various governments, especially up here in New York state, where the culture of corruption grows like barnacles on a boat bottom in the words of U.S. attorney Preet Bharara, I frankly almost laugh right out loud, and want to say, “who are you trying to kid there, Al?”
“What kind of fools do you take us for, dude, asking us to believe that blather?”
But what if that was really true back in those times he lived in – that A LAW, by the very meaning of the term, includes supremacy, so that it is a rule which those to whom it is prescribed are bound to observe?
If that were so, then what about us?
How did we come to be here in our times, where the law has become a joke?
And what of this from FEDERALIST No. 33:
If the federal government should overpass the just bounds of its authority and make a tyrannical use of its powers, the people, whose creature it is, must appeal to the standard they have formed, and take such measures to redress the injury done to the Constitution as the exigency may suggest and prudence justify.
end quote
Was Alexander Hamilton actually serious when he wrote those words published by the Daily Advertiser on January 3, 1788?
Is it we the people today he was talking to there?
Or was it somebody else entirely?
A question for our times, indeed!
I pay extra to receive Channel 4, NBC, New York so I can keep up with my NJ roots & it isn’t pretty. Shootings, every felon has a Glock, murders, corruption, Bridgegate, etc. The liberal bias is deafening especially when Lester Holt comes on & I go back to Fox.
I heard of papers from Alexander Hamilton going off at auction and his connection to a church in Manhatten.
As I keep hearing of the email scandals, the classified information to include TOP SECRET on private insecure servers, the incessent lies from everyone including Obama & Hillary, the Russians or whomever hacking the DNC web sites, it is obvious that foreign countries have ALL the documents & information that the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton possessed. As an Infantry Batallion S-3 I shared a quonset hut with the S-2 & he had a safe with classified documents. At times he was ordered to destroy certain papers & he & I signed that they were burned and destroyed. We would not DARE mess this up as we KNEW it wouldn’t matter we “intended” or even knew we made a mistake; it would mean many years at Ft Leavenworth. All of us were forever taught that “iggnorance of the law is no excuse” but for Hillary it doesn’t apply, YET.
Trump is exactly right when he says we are ruled by STUPID people. I would add that they are corrupt and must be using some funny stuff.
Take John Podesta. He has fantastic credentials, a great resume. I guess he is a lawyer. A former congressman. Was he Secretary of Defense? I believe he was a Director of the CIA. With all of these SMARTS how can he be so STUPID to put such increminating material on the internet where we ALL know it is insecure and can be hacked. Most people know what is entered onto a computer stays on that computer & the “delete” does not get rid of the items. Hillary & Bill know this & destroyed several devices with hammers knowingly OBSTRUCTING JUSTICE & both have legal training; one a lawyer, one disbarred.
How absolutely STUPID to tell the American people a lie about Bengazi & then email the truth to Chelsea. How absolutely STUPID to go on TV & lie to the American people about “keeping your health care”, “keeping your doctor” and how the price will come down $2500 a year (AFFORDABLE, AFFORDABLE) when the TRUTH is the price is up out of sight & with the HIGH deductibles & co-pays it is WORTHLESS.