Note: No mention of Amos the mouse. How can that be?

Corporations? Jeez, Louise. I really should switch over to Pffft. At least there, no matter how idiotic the resolution, it only lasts a month. I mean, what’s the alternative to the aff? Higher moral standard, in which case for all practical purposes both sides are arguing the affirmative? Or lower moral standard, where the neg gets to stand for child labor in developing nations, or maybe that Enron isn’t all that bad after all? Or, of course, the perennially annoying kritik, in this case that corporations are not moral entities?

Sigh. And sigh again.

Anyhow, back to the business at hand. I’m no Benjamin Franklin scholar, but perhaps of all the Founders he’s the easiest to understand, then and now. Ambitious, witty, imaginative, wise, charming, earthy—pulling himself up from poor beginnings by his bootstraps and becoming a pillar of every community he happened to be in. I see him as the ultimate Yankee, out there inventing stoves and bifocals and practically getting himself fried in order to demonstrate that lightning is electrical in nature. (Electricity, at the time, did not come out of wall sockets, and was quite the lively object of curiosity.) Aside from T. A. Edison, Ben is about the inventingest person you’ve ever heard of.

There’s an interesting fact of those times: a person who was interested in science could, for all practical purposes, know all there was to know about it. You can say this was a Golden Age of amateur science, or maybe you can say that there was no great line between amateur and professional scientist. Today, if you can vaguely understand genetics and string theory and organic chemistry, you’re something of a novelty, and you’re a dabbler of the first order with knowledge as thin as mist. Then, you were a renaissance man, and really could know your stuff in detail. Of the Founders, both Ben and TJ were of this ilk, devoted scientists among their other interests, which evidenced a curiosity about the world in general and as a whole: there was nothing in creation that wasn’t worthy of study. Which means that among the primary of the Founders, we had not one but two of these polymaths.

Ben provides to the Founding mix the wisdom of age. He was already an old-timer in ’76. (In fact, he had already signed up as a stamp issuer a few years previously, until the response to the Stamp Act put the kibosh on that.) He famously put his imprimatur on the Constitution by saying it was the best possible, even if one couldn’t agree with all of it. His representation of the US in Europe was remarkable, and he became something of a rock star in France: his picture was on all the tee shirts and he sported a coonskin cap as did all Americans at the time (yeah, right—he was no stranger to public relations). I think maybe it was his practicality that made him a key figure in the establishment of the US, especially when contrasted against the thorough lack of practicality in his visionary compatriot Mr. Jefferson. And he was a warm, friendly sort as compared to the gruff Mr. Adams or the fairly unapproachable General Washington. Every organization needs its eminence grise, for private and public purposes, and that was BF’s role for a couple of decades. It still is, to some degree. Take a trip to Philadelphia. You can’t swing a cat without hitting a BF statue, memorial, diorama or souvenir cart. You can still buy the tee shirt, in other words. Which is as it should be.

(And going back just a bit, Ewok offers in a comment to yesterday’s post that the Aliens were really screwed by the A&S Acts, and I wasn’t saying that the acts were good, simply that their effect on the times wasn’t great. Keep in mind the outcome of the election of 1800, and the workings of the electoral college. How much of the immigrant vote are we really talking about? Not that much has changed. Look at the recent dirty political tactic of telling recent Latino citizens that they couldn’t vote… Oh, yeah, we’ve come a long way. Say what you will about Adams, you couldn’t call him devious. He didn’t have the ability to believe he was wrong, or the modesty not to declare his rightness from the rooftops, however wrong it was.)