July 4

Mister B extends
his
best wishes
to all
his
American friends
on this
their
Independence
Day.

That said, he hopes and prays that (for them and for all of us in the rest of the world) their current constitutional and political arrangements -- a president and executive branch that considers itself above the law, and a Congress which has abandoned executive oversight -- are merely a temporary aberration. Still, it is not a given that the pendulum will swing back. Their country is now firmly controlled by an energy-military-corporate complex with theocratic underpinnings, making up new rules and jettisoning old ones as it goes along.

Elsewhere, the July 4, 1776 Declaration of Independence (most especially the second paragraph) contains words and phrases lifted directly from John Locke's Two Treatises of Government. Locke's book, published in 1689, provided much of the intellectual and political argument for those challenging the anciens regimes in what we now know as the American (1776) and French (1789) revolutions.

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness + Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité

This is not meant to suggest anyone should actually go and read Locke (Mister B did a long time ago, but it was a guided tour of duration two academic years). Notwithstanding, let it be remembered that in Book Two of the Two Treatises, Locke asserted that the only legitimate government was government by consent, and that a government's role was to safeguard and protect the individual's property (property meaning that individual's own life, liberty and estate) according to the rule of law. That if civil goverment failed in that duty, by abrogating the rule of law and instead exercising arbitrary power, citizens had the Right to Resist and the Right to Revolution.

One and all: Best wishes, have a day.