I think the hardest thing for Americans to reconcile this idea of the Founding Fathers as flawed people who still did good things.
Washington was a slave owner who came to have mixed feelings on it later in life, but at one point he was literally the only thing standing between democracy and a military dictatorship (immediately after the Revolution the army hadn’t been paid in years and they were talking of storming the capitol and taking over, Washington defused the situation).
I don’t think I have to list all the things Jefferson did, but he did still also write the Declaration of Independence.
Madison was a slave owner but he and Hamilton were instrumental in the Constitution being ratified and he also worked on the Bill of Rights.
Hamilton was a temperamental asshat who cheated on his wife repeatedly and would destroy people for petty grievances. He was also an abolitionist.
They all did good things and bad things and it’s really hard to wrap your mind around the vast gulf that should come between “literally owned people” and “set up a form of government that protected the rights of its citizens against the power structures for basically one of the first times since antiquity.” (edit because I forgot about the Iroquois Confederacy) And most people will choose one extreme or the other. Either they were all universally terrible for slavery (which was terrible) or they were brilliant defenders of the people (which they were for certain people). The best you’ll usually get is an acknowledgement that they were “complex” but that doesn’t really mean much when we’re talking about these extremes.
The truth is that ultimately they did both and we have to at some point learn to accept that there were no demons or saints. Some were worse than others, but they all did awful things because they were ultimately fallible humans and by trying to reduce them to caricatures we turn them into talking points (“what did the Founders MEAN by ‘bear arms?’”) and these strange sort of deities whose words we have to interpret as best we can or else as devils who need to be conquered. They were literally just people who did fucked up things that they thought were okay and did some pretty cool things that we should try to hold onto.
Except for Andrew Jackson. Fuck that guy.
The world isn’t split into good people and Death Eaters…
Fun fact: According to Greek legend there was a famous prostitute who managed to avoid a death sentence by showing the judges her boobs and arguing that it would be a crime against the Gods to destroy something so beautiful.
Before you ask, yes there are paintings of this. And yes, they’re amazing.
No, but this is one of my absolute favorite bits of history!
The courtesan named was named Phryne and she was indeed a renowned beauty, and was indeed was put on trial for a capital crime. And yes, the sum of her defense consisted of her stripping in court (helped by her lover/defendant) and asking the jury (all males) if they were prepared to destroy this.
But this is actually a very interesting case of Values Dissonance – the capital crime she was accused of was blasphemy. In Ancient Greek society, exceptional beauty was a sign of favor from the gods, and they took the idea that beauty indicated goodness with great seriousness. They even called their nobles Kaloi k’Agathoi, “the Beautiful and the Good.”
So by showing off her great physical beauty, Phryne was being very clever indeed, her argument essentially being “How could I possibly commit blasphemy if the gods have given me this body?“
Rest stops on highways are liminal spaces where the veil is thin and nobody can tell me differently
Explain
The explanation is that liminal spaces are in between places that bridge Here with There, so in fairy tales we often have the Fairy Ring, the Forest Clearing, the Sudden Misty Foggy Forest, the Bridge, the River, graveyards, in some cases
We also have a ton of american urban mythology around famous roadways and sites off the sides of roads
Archetypes like these occur to mark the places in the world where the veil goes thin and humans can have extra-worldly experiences, out of the ordinary way of living
So why wouldn’t transient spaces like rest stops where everyone is just passing through from one place to the next, never stopping for too long, not be a liminal space where spirits frequent, too
Especially since nobody would know if they were real or not
Ok but this speaks to me
I always feel like something isn’t quite right at rest stops
I once slept though three gas stations on a road trip, and the second the car started to slow to turn into a rest stop, I was basically wide awake.
My mom and I were on I-90 in a blizzard once and pulled off at the first exit we could find. Turns out that if we’d gone even a mile further, we would have happened on a 49-and-counting car pileup, and that 90 was closed for MILES. How we found an unblocked ramp was a matter of great debate, but where this gets weirder still is that at the bottom of the ramp was a closed truck stop and an open church full of teenagers–they went for youth group, the blizzard started, and they were stuck until the snow stopped. They fed us leftovers from their potluck dinner, prayed with us for safe travel, and when the snow let up they saw us on our way.
Three days later–Sunday–we were traveling back and decided to stop at that church to thank them. We found it thanks to the truck stop, but this time it was the truck stop that was open and the church that was closed. Neither of us remembered it looking so decrepit on the trip down, and granted we saw it first at night in a snowstorm, but you’d think we’d have noticed the boarded-up windows. So we asked in at the truck stop.
The church had been abandoned for ten years. And yet I still had one of their youth group programs under my sun visor, very clearly labeled for the previous week.
To this day I’m sure we crossed dimensions somewhere on I-90, and that’s how we stayed safe. You could tell me it’s because the truck stop was a liminal space and I’d 100% believe you.
I don’t mind when this post goes around again because sometimes I get stories like this
