Elizabeth Wurtzel Reveals our Next Big National Dialog
Like any pundit, my one great love in life is talking with other pundits about punditry. So I really had to reach outside my comfort zone to talk about pundits with Elizabeth Wurtzel. Not only a memoirist and litigatrix, she's a media visionary -- and she's given Ricochet an exclusive inside scoop on the next big national dialog about to sweep America.
Elizabeth Wurtzel writes:
Somebody somewhere could probably get tenure by becoming the leading, or perhaps only, authority on the Third Amendment to the Constitution, which has been sorely neglected. For those who don't remember, this lost clause is a ban on quartering soldiers in private homes during peacetime, and it has not really mattered to much of anybody in a good two centuries or so. It has never been reviewed by the Supreme Court -- but The Onion once ran an article about the National Anti-Quartering Association, which it described as "the nation's leading Third Amendment rights group" -- keeping America safe, year after year, from soldiers demanding room and board.
My suggestion that we have a searching national debate about the Third Amendment -- an "adult conversation," like the one we're supposed to be having right now about raising the retirement age -- is prompted by my viewing of the various 24-hour news channels. I've determined that nothing that's being said by the likes of Keith Olbermann or Glenn Beck -- and their lesser minions -- is really any less ridiculous than discussing quartering soldiers, pro or con. All day long, pundits debate topics that don't really matter, like whether the Fourteenth Amendment will be repealed, which is simply not going to happen -- the Constitution has not been changed in decades, and that provision is pretty much sacrosanct. Or they handicap polls, or they parrot press releases -- and they all say the same things over and over again, which is nothing more than the conventional wisdom either skewed left or flushed right, depending on which side the person is on. The one thing that does not happen on television news is anything that you would call "news" -- I mean, yes, there is "breaking news" whenever something new doesn't happen with the BP oil spill and they have a press conference about it anyway, or something doesn't change with unemployment numbers but the President makes remarks from the Rose Garden just the same. There is just a lot of unenlightened debate about things that don't matter or, quite possibly, don't even exist.
So my suggestion is that we make a cognitive leap and actually discuss an issue that we honestly know doesn't matter: the Third Amendment, and its implications. Let's eliminate the notion that we are having a meaningful conversation and go right for the completely wasteful, irrelevant and unimportant. That's what is happening anyway.
And the added benefit is it might give some poor academic a new idea for a scholarly paper. I see journal articles. I see New York Times bestsellers.
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Comments :
Jun '10
Re: Elizabeth Wurtzel Reveals our Next Big National Dialog
I think the fact that we don't have a National Spare Bedroom Association, like we have a National Rifle Association, is proof that our rights organizations are NOT frivolous endeavors. They're a necessary response to some real usurpation of constitutional rights.
Re: Elizabeth Wurtzel Reveals our Next Big National Dialog
Usurpation is real. What worries me, etoiledunord, is that the culture of permanent crisis is well able to afflict right, left, and yes, even center all at the same time -- creating a public sphere that's so worked up that we wind up agitating for many national dialogs but never manage to have any decent conversations.
May '10
Re: Elizabeth Wurtzel Reveals our Next Big National Dialog
I enjoy conversations. I run like a scalded dog from dialogs.
Jul '10
Re: Elizabeth Wurtzel Reveals our Next Big National Dialog
A capital idea. While we're about it, I think several discussions are in order.
We should debate the merits of a Pelosi-Palin ticket for 2012. It's time to consider the potential upside of an entirely left-handed military. What if windmills produce too much energy?
May '10
Re: Elizabeth Wurtzel Reveals our Next Big National Dialog
I'm anxious to be on the right side of the cultural wars on this one. But which side? As Mollie Hemingway put it yesterday:
This suggests an anti-Quartering position. But that would work against the interests of our military, which would be better served by Quartering. What's a conservative to do?
The first alternative is to compromise: We hold the line against overnighters, but allow for the commandeering of SUVs, RVs and light trucks -- as long as they eventually return it with a full tank.
The second is to argue semantics: What do they mean by Quartering? Does this apply only to single family houses, and, if so, can they stay at a Residence Inn? Or "in time of peace." We're fighting two wars right now, so it's hardly a time of peace. Can Peter expect the Marines to commandeer his Suburban at any time?
This is complicated stuff.
May '10
Re: Elizabeth Wurtzel Reveals our Next Big National Dialog
Indeed it is! What do they mean by soldier? Could a President, one without much respect for the constitution, declare a "war on racism", deputize an ACORN-style army to fight it and quarter them in American homes? I'm sure we could find a judge who will rule that ideas like "weapons" and "fighting" were never historically integral to the concepts of "soldier" and "war."
(The poor Third Amendment, no one's even tried to abuse it. It's like the Sabine woman the Romans left behind)
Jul '10
Re: Elizabeth Wurtzel Reveals our Next Big National Dialog
I'm afraid that if liberals start talking about the Third Amendment, before we know it it will be illegal for veterans to rent apartments.
Re: Elizabeth Wurtzel Reveals our Next Big National Dialog
I'm going to wait a while, so that everyone forgets you wrote this, then steal this line.