Census Senses!

04 July 19

The dramatic manner in which President Trump assured Americans that his administration will work around the Supreme Court order that kept citizenship question from the Census Questionnaire, was in absolute contrast to how quietly an official of the Justice Department and an official in charge of the Census informed Americans that the Census citizenship row was effectively buried for now. While Justice Roberts refused to interfere in the Republican Party’s Congressional Districts redrawing plan that was a blatant attempt at gerrymandering, saying almost that this called for a bipartisan political effort to resolve this, perhaps the casting vote of his in a 5-4 judicial order is as reflective of how divided America is and how it actually needs political resolve to mend a lot of the damage that American Right Wing has caused to the larger Constitutional scheme of America.
It has long been perceived in US electoral politics that the WASP as the particular ethnic group was called is the bedrock of American Republicanism. Yet it is actually some thing that Americans themselves would be surprised to know that Republicanism was not always equated with Reductionism! Can you imagine the 16th President was elected as a Republican? That he went on the dismantle slavery which was an important monetary component of the US economy in the middle of the 18th Century and he of all people waged War against those who did not agree with him? Yes! Abraham Lincoln was all that!
So when Chief Justice of the USA declined to intervene in a political slugfest, perhaps he wished to remind the American polity of their own past, and hope that they rose to the ideals of their Founding Fathers! Remember the UK has no written Constitution, the closest document to something like that is the Magna Carta…So the USA a quarter millennia later was to chose to write everything down, because precisely the wise men led by Washington knew that their successors could slip and more!
What the Democrats need is a greater dose of aggressive legislative presence like how freshman Congresswoman Ms Ocasio Cortez is doing. On Television, with the help of statutes and records, she is exposing the hypocrisy and the double standards that USA has managed to build with, a monstrosity of obtuse legalese that can allow such leverage with those having access to the Offices of the State and to work it to disadvantage of the weaker sections of society. While ‘Wall Street versus main street’ is a almost a caricature of this gulf, in a larger context, it basically works to the advantage of the entrenched, it runs contrary to the spirit of entrepreneurship and adventurism that has allowed American society to value enterprise and freedom of choice!
So if women and their reproductive rights are again on cross hairs, or if USA is actually acting in direct conflict with the symbolism of the Statue of Liberty gifted to her by the French Republic, and if people draw comparisons to the Nazi regime and the present situation, accuse the US Federal government of running concentration camps, it is this slippage of ideals, this furthering of vested agenda, of narrow considerations unchallenged by the Democrats as equally to blame as the Republicans are for allowing themselves to be so manipulated! Just hearing that Federal official gave me the creeps when she defended the poor conditions of children and the lack of attention to their basic needs when detained such as soap and toothpaste! If she needed legislation for such needs which are common sense, then perhaps she has seen too many Alien movies, and she imagines these ‘illegal aliens and their offspring’ as some monsters out to devour good patriotic Americans, and who must be left entirely to their devices to prevent accidental contact with them, that could endanger patriotic American lives! It is cliche filled Hollywood drama, only scripted with far greater ingenuity and stupidity that shows how Americans today have already dumped the Lady of Liberty into the Atlantic in spirit! For a bra burning feminist socially upwardly mobile society that created openings for open relationships on more equal footing with man, to suddenly turn its paws on the woman’s womb is like a Dracula returned from the Dead for Revenge kind of tale! After decades of Roe V Wade, why should Americans now view a six week fetus as an autonomous life, as a human, when we know scientifically viability does not come until 24 weeks with advanced neonatal support? And why is the whole debate lopsided, or are we in some dystopian world where Americans dumbly think that women can get pregnant on their own like in the movie “No Men Beyond This Point”.
What America has done and not just because of Trump, decidedly it would be farcical to lay all this on his door, is to get goaded by these Right Wingers into turning on its own founding ideals, moving opposite the emancipatory, ecumenical, entrepreneurial and egalitarian principles that were brought to her shores by the original Puritans-The Pilgrim Fathers on Mayflower! Does that current of an agenda decidedly against the lofty idealism of the founders of modern America not sound familiar across many countries in the throes of change, both near home and far abroad? A censorial Census based calculus seems to be getting the better of our senses!