Finally, a Statue of Liberty for the “other America”.

Blue State America has long had a monument to the ideals of what I am now going to call “The Blue State Founders”.  Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin,, James Madison, et.al.

These were men steeped in the best, brightest and foremost thoughts of The Enlightenment.  They were Whigs…the first American liberals…and the founders of what has become the mainstream of modern liberal thought.  We are the direct inheritors of their vision of a world where every man would be free to follow his conscience in his own affairs and would be restrained only so far as it was necessary to prevent him from becoming a tyrant over his fellow man.

Their vision was for America to become a bright, shining monument of how enlightenment principles could allow every human being to live as fulfilled, useful, happy an existence as allowed by his ability.  Unlimited by what his neighbor thinks he should do, unlimited by excessive taxes from a wasteful, oppressive, odious government; truly king of himself (and only himself) and his own property.  Man was to only be beholden to natural order and natural laws (assumed to be authored by God, who created nature), and they believed that honest adherence to those first principles would bring about a country in harmony with itself and the world.

America was given a symbol of that ideal.  The Statue of Liberty was a gift from France to symbolize our gift to the world.

But there was another group of people in America at that time.  People who distrusted human nature…who considered it to be inherently and irredeemably corrupt.  These people believed that human beings needed to be controlled within an unnatural and nonsensical world order.  Only the inerrant will of God (as handed down by God’s appointed representatives; The Crown and The Church) could constrain the evil of humanity in a way that would bring happiness and peace to everyone.

These people were the Tories.  They were the first American conservatives….and they got right to work right away – causing trouble.  The moment the ink dried on the Declaration of Independence, they went to work trying to get everyone to make nice with Great Britain.  They did so in part because they had come to America to pillage it for riches, and then use it to go back and be rich and powerful in Great Britain….and that would be more difficult if they were no longer subjects of that empire.  They weren’t interested in being masters of themselves and no one else.  They wanted the world to still consist of masters and servants…just they wanted to be the masters.

They published their thoughts in newspapers under names like “Cato”…because their views and goals were so anti-American that if they used their real names, their houses would be burned down by angry mobs.

They believed that they had a divine right to run things.  Their King and their church mutually validated each other and all the power flowed from there.  By gum, they’d worked hard and risked much to get a little piece of that power trickling down from on high, and they weren’t about to let a bunch of uppity liberals take it away.

Well, they’ve been working on their version of the ideal world for a long, long, time.  And now, they have their very own symbol of that vision.  The Statue of Liberation (click here for a newspaper article about the statue, which includes some photos of it).  It replaces the Torch of Liberty with the Cross (an implement of persecution and execution)  and replaces the Declaration of Independance with the Ten Commandments (symbolic of the authority of God and his appointed Ruler). 

So, I give you an inscription for the Statue of Liberation that is worthy of this great icon:

“Give me your Pusillanimous, your willfully ignorant, your televangelist-viewing masses yearning to breathe freely through their mouths.  I will shelter them so that they do not drown in the rainstorms, and I will ensure their right to live in a world where the very laws of nature as described by reason will be denied to meet their psychological need to believe whatever they are told.”

[Editor's Note:  There is a Coulteresque nugget of hyperbole in this rant that crosses the line into full-fledged Intellectual Dishonesty.  The first person to correctly identify it gets a figurative "Gold Star".]