Why does John Ashcroft hate America?
A pirate posting of a recent Vanity Fair profile of John Ashcroft makes for an interesting read (it’s long but worth reading–you might want to print it out). It doesn’t have a lot of profound insights, but it does have numerous alarming anecdotes from people who have worked closely with the man.
One point in particular jumped off the page at me, though:
He has supported an additional 10 amendments to the Constitution (including one to make it easier to amend).
Here’s the thing: America is an unusual country in that at its root, it is founded on a document, the Constitution. Older countries–France or Japan, for example–are at root basically big tribes: they are countries because there are more-or-less cohesive ethnic/linguistic groups within their borders. France and Japan have been through any number of different forms of government–monarchy, military dictatorship, republic, etc–but nobody would ever dispute that each was the same country throughout. Many newer countries, for better or worse, are artifacts of colonialism or European tussles, with artificially drawn borders that artificially group together nationalities that probably wouldn’t choose to share citizenship with each other. We saw that with Yugoslavia before, and we’re seeing this in Iraq right now.
The idea behind the USA is that people are made American by their choice to accept a certain set of rules for what it means to be American, and that set of rules is expressed in the Constitution. Change the Constitution and you change the country. Right now there are 7 articles and 27 amendments to the Constitution and Ashcroft would add 10 more? Clearly, he is not happy with this country as it is constituted and wants it to be something very different. Rather than radically change the country to suit his tastes, he’d be better off finding a country that’s closer to his liking and moving there. The rest of us would be better off, too.