The
true American revolutionaries - Tom Jefferson, Tom Paine and their kind - always
argued that the rebellion against King George III was unfinished business. Jefferson
went so far as to suggest that the tree of liberty would need to be watered every
20 years or so with the blood of patriots.
When another King George brought
his royal tour to southwestern Wisconsin Tuesday, high school students in Richland
Center got a powerful lesson regarding the difficulty of stamping out the regal
impulse in the lesser leaders of our age.
The Bush-Cheney campaign rented
the local high school and applied the divine right of kings - or at least one
ill-prepared and inarticulate boy king - to what had been a public school. Richland
Center students were informed that they could attend the audience with His Highness
only if they donned approved apparel: a Bush for President T-shirt or so-called
"neutral clothing." What they could not wear was any clothing that promoted
the cause of any dissenter to the rule of King George.
If they showed up
dressed inappropriately, students were warned, they would be removed from what
was perhaps the biggest-ever event at their school.
What could justify such
an abuse of the First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and assembly? The
principal of Richland Center High School - whose boss, the superintendent of schools
for the city, is the wife of Republican congressional candidate Dale Schultz -
had no problem eliminating a few basic liberties because, as he put it, students
were being given a rare opportunity to spend time in the presence of their king,
er, president. The principal needs to review a few American history books.
The
American Revolution was fought, in Paine's words, to "establish a new
social order." Central to that new order's philosophy of being was the
notion that every American must be endowed, as Jefferson explained, with "the
free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion."
That
right was denied in Richland Center by the Bush campaign and school officials
who do not understand or respect the ideals that inspired the American revolution
against King George - who Paine dismissed as the "Royal Brute" - and
against the warped values that claimed God wanted power to pass from a wealthy
and privileged father to a wealthy and privileged son.
Unfortunately, this
was not the first time that the Bill of Rights was torn up to make way for a royal
visit to Wisconsin by the current King George. During previous regal tours of
Wisconsin, a man who held up an anti-Bush sign as His Highness passed was arrested
in Platteville, peaceful demonstrators were denied access to a space they had
reserved in La Crosse because there was an outside chance that their objections
might momentarily be seen or heard by the visiting king, and an Outagamie County
official was hustled out of a royal rally in Ashwaubenon because he was wearing
a T-shirt that mentioned the name of a foe of the boy king.
This King George
is no more open to dissent than the previous King George.
What to do?
The
last Royal Brute's excesses inspired Tom Jefferson to argue "that whenever
any form of government becomes destructive to (the inalienable rights of life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness), it is the right of the people to alter
or to abolish it, and to institute new government ..."
In light of
the current Royal Brute's excesses, it would seem only appropriate Tuesday
to water the tree of liberty with - if not the blood of patriots - then certainly
their votes.
© 2004 Capital Times
###
