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for the record, dk, i dont dislike anyone personally. i find arguments more and less coherent: things people say make more or less sense to me, depending on the logic. in the case of your position on the constitution, were you arguing as a historian, i'd have nothing in particular to say about it: you'd be encountering the same questions as anyone who was interested in trying to understand the positions and contexts that shaped the writing of the constitution. sometimes really interesting work can happen using that approach--look at keith baker's thing on the process that resulted in the declaration of the rights of man during the french revolution for example. but these are historical/exegtical exercises. the problem with your position is that it sets up "intent" as a transcendent principle and juxtaposes that to history as it's played out, and so to the legal tradition in the united states as it has operated for 200 odd years, and try to make political/legal arguments based on that.
from a methodological viewpoint, you can't do that even in historical writing. you cannot reconstruct intent. you can't do it.
you cannot tell for example anything at all about my intent from these sentences. you can construct and interpretation of it--but another could juxtapose another and there'd be no appeal to the writer, only to the words and in the end the question of which interpretation "works" would be a function of how closely it stuck to the surface of the sentences and what the framework that was used to set the interpretive machinery into motion.
so the problem i have with your position really has nothing to do with my "dislike" of this or that political position--it has first and foremost to do with the fact that you are making naive use of the category of intent to set into motion a sequence of claims that can't be compelling, in my view, because their premise is faulty. that you derive political correlates from these faulty premises that i don't agree with on other grounds of course doesn't help matters. but don't take it personally. it's just a logic game. we're on a messageboard. no-one cares what we say. this isn't a political space really. it's a parlor game. it's not personal. it's just a game that amuses us to play.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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