Norann Dillon's Disneyfication

The other day I used the title from an old Pogues LP--a title itself lifted from Winston Churchill's amusing three-word description of life in the Royal Navy:  Rum, Sodomy and the Lash--to call into question fantasies concerning past American Edens.

Sheila Kihne witlessly caricatured 'my' viewpoint:  '[Norann Dillon] respects the founding documents. Jefferson wrote them and owned slaves, therefore she wants to own slaves too.' 

No fair reading of my post could sustain that willful misinterpretation, though I'll clarify anyway:

At age 14 Jefferson inherited dozens of slaves--in later life he owned over 600--and didn't merely screw them figuratively.  But we shouldn't condemn him for this--say some--since he was the product of another age and didn't know that owning other human beings was mean.  OTOH many contemporaries of Jefferson opposed slavery, and the Sage [in 1784] himself wrote:

For in a warm climate, no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him. This is so true, that of the proprietors of slaves a very small proportion indeed are ever seen to labour. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference!

The slave trade continued while early white Americans were decimating the aboriginal population:  They couldn't have known better either, of course--as their leaders set to work on their victimological Declaration against the distant [real, anti-honky] 'tyrant'--George III. 

Dillon's historical 'analysis' begins by issuing a blanket pardon upon all the Founders' crimes, allowing her to then savor their remaining splendors and issue each an A+ in time for lunch.

Of course Dillon isn't calling for a resumption of the middle passage.  But she gushes with a bumpkin's 'love of our founding documents'--sidestepping the Declaration's grandstanding hypocrisy. 

We ought to consider the national honor prior to making false assertions about our past.