re: #163 Bert’s House of Beef and Obdicuts

I am more and more convinced that the office of the president is a massively problematic one on every level. We should have something quite a bit different, with a lot more distributed power, because this unitary executive thing both fucks up politics a lot by making that one election of megaimportance and by giving the ‘other side’ a single guy to hate with the fiery passion of a thousand suns.

The problem is it’s so mythical and we like having a ‘leader’, in US culture, which is really funny if you think about it given we’re supposed to be so goddamn independent.

Combine that with the archaic death pact that is the 2nd Amendment, and I think you’re touching on something bigger: maybe we need to modernize the Constitution. We’re dealing with issues that the Founders could not have possibly foreseen, even given how smart some of them were.

I mean, think about it: the Constitution was written by a group of white, nominally Christian/Deist guys, some of whom were slave holders. It was written, what? 70 years before The Origin of Species was published?

Women weren’t allowed to vote. Gay people weren’t so much as in the closet as they were in the foundation under the house. It took all day to travel 20 miles; a trip to Europe took a month, not 8 hours. A gun could fire maybe two shots in a minute.

Sorry, kids, I love the Constitution but it’s starting to show its age.