The United States Constitution promised a More Perfect
Union. It’s a shame no one bothered to write a more perfect
Constitution—one that didn’t trigger more than two centuries
of arguments about what the darn thing actually
says.
Until now.
Perfection
is at hand. A new, improved Constitution is here. And you
are holding it.
But first, some historical
context: In the eighteenth century, a lawyer named James
Madison gathered his friends in Philadelphia and, over four
long months, wrote four short pages: the Constitution of the
United States of America. Not bad.
In the
nineteenth century, a president named Abraham Lincoln freed
an entire people from the flaws in that Constitution by
signing the Emancipation Proclamation. Pretty
impressive.
And in the twentieth century, a
doctor at the Bethesda Naval Hospital delivered a baby—but
not just any baby. Because in the twenty-first century, that
baby would become a man, that man would become a patriot,
and that patriot would rescue a country . . . by
single-handedly rewriting that
Constitution.
Why? We think of our Constitution
as the painstakingly designed blueprint drawn up by, in
Thomas Jefferson’s words, an “assembly of demigods” who laid
the foundation for the sturdiest republic ever created. The
truth is, it was no blueprint at all but an Etch A Sketch, a
haphazard series of blunders, shaken clean and redrawn
countless times during a summer of petty debates, drunken
ramblings, and desperate compromise—as much the product of
an “assembly of demigods” as a confederacy of
dunces.
No wonder George Washington wished it
“had been made more perfect.” No wonder Benjamin Franklin
stomached it only “with all its faults.” The Constitution
they wrote is a hot mess. For starters, it doesn’t mention
slavery, or democracy, or even Facebook; it plays favorites
among the states; it has typos, smudges, and misspellings;
and its Preamble, its most famous passage, was written by a
man with a peg leg. Which, if you think about it, gives our
Constitution hardly a leg to stand on.
[Pause
for laughter.]
Now stop laughing. Because you
hold in your hands no mere book, but the most important
document of our time. Its creator, Daily Show writer
Kevin Bleyer, paid every price, bore every burden, and saved
every receipt in his quest to assure the salvation of our
nation’s founding charter. He flew to Greece, the birthplace
of democracy. He bused to Philly, the home of independence.
He went toe-to-toe (face-to-face) with Scalia. He added
nightly confabs with James Madison to his daily
consultations with Jon Stewart. He tracked down not one but
two John Hancocks—to make his version twice as official. He
even read the Constitution of the United
States.
So prepare yourselves, fellow patriots,
for the most significant literary event of the twenty-first,
twentieth, nineteenth, and latter part of the eighteenth
centuries. Me the People won’t just form a More Perfect
Union. It will save America.
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