Let's Go Fly a Kite Up to the Highest Height Let's Go Fly a Kite and Send It Soaring Up through the Atmosphere up Where the Air Is Clear
[Fair Use for social, cultural and political comment and discussion is claimed]
Mary Poppins may have been set in London, and opened on the stage at the center of the Empire upon which the sun used never to set, but the most famous of Kites quite shockingly was American.
It is time to fly Benjamin Franklin's Kite again, the first treasure of the American Progressive Spirit. Let's send it soaring, and dare any nay saying tree or Republican Senator to eat it. Our Constitution itself contains a Progress Clause, impelling us to move forward, to advance the American Mind and Spirit, not to surrender to a stand still or regressive pseudo-science which cannot compete with other nations, let alone expand our own worth as a people.
Consider one American Art Form, The Broadway musical, and come Fly with me a Kite, in memory of and in homage to Ben, and let Hope String Eternal as we chase the Kite in a musical adventure.
Originally published on the Street.
Kites are an American treasure - fly them, let them soar, up through the atmosphere, perhaps after we clean up the air though. Like Franklin we might have a shocking experience. But let us commit to halt the destruction of young American Minds, of American Productivity and American Competitiveness. Fly that Kite, and challenge those who have made our very progress hostage to those who demand ignorance and debt and international servitude as a creed.
The Original Founders made sure Congress was empowered "To promote the progress of science and useful arts" - not to destroy them or to let them slide backwards. Bad Science is both un-American and Bad Religion. We need to say so, loudly and confidently. Real Americans like Benjamin Franklin and James Madison and Barack Obama Prefer Progress to Regress, discovery over stagnation, and education over a deliberate embrace of ignorance. Real Americans claim the Progress Clause of our Constitution for the whole Nation, rather than corporate and institutional holders of the patents and copyrights originally conceived as a limited monopoly to encourage invention and art. So Open Source. Fly those Kites. Become again the People we once were becoming.
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries"
U.S. Const. Art. I, sect. 1, cl. 8.The Progress Clause gifted us by the founders, who despite the best efforts of the religious right and the Originalists to discover one, included neither a regress nor a "Stay Where You Are" clause in the Constitution. Nor have successor generation (or generations in the case of the Madison Amendment) of founders included one in an amendment (the allowing of which amendments simply further shows the Progressive Nature of our Constitution. Our National Compact is at its very core a progressive Covenant.
Placed in the mouth of Richard Henry Lee, in the musical 1776, can you sing with all the Lees of Old Virginia, "Forward Ho!" When did Regress and Stasis replace "One if by land and two if by sea" as our national watchwords?
It is time for all of us to move forward together. We owe our children's children no less than that, and much more. Sadly, only Three Republicans heard that call from our President - well many more heard it and quaked in terror rather than act as responsible citizens and stewards of our future. So many responsible citizens have fled the Republican Party it is now doubtful any real states person can survive a Republican Primary anywhere in America.
As Linus might say it is time for somebody, somewhere to consider whether she or he might have been if not utterly wrong at least a tad mistaken. Adults do so every day. Barack Obama has done it. Spoiled or scared illusory adults don't. George W. Bush never could.
Payday Someday has come Today for those who gave away our childrens' childrens' future to fight Mr. Bush's War, Quash American rights, Pretty much render our Military overextended to the point we have to pull Louisiana National Guardsmen to Iraq and consequently not have them or their equipment available in the flood of our lifetimes. As a people we have utterly failed to steward our greatest asset, the minds of our children and grand children by allow the wrecking of what was once a fine public educational system.
Do not Sit Down, this a Boat in Need of Rocking.
The only Art these folk seem to want to teach in our public schools is by the art of Razzle Dazzle to teach by stealth there is no literature in the Bible. This message is essential to those who demand the Bible be studied in public schools. There in fact is much great literature and art in the Bible, but to admit this would fro the religious right be an admission the Bible is not to be taken literally, for great literature and art demands a freedom of thought which allows truth to be expressed through story and (gasp) even mythological expression. So the public is told the Bible is being taught as literature; while the almost undisguised purpose is to teach the Bible as science and history. The result is a Bible taught only as a dry and useless pseudo-science, which deprives students of Religion, Art and Science in one fell swoop, and probably does not do much for History, Arithmetic or philosophy & ethics either.
The proponents have to bewitch, bother, bewilder and downright lie to get such a curriculum into the public schools. What a Parade Passes By Our Young as these proponents of Deliberate Ignorance Razzle and Dazzle through a pretzeled up logic to claim the Bible is literature rather than science, then teach in a Church setting to the same children publicly made to call the Bible literature that it is instead a literal warrant to abandon any possibility of Discovery, Creativity, Wonder or Kite Flying. Well this hardly shocks the the affected youth who catch on to this double speak fairly quickly.
How dare the Right destroy the mind of a child by restricting her to one literal reading of a Whale (ok, BIG FISH) in Jonah, when Jesus Himself reinterprets the Jonah story as figurative?
Can they not see the Whale as a bathysphere or Space Shuttle, enabling Jonah and those who listen and learn his story, to take with them into a hostile environment the treasure of music as one hears Jonah's snatches of the Psalter in his prayer from the Belly of the Fish. Jonah takes with him his culture, his community and his God as he descends to theophany at the base of the mountains under the sea. The only accurate science in the entire story is the vomit - eating too much does cause it.
May those who have dishonored our heritage and darkened our childrens' possibility of a future wallow in the vomit of that Big Fish, and perhaps wake up to reality Before the Parade Passes America By. May we get some Life Back into our lives. May we fly Benjamin Franklin's Kite again, and return to the joy of discovery.
Just Wishin' and Hopin'.