Insure Domestic Tranquility

The preamble of the US Constitution that begins with the words, We the People, includes the injunction that among the purposes of the Union is to "insure domestic Tranquility."

This is mildly interesting, like something the dog dug up and brings into the house and drops at my feet while I'm reading the morning paper.

I think deeply as deeply as I'm able about the phrase--insure domestic tranquility--and what it might have meant at the time of its first writing and what it might mean now, and then go on to other matters.

What other matters do I go on to?

The current Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh as a Character from the pen of Charles Dickens. A simple re-fashioning of his name from Kavanaugh to Cravengnaw would do the trick: the rest could be a verbatim transcription from the Judge's testimony yesterday to the Senate committee, with Charles Dickens himself providing color commentary on the sniveling piousness, manufactured moral rectitude, swindled little rich boy, the unjust ruination of a career, the sweet, innocent little daughter who asked that the Kavanaugh family pray for his accuser, "the lady"... 

Then suddenly, from underneath a lingual veneer of proper male Catholic service to church and state, the snarling lapdog of the far right, hand-picked from the tree of jurists and policy makers long cultivated by the Koch Bros and others of their ilk, emerges. The tears stop, the voice that in the opening moments sounded so wounded, so misunderstood, so innocent in and of themselves, turn harsh, vindictive, accusatory, not forensic but caustic. That place in the forehead between the eyes and the bridge of Kavanaugh's nose is suddenly activated, its own sort of lie detector...

Yep, Dickens would have had fun with this guy, though Dickens lived in a much more unjust age than ours, an age of unfair, rapacious labor practices, corrupt politicians and dishonest judges. There would be no domestic tranquilty for Charles Dickens. 

A page from "The Way We Live Now" by Anthony Trollope, Irish-born English novelist and near contemporary of Charles Dickens, an equally astute chronicler of the social/cultural/political life of his time.