To the extent that it may have merit, I dedicate this political / literary work to the Authoress of the Magnificat (Luke 1: 51-52).  Dated some twelve dozen years after the counterrevolution of the Maccabees had restored ancient Israel, may Mary’s magnificent composition be prophetic of restoration for America in the 21st century:  “He has shown might in his arm.  He has scattered the proud in the conceit of their hearts.  He has put down the mighty from their thrones, and has exalted the humble.”

 

Chapter by chapter:

1. To the memory of John F. Kennedy, the last President before the postmodernist breakthrough.

In William Manchester’s view (One Brief Shining Moment, 1983, p. 120), Kennedy was perhaps “the last of the liberal patriots.”  According to Ted Sorensen, who knew the President well, JFK was “the truest and oldest kind of liberal: the free man with the free mind.”  Kennedy “started out asking questions.”  He arrived at answers that were “the product of his own reasoning and learning,” rather than a “parroting … without reflection or re-examination” of political or intellectual spokesmen for either the left or the right.  (Sorensen, Kennedy, 1965, pp. 21-22, 26).

In 1957, JFK won the Pulitzer Prize for his book, Profiles in Courage.

 

2. To the memory of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who built the “Big Five” coalition against the Axis war machine.  During World War II, the Big Five and their leaders were FDR of the United States, Winston Churchill of Great Britain, Joseph Stalin of the USSR, Chiang Kai-shek of the Republic of China, and Charles de Gaulle of France.   Roosevelt was able to hold this disparate alliance together despite such wide ideological divides as that between Stalin and Churchill.
3. To the memory of Thomas Jefferson, America’s reformer of wide knowledge and intellect.  Jefferson composed his own epitaph: “Author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, & Father of the University of Virginia.”   T.J. believed that occasional revolts or rebellions were healthy in a republic.  Said Jefferson in 1787, the year the Convention at Philadelphia did its great work, “God forbid that we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.”
4. To the memory of the 39 signers of the U.S. Constitution.  Anticipating the centennial of the Convention at Philadelphia, William Gladstone described what the Framers wrought as “the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.”  In composing the Constitution the Framers included means for its correction, i.e. the fifth article on constitutional amendments.  Included in Article V is the “convention for proposing amendments,” along with a ratification process controlled by voters in the States.

Article V contrasts starkly with the postmodern practice whereby unelected, life-tenured, oligarchs amend the Constitution by adjudicating from the bench.

 

5. To the memory of the valiant Mathathias, and through him to his heroic sons – Jonathan, Simon, and Judas Maccabeus – who hammered out a grand victory in a godly counterrevolution.  The fighting Maccabees organized a resistance to the top-down revolution imposed on ancient Israel by Greek successors of Alexander the Great.  God blessed them with victory, and lifted the yoke of the heathen from the Jewish nation (143, B.C.).
6. To the memory of Richard Henry Lee of Virginia.  In the continental congress, June 7, 1776, Lee introduced his motion for the independence of the United States.  It was seconded by John Adams and passed a month later as the Declaration of Independence.

During the revolutionary era, Richard Henry Lee campaigned against oligarchic tendencies in government.  As president of the continental congress in 1785, Lee wrote to Samuel Adams:  "The fact is that power poisons the mind of its possessor." 

Lee saw incumbency of long duration as tending to distance government from the governed; therefore he wrote extensively for what today would be called term limits.  Under the influence of Lee and contemporaries like Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, the nation’s first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, applied the highly democratic principle of rotation in office to membership in congress as well as to the top leadership post within congress.

7. To the memory of Thomas Allan Jenckes, Congressman from Rhode Island, 1863-70.  Pioneering reformer aiming to promote efficiency and professionalism in the federal bureaucracy.  During the last third of the 19th century, Jenckes and subsequent civil service reformers sought to eradicate bureaucratic corruption, which issued in those days from the political payoffs integral to the post-Jacksonian spoils system.
8. To the memory of Samuel Gompers, founder of the AFL (1886), and father of the U.S. labor movement.  Until his death in 1924, Gompers worked tirelessly and honestly to bolster the bargaining strength of workers vis-à-vis the magnates of capital.  Due in no small part to his efforts, pay and working conditions improved vastly for Americans whose livelihood depended on wages and salaries.
9. To the memory of Theodore Roosevelt.  The nation’s leading trustbuster and a friend of Gompers, Teddy Roosevelt made his most enduring mark as a conservationist.  As President, T.R. stated that “the conservation of our natural resources and their proper use constitute the fundamental problem which underlies almost every other problem of our national life.”  Roosevelt sought to promote the friendly co-existence of mankind and nature.  Roosevelt believed also in the right to own firearms, and in the merits of self-sufficiency.
10. To the memory of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her fellow delegates at the Seneca Falls Convention, a pioneering assembly for women’s rights.  Their resolutions of 1848 included the following:  “Resolved, That the same amount of virtue, delicacy, and refinement of behavior, that is required of woman in the social state, should also be required of man, and the same transgressions should be visited with equal severity on both man and woman.”  This approach would improve morals in male society – not bring moral standards down, in gender neutral fashion, to some base common denominator.

Stanton exhibited a sober approach to morality, opposing, for example, abortion.  She was quite unlike some feminists today, who have been seduced by postmodernist morals, and who scorn the cardinal virtue of temperance.  It is safe to say that mainstreaming sodomy, pornography, euthanasia or human cloning would have struck Stanton as repulsive and unworthy of being elevated to the level of the Bill of Rights.

11. To Billy Graham, and to the memory of George Whitefield, “Lightening rod of the Great Awakening.”  Rev. Whitefield died in New England in 1770, several months after the Boston Massacre presaged the American Revolution.  It has been said that by his extensive labors and travels throughout Britain and her 13 colonies “his diligence and sacrifice helped turn two nations back to God.”

Beginning in the mid-20th century, Rev. Billy Graham followed as best he could in Whitefield’s footsteps.  Graham fought an uphill battle for spiritual revival in the United States, mainly through his ministry of preaching.  

Through his radio program, Hour of Decision, Graham impacted your author significantly.  As a young Bostonian during the early 1970’s, I was earnestly engaged in recovering from the apostasy of my college years – i.e. my individual tryst with postmodern concepts and morals.  Billy Graham helped arm me for my own personal counterrevolution.

Viva Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe

12. If we the people want to save our country; indeed if we are willing to restore the written U.S. Constitution to the high standing it held during America’s happiest years; the enormity of the task bids us to solicit the intervention of Divine Providence.  Let us therefore humbly beseech the God of the Holy Bible.

Accordingly I suggest that we approach the Savior with a plea by way of his blessed mother.  It is well to remember her role at the wedding reception in Cana (John 2:1-12) and how she solicited the first of her Son’s miracles.

Thus this book’s twelfth chapter, in particular the proposed constellation law, is dedicated to the Virgin Mary.  Her first apparition in the Western Hemisphere served as Hidalgo’s revolutionary banner in 1810.  To this day that miraculous standard shines forth from our neighbor south of the border, signifying hope to tyrannically or impiously governed peoples anywhere, and particularly in the nations of North and South America.