Our Declaration

No class on Monday!  Labor Day!

W.H. Auden, "September 1, 1939"

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

 For Wednesday, Allen, ch. 5-22.  (Do not freak out:  the chapters are short.)

Here is the gravestone that Allen mentioned at the Pomona commencement:

Textual analysis and slow reading

• Thinking about how one sentence relates to another;
• Thinking about the origins of terms in the document;
• Thinking about how the document relates to others (p. 33)
• Thnking about what is missing. See pp. 22 on the 2012 campaign.

Patrimony

• Something that you inherit:  heritage.
• Back to "I Have a Dream" "When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir."

Democracy

• What is democracy?
• Who decides who "the people" are?  What is citizenship?
• Why is the word not in the Declaration or Constitution?
• What are the conditions of democracy?

The Declaration