Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Constitution Day a day to celebrate, if only we knew

“What’s that?”

I had just told a lunch companion that it was Constitution Day. In answer to his question, Constitution Day marks the signing of that beautiful, flawed, often misinterpreted, hotly contested, miraculous document on Sept. 17 of whatever year it was signed — I was a little fuzzy on the details.

My friend looked thoughtful, nodded. It’s odd, isn’t it, that an anniversary of such magnitude slides by with so little notice? Did you see anything about it? I didn’t. Meanwhile, on a TV over my friend’s shoulder, MSNBC wondered, in urgent caps, “American dream UNDER SIEGE?”

I had planned to mark Constitution Day with simple rituals — puzzling over the latest encrypted transmission from Planet Angle, perhaps, or enjoying a fresh waft of anti-Obama outgassing from the other paper. You know, patriot stuff. I decided instead to gotcha-test my friends on their constitutional knowledge.

What’s the 27th Amendment, I demanded of another.

His reply, extremely paraphrased for newspaper suitability, was, “Freedom from jerks like you?” (Turns out he knew: the requirement that congressional pay hikes take effect the following session.)

For most of us, the Constitution, like nature or quantum physics, is everywhere around us, invisibly doing its thing, governing our actions and holding this imperfect union together in a way we’re only dimly aware of.

That we the people should be more fluent in our founding documents is inarguable, of course. It’s ridiculous that I didn’t remember offhand what year it was signed. Then again, life happens. On a typical, chaos-rattled, modern-American day, most of us without Tea Party membership simply don’t have many reasons to ponder how amazing it is that the engine of our democracy is really just a sheaf of papers.

Later in the day, I found myself at the Pepper Lane office of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service. It’s a drab cube of bureaucratic space, crowded with chairs and, that day, festooned with small American flags for the ceremony about to take place: Twenty-five men and women from 14 countries were to become American citizens.

In a time when so many of us are at odds about who we are, what this country is about and to what degree the American dream really is UNDER SIEGE, it seemed a resonant place to be on Constitution Day.

I was pretty sure I could pop-quiz that crowd and they’d know that the 13th Amendment prohibits the denial of voting right based on race, and all the rest. As Judge Philip Pro, presiding over the ceremony, ruefully acknowledged, people who choose citizenship know this stuff cold; those of us born here often take it for granted.

Not me: The Constitution was signed in 1787. I looked it up.

After a ceremony, in which the new citizens pledged to support and defend the Constitution, they watched a video from President Barack Obama, sang along to “Proud to Be an American” and endured a couple of dull but well-meaning speeches.

One woman, who’d just given up her Mexican citizenship, was invited to stand up and say a few words on the occasion, but teared up so much I couldn’t understand what she said. I didn’t need to, of course; I could read it on her face.

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