Category: Republic

Johnny Reb and Gus Yank Revisit Mount Horeb: Comitia Americana

10/7/2019

Johnny Reb and Gus Yank RMH: Comitia Americana

Part 12 of 13

“… Which Congress Reb?”
“Continental.”
“So the Continental Congress recognized Morgan’s military side.”
“Commemorative coin of Cowpens.”
“What’s on the other side?”
“A battle scene.”
“What’s Comitia mean?”
“It’s an old Roman word.”
“They’re all old.”
“It means an assembly of citizens, a gathering of the people.”
“For?”
“Making laws, courts and so on.”
“A congress.”
“Americana.”
“How many coins were made?”
“Eleven.”
“All military?”
“Yes.”
“The coins still around?”
“Rare and valuable.”
“Roman, Greek, and American represented.”
“Mount Horeb too.”
“Thunderbolt’s been quiet Reb.”
“Shhhh.”
“Right …”

*Next Up: 8 October and the autumn series finale of Johnny Reb and Gus Yank Revisit Mount Horeb: On the Road Again.

Posted by Bryan W. Brickner

Johnny Reb and Gus Yank Revisit Mount Horeb: To Live the ‘Merican Dream

9/22/2019

Johnny Reb and Gus Yank RMH: To Live the 'Merican Dream

Part 5 of 13

“… We get to live the dream.”
“Say that again Reb.”
“We get to live the dream Yank.”
“Live?”
“The dream.”
“How can we live again Johnny, we dead.”
“What about Crate?”
“You said I died.”
“You did.”
“So we can’t live again.”
“Crate means something Gus, something about you.”
“Be clear Johnny.”
“The thirty Thousand is our dream Yank.”
“I know.”
“You had dreams too, the dreams of Augustus Kotka.”
“I don’t remember them.”
“But you had them.”
“You had dreams too then, the dreams of Jonathan Rebel.”
“Yank, like Knowbody said, it’s time, time we live the ‘Merican dream.”
“The thirty Thousand.”
“Right.”
“And see where the Constitution leads Johnny.”
“It matters ‘cuz it’s true.”
“Speaking of true, what about Tell-Lie-Vision.”
“What about it?”
“Tell-Lie-Vision and the thirty Thousand?”
“I see your point.”
“And?”
“Let’s go see Thunderbolt.”
“Idea excellent.”
“After you Gus.”
“Okay … and bye Lil Man …”
[Bye.]

*Next Up: 26 September and part 6 of Johnny Reb and Gus Yank Revisit Mount Horeb: Truths.

Posted by Bryan W. Brickner

Johnny Reb and Gus Yank Revisit Mount Horeb: Time

9/21/2019

Johnny Reb and Gus Yank RMH: Time

Part 4 of 13

“… Maybe we could stay here Johnny.”
“Knowbody said that?”
“No.”
“You want to stay at Mount Horeb Gus?”
“No.”
“What did Knowbody say?”
“Knowbody said ‘It was time.’”
“Go on.”
“That’s it.”
“Knowbody said it was time?”
“Yes.”
“That’s bugin' you Gus?”
“What did Knowbody mean Johnny?”
“You know what Knowbody meant.”
“I think so too.”
“You just don’t like it.”
“You and me Reb, we been chasing this thirty Thousand thing for so long now, I wasn’t really sure it would …”
“Happen?”
“What happens to us Reb, when we complete the mission?”
“Gus, …”

*Next Up: 22 September and part 5 of Johnny Reb and Gus Yank Revisit Mount Horeb: To Live the 'Merican Dream.

Posted by Bryan W. Brickner

United We Stand 2020: Part 2 of Hannah Arendt, American Greatness and Constitutio Libertatis

7/20/2019

George Hammer and Ida Schiekoff's Wedding Day

Celebrate the Seventh Amendment on 7/20

Whatever great means, it includes the idea of something worth passing on.

George Hammer, my maternal great-grandfather, was born American from German immigrants.

George’s mother was born in Massbach, Bavaria, Germany and immigrated to the United States and Illinois’ Jo Daviess County with her family as a teenager in 1865.

George’s father came here as a five-year old from Zeitfeld Province, Germany (which is hard to find on a map) in the early 1850s as part of an immigrant family of five; they stayed with fellow Mennonites in New York for three years before homesteading in Jo Daviess County.

The land both families homesteaded was available because of the end of “Indian” hostilities in Illinois after the Black Hawk War. I’ve published a pamphlet that excerpts an Illinois history book (1878) with some details on how that war started and ended: see Fire-Water Ignites Black Hawk War of 1832 (and other things).

George, Ida and family (around 1920)

George wrote a few letters to a German woman in Canada named Ida Schiekoff; Ida was born in Arnhausen, Germany (in 1945 the village became Lipie, Poland) and immigrated to Canada as an 18 year-old in 1891. The two met by reading the same German newspaper and became pen pals. George then went to meet Ida and her family in Canada a couple of times; they soon got engaged, married, and moved to the family farm in Illinois. They lived a simple farm life, nothing fancier than good shelter and plenty of food, as there wasn’t any extra coin. Money showed up later, in the next generation, when their son and my grandfather, Willis (the child in the picture without a jacket), told me they started making money off the farm by selling surplus milk.

Maybe right there is a glimpse of the constitutional right within the Seventh Amendment and why it is there; it isn’t written for the rich in coin, or they would have used it: it’s there for the poor. It’s also constitutionally connected to the thirty Thousand, as the usurpation has organized the judiciary and our American sense of justice; the time to review (and amend) the Seventh Amendment, thus bringing to life its constitutional social justice bearing, is when We the People are represented according to numbers (say in 2021 or ‘22).

The same commentator that noted Arendt’s Constitutio Libertatis and honoring of the founders, also pointed out that she only thought the founders were a partial success; that is because, according to the commentator, the founders didn’t create space for We the People to participate. I don’t agree and think the evidence, our Constitution, shows otherwise; the thirty Thousand, the Enumeration, and the Seventh Amendment do provide ways for citizens to participate in their government at a “local” federal level via small districts augmented every ten years. It’s the usurpers fault, not the founders, who are keeping We the People from our constitutional greatness: us too, the people, as we haven’t shown vigilance until now.

Great means that something is worthy of being passed on, of giving to others as a legacy. The former Germans Hannah Arendt and Ida Schiekoff, and the children of German immigrants, like George Hammer, left us an American legacy. American immigrants are greater than the usurpers, and the usurpation of our right to representation, according to numbers, keeps us from our constitutional legacy … and that ain’t great America.

*Next Up: 17 September, US Constitution Day 2019, and Johnny Reb and Gus Yank Revisit Mount Horeb.

Posted by Bryan W. Brickner

2020: Part 1 of Hannah Arendt, American Greatness and Constitutio Libertatis

6/9/2019

American Greatness

Hannah Arendt said she wasn’t German.

The Germans didn’t want her anymore, ‘cuz, you know, they went nuts.

Why’d they go nuts?

One reason for sure is that American greatness was ignored.

Ask yourself, “How did Hitler come to power?” And the answer has to include the constitution Woodrow Wilson offered to Germany at the end of World War I.

Why didn’t Wilson offer the Germans a constitution like ours, like the one George Washington and the founders made?

Where’s the thirty Thousand?

Where’s the Enumeration?

Not in Wilson’s constitutional offering, so how could it be great? This is no small matter, given what happened to Hannah Arendt and millions of others.

When Arendt got to America she wrote about revolution. One commentator noted something new about her thoughts: “The new paradigmatic political actors are the American Founders, whose debates and deliberations concerning the drafting and adoption of the Constitution are presented by Arendt as every bit as exemplary as anything in Homer or Thucydides.”

As exemplary as anything in Homer or Thucydides: in other words, American greatness is not found in the boom-boom of rebellion and the 4th of July; American greatness is found in the law of revolution, the US Constitution, and 17 September.

*Next Up: A celebration of the 7th Amendment on 7/20 with Part 2 of Hannah Arendt, American Greatness and Constitutio Libertatis.

Posted by Bryan W. Brickner

2020: We the People and the Actual (Cat) Enumeration, not Census or Questioning

5/9/2019

Cat Enumeration

There is one cat in the picture.

That is the actual (cat) enumeration.

Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 of the US Constitution details the purpose for taking the “actual Enumeration,” the formal count of the people of the several states, and it doesn’t mention a census or the logic for asking the people questions. It simply states:

“The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct. The number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every …”

Congress does the count, the enumeration, by law.

Then Congress is to divide by thirty Thousand, by law and as Washington taught in the first veto, for a state’s federal representation.

That aggregate creates the House of Representatives for We the People.

No questions asked.

We the People represented according to numbers is constitutional fact, just like there’s one cat in the picture.

One people.

One constitution.

One cat.

2020.

*Next Up: 9 June and a 2020 update focusing on Hannah Arendt, American Greatness and Constitutio Libertatis.

Posted by Bryan W. Brickner

We the People and Usurpation Day 2019

4/9/2019

George Washington's Textbook

Today is Usurpation Day, which first happened on 9 April 1792, when the US House of Representatives broke their word and usurped a power not granted by law.

What created that usurpation moment was President Washington’s first veto, which was also the first veto ever under our Constitution.

President Washington, being a surveyor and Freemason, knew numbers; he also knew the Constitution, which he helped write, and which clearly states: “shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand” (Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3).

What shall not exceed thirty Thousand? That would be the number of Representatives due a state for its enumeration.

In the first attempt to use the enumeration, Congress sent President Washington a bill that dropped the fraction; if a state had thirty Thousand and one, they were due, according to the phrase “shall not exceed,” another Representative. Instead, Congress dropped the fraction and did not give certain states another Representative.

Washington vetoed the bill.

The House of Representatives, unable to override President Washington’s veto, passed a new bill for representation on 9 April 1792, the first usurpation law, and used a divisor of “thirty-three” Thousand for representation instead.

President Washington also knew of the Bill of Rights and its Article the first, the one about moving said representation ratio to forty and then fifty Thousand. Washington either let the new representation bill become law without signing it, or signed it knowing he had made his point and believing this issue would be resolved with the passage of Article the first: this has yet to happen.

Washington was a creator of We the People and the idea of representing ourselves according to numbers. Twenty-twenty is the next enumeration. Why not now ‘Merica? Why not you? Time we did it, time to count the people, divide by thirty Thousand like George taught, and see what We the People really look like … according to numbers.

*Next Up: 9 May and a 2020 We the People update.

Posted by Bryan W. Brickner
~.~
“Those who toy with life never attain mastery. Self-discipline and courageous contemplation are necessary steps to understanding. However, do not become overzealous and drill yourself into the ground.”

From Brian Browne Walker’s The I Ching or Book of Changes: A Guide to Life’s Turning Points (1992)

Johnny Reb and Gus Yank On Our Way: Mount Horeb

3/22/2019

Johnny Reb and Gus Yank OOW: Mount Horeb

Part XIII of XIII

“… How’s this?”
“Feels like home.”
“Welcome home Gus.”
“Welcome home Johnny.”
“There wasn’t a horse before.”
“No?”
“It was people conveying the man.”
“Was there a child?”
“Yes.”
“Slave?”
“Represented.”
“Slavery, it means both: slaves and slavers.”
“Yup.”
“You bring the flag Reb?”
“I thought you did.”
“Not me.”
“Well then.”
“Well then what?”
“Let’s rally ‘round it.”
“Mount Horeb style.”
“Worked before.”
“Did.”

Thanks All!

*Next Up: Usurpation Day 2019.

Posted by Bryan W. Brickner

Johnny Reb and Gus Yank Somewhere On Our Way: Bertha

12/21/2018

Johnny Reb and Gus Yank: Bertha

Part I of XIII

“Reb?”
“Yeah Gus.”
“Who’s Bertha?”
“You hearing that too?”
“And why don’t they want her coming around anymore?”
“It’s a metaphor.”
“For what?”
“Bertha I suppose.”
“That doesn’t help Johnny.”
“Maybe for us?”
“How?”
“Round and round we go.”
“Like the usurpation.”
“Right Yank.”
“And we’ll just try to see what’s going down.”
“The representation usurpation is going down.”
“I like the bended knees part too Johnny.”
“Noble.”
“Taking a knee for the Constitution.”
“Taking a knee for something greater than yourself.”
“Let’s visit Captain Downs again Reb.”
“Let’s Yank.”

Next Up: 4 January 2019 and part II of the winter series Johnny Reb and Gus Yank Somewhere On Our Way: Up.

Posted by Bryan W. Brickner

2020 Update: Representational Absence and Presence in Locke, Madison and Dahl (and Amar)

10/10/2018

Absenting creates a presence: presenting creates an absence.

This creates a political problem, meaning one of value.

John Locke, James Madison and Robert Dahl were political theorists who worked on this problem, the problem of a presence creating an absence (and vice versa).

Locke’s work presented liberalism and a way for particular groups to make absent other groups; this has worked against the likes of tribes, nation-states and monarchies.

Madison’s work presented the US Constitution and a way for a particular group (We the People) to make present and absent other groups (representation); this is done via the decennial census and the ratio of “one Representative for every thirty Thousand.” Madison’s presence is law, yet absented by the usurpation.

Dahl is simple, so to speak: he absented Madison’s presence by ignoring the “thirty Thousand” found in Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3. This makes Yale’s Professor Dahl the 20th century political theory front man for the representation usurpation; the 21st century Yale front man for the usurpation is Sterling Professor of Law Akhil Reed Amar. Amar is simple too, so to speak: he just argues / presents by absenting one of the two shalls in the aforementioned Article.

Viewed from the past, the constitutional concept “We the People” has been an absent presence; viewed from today, it looks like a presenting presence; viewed from the future, that would be a constitutional We the People and an end to the representation usurpation, or simply, 2020.

*Next Up: 14 November and a new pamphlet release, A Dissenting Opinion from Johnny Reb and Gus Yank about George Thomas.

Posted by Bryan W. Brickner