Americans are long accustomed to the media stricture that it is the news, not the normal happenstance, that must be reported. We are told that what is unusual is news; the ordinary does not merit front-page headlines or on-the-spot eyewitness camera coverage.
Newspapers and newscasts never or seldom report about dog bites man. Only man bites dog, we are told, is worthy of media attention.
Yet, when we look at the daily information flow, we are overwhelmed by news of takeovers and attempted takeovers of foreign governments. Most recently, the rebel attempt to topple Cory Aquino in the Philippines dominated the news for days and preempted other topics on interview programs.
Pick any day this year and usually the top of the news was some attempt to overthrow some foreign government by force and violence. In recent weeks, news cameras have covered street demonstrations, violent strikes, guerrilla bands, or threats of takeovers in Korea, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Panama, Afghanistan, and South Africa, to name only the major ones.
If we apply the man/dog metaphor, however, the truth is that these foreign takeover attempts are all cases of dog bites man, not of man bites dog. In most foreign countries, nothing is more ordinary, more normal, more run-of-the-mill, than changing a ruling regime by war or revolution, coup or conquest, street demonstration or just plain murder.
In the long reach of world history, that’s the way most governments come into existence. The overnight coup is a ho-hum event in most Latin American countries. In the third of the world behind the Iron Curtain, most Communist dictators come to power by killing more people than their rivals.
All this talk we hear about “democracy” in Latin America or in the Philippines or in Africa ranges from wishful thinking to media hype to downright misrepresentation. Cory Aquino didn’t come to power by any democratic means; she became head of state as the result of street demonstrations. The chances are that she will eventually depart the same way.
The real man-bites-dog story that deserves to be fully reported is the survival of the American Constitution for 200 years. Mirabile dictu! For two centuries, it has allowed us to change our Presidents peacefully every four years. For the first time in history, a nation adopted a system that uses bombast instead of bloodshed to change its rulers.
When Jimmy Carter became unpopular in 1979, it never occurred to anyone to get rid of him by a street demonstration or a coup or a bloody binge. When political opponents detect weakness in the Reagan Administration, nobody thinks to stage a coup the next time the President goes out to speak.
The handful of other democracies in the world today that can be relied on to change governments in an orderly fashion are a small minority, and none has lasted for 200 years. What is it that makes our American system so remarkable?
The United States Constitution, whose 200th birthday we celebrate this month, is the source of our stability, as it is the fountainhead of our freedom.
The Founding Fathers gathered in Philadelphia that hot summer of 1787 with a great sense of mission and dedication to their task. On June 19, James Madison made a moving speech arguing that the convention must come up with a “Constitution for the Ages.”
For the ages? He had to be kidding! How could those men dare to dream that the constitution they were writing could create a government that could last so long! If it did, it would truly be a “first” in world history. Even the notion that man is capable of self-government was revolutionary and controversial in 1787.
After weeks of wrangling in the non-air-conditioned room in Independence Hall had produced little progress, Benjamin Franklin warned his fellow delegates that, if they failed to produce a workable constitution, future generations might conclude that mankind is not capable of self-government, and then leave government “to chance, conquest, and to war.”
And so, our Constitution writers, who were both keen students of the failure of previous governments and soldiers who knew at first hand the price of liberty, invented our United States Constitution. Its genius was an original design of governance that so distributed and divided the power of man over man that government could not transform itself into tyranny and need to be overthrown in violence.
