This is the last week of the legislative session. Time is even more precious now and the risk that some worthwhile things will be talked to death is greatest.
This session already will be remembered as the year the Missouri Senate became a reading club. A lousy one.
Not only were the choices of reading material poor, the reading of the material was fingernails-on-the-blackboard irritating.
Not only was their choice of material and their delivery of it lifeless, spiritless, colorless, arid, tedious (we could go on—we found a listing of 50 synonyms for “boring”), it set a low bar for being educational.
If unrecoverable hours of members’ lives will be taken from them, they at least should have the opportunity to turn the torturous time into a learning experience.
To solve this problem, we suggest that the Senate set aside funds to hire temporary personnel who have professional reading skills and employ them as part-time reading clerks—overnight reading hours would demand heftier salaries but it would be a small price to pay for making the Senate a more enlightened chamber. Accompanying this recommendation is a suggested rule change that any group fomenting a filibuster must commit to staying in the chamber for the duration of the readings, thus guaranteeing that SOMEBODY will learn something.
Herewith, then, we offer a reading list for filibusters in hopes that consumption of those hours will provide participants and listeners alike some value. We regret that we cannot guarantee that the readers can do a better job than they did this year.
Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality by Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. While most of us have read the Declaration or have heard it read, this book is a highly-informative explanation of the care that went into each paragraph and sometimes each word of our nation’s foundational document and how the elements of the Declaration fit together and constitute the legal framework that led to the writing of the United States Constitution.
America’s Unwritten Constitution: The Precedents and Principles We Live By, by Akil Reed Amar, who teaches Constitutional Law at Yale College and Yale Law School. Amar is considered “one of America’s pre-eminent legal scholars” who explains why the Constitution does not set forth all of the rights, principles, and procedures that govern our nation. He maintains that the Constitution cannot be understood in textual isolation from a changing world and the laws that change with it.
The End of White Christian America by Robert P. Jones, a former psychology professor at Missouri State University who now leads the Public Religion Research Institute, that examines what is happening because our nation is no longer an evangelical majority white Christian nation and the political and cultural effects of that change. The book explores that change, its implications for the future, and why those who fear the future should instead understand how the positive values of white Christian America will survive.
New World, Inc., by John Butman and Simon Targett. The authors explain that it was commerce, not religious freedom, that was the motivating factor for the earliest explorations and settlements of our nation.
The Wordy Shipmates, by Sarah Vowell. Ms. Vowell is greatly entertaining in explaining who the Puritans on which so much of our standard history is based really were as human beings—and they were pips and not necessarily pure..
Marooned: Jamestown, Shipwreck, and a New History of America’s Origin, by Joseph Kelly, takes us to the dangerous, desperate times overlooked in our usual histories. We do not often consider that those who came to this side of the Atlantic placed themselves in a hostile world for which most were unsuited to settle with no guarantees that new supplies to sustain them would arrive later It also explores the papal-approved concept that if a land was not populated by Christians, it was proper—a duty, in fact—for Christians to take that land regardless of the cost to those who inhabited it.
El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America, by Carrie Gibson. Long before the Pilgrims and the Puritans arrived on this side of the pond, the Spanish were here as conquerors, settlers, enslavers, missionaries, and adventurers. But most of our history is based on, as poet Walt Whitman put it, the idea that this nation was founded as a second England.
There are several others that could broaden understanding of who laid the foundation for our country and the opportunities and the missed opportunities to recognize them that shape our attitudes today, and not always in a positive way.
If the Senate, or a small part of it, wants to kill time and possibly beneficial legislation (for somebody) in the process, it should at least contribute to improving the general knowledge of our nation, at least for the Senator who should fill his mind while killing everybody else’s time, and for those who might stick around if there’s something worthwhile to listen to. And with these books, there is.
We offer these suggestions with no hope that they will amount to anything.
But that doesn’t keep individual members of the legislature—and the public—from becoming better citizens by broadening their understanding of our nation’s roots.