The Tragic Irony of the Trump Campaign
In class earlier this week I read to my Italian students that famous line from our nation’s founding document: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. I asked them very plainly if they could identify the two grand hypocrisies inherent in these famous words. The answers did not take very long at all: in these lofty, oft-repeated lines there is no mention of women, the human beings whose bodies actually perform the work of creating new human beings. And the wombless men who signed this piece of paper owned slaves.
It is not possible to understand our nation’s history or present without first reconciling oneself to the grand hypocrisies with which it was founded. It is not possible to understand America without first …more