The Ark of America

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.CLOSE_P]

The Constitution has the aura of the sacred about it. It occupies a shrine up in the higher stretches of American reverence. A citizen imagines sun-shot clouds, the founders hovering in the air like saints in religious art.

But the Constitution has its other, mundane life. Down at sea level, where people struggle along in law courts and jailhouses and abortion clinics, where lives and ideas crash into each other, the Constitution has a more interesting / and turbulent existence. There the Constitution is not a civic icon but a messy series of collisions that knock together the arrangements of the nation's life. Those arrangements become America's history -- what its people do, what they are, what they mean. Walt Whitman wrote, "I contain multitudes." That is what the Constitution does -- an astonishing feat considering the variety of multitudes that have landed on American shores, and continue to land.

May a man be detained in jail before being tried? Is prayer to be permitted in the public schools? Or a Christmas creche in the town square? What of the Reagan Administration's arranging military help for the Nicaraguan contras when Congress has forbidden it? If a man murders someone, may the state kill the killer in retribution? May government employees be forced to have their urine tested to search for the trace of drugs? May American Nazis march in an Illinois suburb that is home to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust? May a man be arrested for performing a homosexual act in his own home? Is it right to promote a woman ahead of an equally qualified man in order to redress past inequities toward women?

Issues passionate and human and difficult surge up against the Constitution. Every day it attends to the pleas of lust, rage, unborn life, the killer's remorse, the President's prerogatives, the First Amendment rights of a Ku Klux Klansman. The Constitution even makes a ritual appearance in the American television cop show: there comes a moment of denouement when the detective, triumphant but sardonically obedient to the Miranda decision, snaps the cuffs on a suspect and growls, "You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to . . ."

The Constitution forces Americans to think about uncongenial matters, to think about tolerating everything they may hate. It is the American superego. It holds Americans to a high standard, even though it has sometimes countenanced filthy deeds -- most notoriously, the owning of slaves.

In this Bicentennial year, fiestas are swirling around the shrine of the Constitution. In Philadelphia there are endless parties, picnics and explications. The pageantry is perfectly American. Yet the nation may have grown a little weary of such celebrations. The skies of the '80s have been filled with red, white and blue balloons. In the waning Reagan years, the note of national self-congratulation sounds hollow.