Thomas Jefferson was an enormously complex man – bankrupt slaveholder, inventor, the finest architect in the new world, founder of institutions, translator of what is still the most radical Enlightenment version of The Bible, author of the most important document in American history We hold these truths to be self-evident . . . .

 

So many of the web photos of Monticello are of its outside, which is certainly magisterial, but not, for me, the best way to see this building. For it is inside this structure that the polymath is revealed – the bed built into the wall so as to render bedchamber & study equally accessible, the maze of underground rooms in the mountain that meant that servants didn’t have to trek through snow in winter to reach kitchen or wine cellar (but which also contributed greatly to the cost of running the home). In the entrance hall is an exhibit on the wall of artifacts brought back by Lewis & Clark, as well as, if I recall correctly, the jawbone of a wooly mammoth & a clock that tells the days of the week (but does so with some difficulty, so that some of it literally descends into the floor). There is a part of Jefferson that is absolutely resonant with William Blake as well as with Simon Rodia, visionary junk architect of the Watts Towers. Yet there is a side also entirely practical & grounded. That is the aspect of Jefferson closest, say, to Walt Whitman. The words he chose for the obelisk over his grave give you a sense of his priorities:

 

Here was buried

Thomas Jefferson

Author of the

Declaration

of

American Independence

of

the Statute of Virginia

for

Religious Freedom

and Father of the

University of Virginia

 

The most important thing I’ve done thus far this year was to step into this house – the tour is quick & it’s impossible to pause long enough in any one room. But you don’t really need a lot of time – the comprehensiveness of his vision strikes you immediately. I burst into tears, or very nearly did, just standing in the very first room. Once in this nation’s history, the president was also the smartest person in the country.

 

Now we do it just the other way around. The decadence at the heart of the present regime is not to be underestimated. Roger Griffin, writing of an earlier form of this same phenomenon, nailed it:

 

Fascism was no freak display of anti-modernism or of social pathological processes in the special paths of development followed by a few nation states. Its raw materials were the forces of militarism, racism, chauvinism, charismatic leadership, populist nationalism, fears that the nation or civilisation as a whole was being undermined by the forces of decadence, deep anxiety about the modern age and longings for a new era to begin, all of which are active ingredients in contemporary history...what made it possible for these ingredients to be forged together into popular, and even mass movements in the inter-war period and for two of them, fascism and nazism, eventually to erect a new type of single party state, was an extraordinary conjuncture of acute socio-political tensions....fascism is best defined as a revolutionary form of nationalism, one which sets out to be a political, social, and ethical revolution, wedding the ‘people’ into a dynamic national community under new elites infused with new heroic values. The core myth which inspires this project is that only a populist, trans-class movement offering cathartic national rebirth (palingenesis) can stem to tide of decadence... the whole thrust of the fascist revolutionary programme is anti-conservative, though not in the same way it is anti-liberal or anti-marxist...” (The Nature of Fascism, 1993)

 

We haven’t arrived as yet at a “single party state,” tho W appears to want to govern is tho we have. Concentration camps, “ghost prisoners,” humans placed outside of the reach of the law – none of this is even remotely constitutional. I don’t think any of us understand yet just how far apart at the seams the American “experiment” has truly unraveled. Nor do I think any of us know whether or not it will ever be possible to put the genii of unbridled power back into the bottle. History does not counsel optimism.

 

Yet history does offer counter examples & Jefferson, for all of his flaws, is one of the very best. There are moments when I think that the whole of human history can best be viewed as an evolving understanding of the potential contained inside that phrase of Jefferson’s, that all men are created equal. That’s the hopeful side of me, and when I see the degree to which people under 30 could care less whether or not gays marry, I can see that this evolution of understanding is relentless.

 

So today feels like an appropriate one to give a nod to Tom Jefferson, tho we have so very far to go.