Bruce Watson: Your founding fathers on Facebook

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LEVERETT — Ten score and a bunch of years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a nation where you could say things like “four score and seven years ago” and people would actually listen. And vote for you.

But now we are engaged in a great civil experiment to see whether that nation or any nation besieged by screaming pundits, mindless tweets and relentless political hackery at a third-grade level can long endure.

We have survived another campaign, yet you can’t help but wonder what our founding fathers would have thought about the whole mess.

In their day, they wrote letters, actual letters with full sentences and robust thoughts. Today they’d be on Facebook.

TomJ

OMG! Y’all check out that election?

JohnA

Soooo friggin’ LAME!!!!!!!!

WoodTooth

All they ever talked about was the economy, the economy, the economy. Like, don’t they have enough stuff already?

TomJ

When I wrote “all men are created equal,” I didn’t mean “equally self-centered.”

JohnA

And all that name-calling. Jeez, how old are these people?

TomJ

You got called names, J :)e_SClBJohnA

Yeah, but I figured people would have grown up by now.

WoodTooth

LOL! Grown up? Dude, you’re talkin’ about people who get 70-degree November days and hurricanes hitting New England and neither candidate says word one about global warming. People are shot in their offices every week and they won’t lift a finger to keep MACHINE GUNS OUT OF THE HANDS OF LUNATICS!!!!

TomJ

Which one of you geniuses made that second amendment so perfectly vague?

Abigail A tagged a photo of JohnA.

WoodTooth

I just wanna know. What on God’s green earth is a super PAC?

TomJ

It’s the end of democracy as we created it. Any rich merchant can give as much as he wants to any clown that’ll do his bidding. If we’d had that in 1776, the Tories would have bankrolled a billion-pound PR campaign for ol’ George III and we’d still be sipping tea and spelling color “colour.”

JohnA

Disgusting. And they call this a DEMOCRACY??????

TomJ

Not only that, but check out the SUPREME COURT!!!! Nine judges who serve forever — which one of you geniuses thought up that lifetime appointment scam?

JamesM

’Fraid that was me. Who knew people would live so long?

TomJ

So the Supremes call campaign spending “free speech!” Money is speech! What will they say next, that land is thought?

JohnA

That commerce is conjugal coupling?

WoodTooth

That corn is currency?

TomJ

Well, at least the nation survived. Thank God for that Electoral College we dreamed up that night we all got plastered.

JohnA

The mind-boggling thing is we set this whole machine in motion more than 200 years ago. We did our best but we made mistakes. And these bozos look at us like we were gods gifted with infinite foresight. And they use our ideas any way that suits them.

TomJ

Yeah, they think “arms” means semi-automatics.

WoodTooth

And filibuster means ... wait, what does filibuster mean?

TomJ

It’s not in anything we wrote. They just made it up as a power grab.

JohnA

Disgusting. And would it kill them to update the Constitution maybe? Like VOTING ON TUESDAY? GET REAL :(

TomJ

Well, I guess it’s just America being America. We should all go back to our graves. Hey, how come Abe’s not on Founders’ Facebook these days?

WoodTooth

He’s promoting his movie.

Bruce Watson’s column appears every other Wednesday. He can be reached at opinion@gazettenet.com.