While I compose this week’s masterful column, at least 50 percent of the U.S. population is looking toward the state of Florida, wondering why the whole presidential election comes down to a mysterious guy named Chad who election officials keep arguing over, and a governor named Jeb. The other 50 percent of the U.S. population is wondering why they didn’t get their free burrito on Election Day last Tuesday.
It is not, dear reader, my intention to discuss the base, nasty, brutish and short unfoldings of the current presidential election. I leave that job to people who are making a lot more money than myself by saying brilliant things like, “The current presidential election is really important,” and my personal favorite, “Perhaps irregularities have always existed in the American voting system.” Those comments are both worth six figures — I’m not joking. My goal this week is to inform the readers of the Daily, nay, the populace of the free world about a document often overlooked during moments of presidential crisis.
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union …” is the opening line for one important document (if you can’t name it, then move to Florida or rent “School House Rocks” over the weekend.) I’m not talking about the all-too-often quoted parchment behind bulletproof glass with its own nuclear war-proof bunker given credit for creating the bedrock upon which we all live. Skip the 18th century prose of the Great White Fathers and pick up a copy of “The Constitution Code” published by The Apocryphal Press in 1999. I suggested a book review of this text by the Daily, but mysteriously, no one knows who’s reporting on arts and culture for my employer.
“The Constitution Code” was a project begun by a group of political scientists, U.S. history experts and computer science encryption code breakers in American universities during the 1950s. In fact, one of the chief project leaders was a University of Minnesota professor, Dr. Ellsworth Reyort, from the now defunct Program in Constitutional Studies, Lore and Agrarianism on the St. Paul Campus.
Professor Reyort, in the foreword to the book, defined the project for his group of scholars as a way of “… uncovering the hidden codes and meanings placed in the U.S. Constitution by our Forefathers who ran out of paper space to say everything they wanted to …” (Reyort xvi).
I apologize to readers for rehearsing these rather dusty bits of information regarding the cracking of the constitutional code, but I’ll assume it’s new information for most people. It’s a little known fact that the framers of the U.S. Constitution hid secret messages in the wording of their document that when unscrambled, lend a whole new light to the ideas of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and Rufus King. In “The Constitution Code,” Dr. Ellsworth and his colleagues document the ways in which this clever group of revolutionaries provided an entirely hidden agenda in how to handle the potential troubles of the Republic.
Why, if these ideas are so important, were they hidden, the reader might ask? Well, tragically that part of the code has never been broken, but several other interesting tracks of thought were discovered — especially the ideas regarding the office of the president. The framer’s of the Constitution operated with a foresight we the people can all benefit from during these turbulent post-election days.
Legal scholars point to the sections of the Constitution they think lay the foundation for how the presidential election is to be decided. Yet, when the code breaking tools of Dr. Reyort and his colleagues are applied to Article II of the Constitution we learn —
“The president should never ever be a person who uses a single letter of the alphabet as a name. Furthermore, if boils appear on the skin of the president-elect, then the dark forces of Satan have in fact corrupted the flesh of our leader, and he or she must be exorcised with a complicated voting system that our populace, being too dim to understand, will allow to happen without question. As well, the president and vice president must never have names that, when put together, can be misunderstood as vulgar terms for the naughty bits of human anatomy. If any of these things should come to pass, then we suggest giving all the land back to the Indians whom we know we’ve done awful things to but they were in the way of our grand, Enlightenment agenda.” (Reyort 145)
I take a moment to pause and reflect. Let me suggest that the reader do the same. How did this group of freedom-fighting scamps know, in such detail, the perils our country might face one day? I get chills up and down my spine just contemplating their intellectual acuity. But there’s more to these coded messages; I’ve only taken a moment to catch my breath and prepare the reader for the sublime terror of “The Big Warning” hidden as well in Article II, sections 1-8 of the Constitution.
“We the writers of the Constitution know that one day an election for the office of the president will go completely askew and warn against the presence of siblings who hold offices of power and can deliver entire states to, let’s say, their brother, but only after votes cast by the populace have been lost, bungled and/or purchased at a fair market value.
As we hope this will never happen, we’ve developed an emergency plan that involves aliens coming down from the planet Thantork to ask, on our behalf, how in the hell the populace let this happen after we spent all this time sweating over the fact that it was bad enough our entire constitutional labor would be turned into an awful musical called ‘1776’ (the aliens told us all about it) starring David Hasselhoff.
“The aliens from Thantork will then pants the boil-infested leader of the free world. If and when these events transpire, the populace, being of sound mind and body, must do the following things to eschew the factionalism produced by southerners with pussing sores: Take a step to the left, then a step to the right. Put your hands on your hips and bring your knees in tight. Do the pelvic thrust (and say), “oo-ah-oo-ah-oo-ah.” We call this plan the “Time-Warp Contingency,” and know that it will emerge only when then ships of Thantork have landed.
“If and when these steps are taken to reinvigorate the demos, then a hope for representational democracy will still exist. Our colleagues from Thantork assure us that steps will be taken to train the populace in how to follow this plan. Klatu-Barada-Nikto” (Reyort 325).
Dearest readers, we must consider the horror suggested in this coded message. Not only will aliens descend from the heavens but we, the people, might be faced with looking at parts of the president-elect only interns usually see.
These are the stakes at hand, and I could not be more afraid for the safety of our genteel democracy. I’m left with a deep suspicion that perhaps those who worked on the project de-coding the U.S. Constitution embellished their findings for the sake of book sales. Yet the truth and accuracy of these pages is astounding when compared to similar texts by Nostradamus and the top notch news teams who botched the calling of this current election while people were standing in line to vote.
Don’t misunderstand my criticism — I really believe what The Constitution Code says. Why not? We’ve got ballots that are missing, offers from Fidel Castro to send international observers to monitor the re-counts (a good idea to say the least) and members of the ruling elite upset that democracy is a slow process that might mean more to the voting populace than free burritos.
John Troyer’s column appears alternate Fridays. He welcomes comments to [email protected]. Send letters to the editor to [email protected]