I’m speaking this week from Mount Pleasant, a neighborhood in Washington, DC where life is often not as pleasant as the name implies. Mount Pleasant is home to a number of immigrants from Central America who are clinging to the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder in the nation’s capital. Families try to keep the old ways together – you can see them strolling in the parks on Sunday, dressed in their best clothes, but it’s more common to see men giving in to drunkenness and despair, staggering on the sidewalk.

In the other Washington – Washington state – is the farming community of Wenatchee. In the past 10 years, the Latino population has increased by nearly 500 percent as agricultural workers move to Wenatchee from Mexico, seeking work in the local orchards and farms. Coming into a new society, the farm workers of Wenatchee face the same pressures as the Central Americans of Mount Pleasant. These transitions are particularly difficult for the young, who find themselves in schools that are not only taught in a foreign language, but that have curricula and bureaucracies unlike anything they’ve ever faced before.
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The newspapers reported, a few weeks ago, that a cross-section of Americans was given a quiz about the Constitution and of course, we failed miserably. On one particular point of ignorance, only six percent of those polled could name the four freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution. I’ll give you a second if you want to quiz yourself… Did you name them? They are: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion and freedom of assembly. They’re listed in the First Amendment.

One American who would have answered the question correctly is Charlton Heston, who rattled them off recently during a speech at the National Press Club. Mr. Heston, when he’s not out pretending to be Moses, is a vice-president of the National Rifle Association. Although he can name the four freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution, Mr. Heston said the right to keep and bear arms, which is found in the Second Amendment, is the “most vital” of the rights granted by the Constitution. Mr. Heston said, “… it is the first among equals. It alone offers the absolute capacity to live without fear. The right to keep and bear arms is the one right that allows rights to exist at all.”
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Will Rogers used to say he didn’t know anything, except what he read in the newspapers. After saying that, he’d usually launch into a strange tale he’d picked up in the daily news sheets.

Will’s phrase kept ringing through my head last Saturday morning as I choked down my breakfast over the Seattle-Post Intelligencer. Everything I’m about to tell you was actually in the paper, just the “A” section, for September 13th.
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The first week of September, traditionally, signaled the start of the campaign season. I say traditionally, which is the polite way of noting something that has become obsolete. Presidential campaigning has become a sport for all seasons and in Indianapolis a few weeks ago, Republican hopefuls gathered for a beauty contest that is three years premature.

The reason politicians put themselves, and us, through all this michigas is to raise money. It takes a powerful amount of money to buy a seat in Congress these days, so politicians spend years soliciting cash, much of it from folks they ought not to talk to, like folks with links to organized crime, Indonesian banking families or in the case of Al Gore – Buddhists. There’s a positive side here. All this chicanery gives Senator Thompson a way to fill his days until it’s time for him to run for re-election, thereby spending the cash he’s managed to squeeze from his sources.
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