Word: reade
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...someone unfamiliar with the detailed story of the Constitution's birth, no book better combines the virtues of logical organization, responsible brevity and pleasant reading than A More Perfect Union. Though neither constitutional scholars nor well-read dilettantes are likely to discover previously hidden treasures here, they will find a uniquely clear guide that keeps an orderly hand on the chronology of the convention, as well as on the evolving roles of the principal actors...
That is the argument often made under the First Amendment by civil libertarians, and never more urgently than today. If you don't like it, they say, don't watch it, read it, listen to it or buy it. But also, don't bother people whose tastes differ from yours. In a less toxic age, Thomas Jefferson rhetorically asked, "Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched?" Today Comic George Carlin puts it this way: "On the radio there are two knobs. One turns it off; the other changes the station...
...that entertainment -- home entertainment, at least -- was not legally required to please the bland majority palate. In Stanley v. Georgia, Thurgood Marshall declared, "If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his house, what books he may read or what films he may watch...
...fireworks bathe Independence Hall in a Bicentennial burst of glory, Americans feel a reverential glow. The framers' words, painstakingly inscribed on four sheets of parchment, have the aura of the sacred about them. The Ark of America, it is a civic icon that is worshiped, if not always read. But the Constitution has its other, mundane life down at sea level, where wants and ideals crash into one another. Every year the U.S. reinvents the meaning of the document. In this special issue TIME organizes its usual sections under language from the charter and celebrates the continued vibrancy of those...
...take one last look to discover who lives there. Someone lives there. The Constitution's inventors could not have produced so durable a document without a vision of the person to whom the laws and stipulations were directed. Before the season dissipates, look at the words one more time. Read them not as rules of the game but as the interior ruminations of a character, a hero, who in some strange conflicted combination of exultation and self-restraint has, for 200 years, found a way to live a life. What character? What life...