Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 14, 1993 TAG: 9302150280
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: D-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GEOFF SEAMANS ASSOCIATE EDITOR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
NO. 8 ON THE LIST
BY ASTOUNDINGLY, amazingly incredible coincidence, today is (1) a Sunday, and (2) four weeks since I've written a column, and (3) Valentine's Day.Fact No. 1 means it's the day for a Commentary Page column by a local editorial-page staffer.
Fact No. 2 means it's my turn to do it.
Fact No. 3 means I'm supposed to write about "romance."
I was informed of Fact No. 3 by a lady who - by astoundingly, amazingly incredible coincidence - happens to be the very same person to whom I've been wed for . . . well, let's just say Nan and I were married before anybody outside Georgia had ever heard of Jimmy Carter, but after people outside Maryland had heard of Spiro Agnew.
Not that Carter and Agnew have much in common. Which is, as I think about it, a topic that comes up often when romance blooms into a wedding ceremony.
Having things in common, I mean, not Carter and Agnew. As in this dialogue from the back pew:
"John and Jane don't seem to have much in common."
"Yeah, I give this marriage maybe eight months, 10 tops."
Ah, but John and Jane will have plenty in common: common property, the division of which can be fought over in divorce court.
Anyway, this lady who told me I should write about romance, its being Feb. 14 and all, is the very same person who has been heard to complain to me - me, mind you - that "`you have no sense of romance."
This and similar disparagements usually arise when my response is less than enthusiastic to proposals such as, "Let's run away and join the circus," or, "Let's sell everything and become gypsies."
In fairness, I do have to acknowledge the time when, after a splendid holiday vacation in London, just the two of us were driving back to Roanoke from Dulles Airport, the Shenandoah Valley around us cast in winter colors by a brilliant sunset. The aforementioned person asked whether I had any resolutions for the new year.
"Well, yes," I replied. "I sure would like to finish the paint job on the house."
Wrong answer, I learned. And, I'll concede, an unromantic one.
But what exactly is "romance"?
The first four definitions in Webster's New World Dictionary are of literary genres that feature chivalry, idealized adventure and the like. Definitions five and six are about attitudes toward, or derived from, such literature.
Definition No. 7 is a real downer: "an exaggeration or fabrication that has no real substance." Not until Definition No. 8 does romance become something akin to its Valentine's Day connotations: "a love affair."
So what better, on this Feb. 14, than: "We're No. 8."
February is also Black History Month, and this past Friday was Abraham Lincoln's 184th birthday.
The history and current state of race relations in the United States are by turns depressing and heartening, reflecting by turns what's worst about America and what's best. In a word, complicated.
Taking one small piece of the puzzle, I've been trying to figure out what's so bothersome to me about how the term "African-American" is gaining favor.
For a while, I thought it was just my age showing.
I was a young man when "black" emerged as the word of choice for describing Americans of African descent, a companion to the "white" long used to describe Americans of European descent. To me, this use of "black" seemed a demystifying, empowering and symmetrically sensible way to talk about race in this country.
Still, times change. Maybe my problem with "African-American" is nothing more than a reflection of the fact that it's harder for me, a quarter-century older, to change.
But maybe there's a better reason. Insights sometimes pop up in the strangest places, and this one popped up from Ed McBain's novel "Kiss," one in his series of 87th Precinct police procedurals.
In it, a detective of Italian extraction objects to being called "Italian-American." The grandfather who had immigrated to America from Italy was Italian-American, the detective tells a WASP prosecutor; he himself - born, reared and living his whole life in the United States - is simply American.
Dual citizenship, expatriation, birth in another country: Those, it strikes me, are the sorts of things to which hyphenated Americanism is legitimately applied. Otherwise, we're undiluted Americans, however diverse our ancestries.
Herewith, as a public service, is the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution - in its entirety:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
I bring it up because, with limits on handgun sales a central issue this year in the Virginia General Assembly, the old gun argument rages anew. Part of the argument is the gun-lobby claim that the Second Amendment guarantees a right of private citizens to own any kind of gun, in any amount, anywhere, at any time.
But the National Rifle Association is off target. The Constitution According To The NRA is in error because:
(1) The Second Amendment must be taken as an uncompartmentalized whole.
The second part of the amendment - "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" - can't logically be separated from the first part. If you extract the second part, the rest of the amendment - "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State" - makes no sense.
(2) The amendment says nothing about the people's right to buy and sell arms, or for that matter to own them at all.
A quibble, inasmuch as a right to keep and bear arms implies a right to acquire and dispose of them? Maybe. But the omission also underscores the point that the Second Amendment isn't about a private-property right; it's about states' right to have well-equipped home guards.
(3) The amendment doesn't talk about just any old militia; it talks about a "well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State."
Private armies, in other words, need not apply: This is about militias in the service of the security of free states.
And, please, none of this business about citizenship's automatically bestowing militiaman status on every individual. Each man his own militia? That's about as far from "well regulated" as you can get.
The question regarding gun-control proposals is whether the prospective benefits, broadly defined, outweigh the prospective costs, broadly defined. The issue is political and practical, not constitutional.