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" TAMPA, Fla. \u2014 Continuing with our general theme of &amp;quot;History! Huh! What Is It Good For?&amp;quot; here at the Republican National Convention, we strolled over to Liberty Plaza, the very bizarre off-site compound in which a number of conservative organizations have gathered to make elaborate presentations to the sucke... er... delegates. It is a scalded piece of turf with lovely air-conditioned tents that, given the way the security has turned the downtown streets into a heavily weaponized corn maze, is only slightly easier to find than El Dorado or the land of Tir na Nog. Once there, we stopped by our new pal David Bossie&amp;#039;s pavilion for the premiere of the new Citizens United joint, Our Sacred Honor, which purports to explain what the Founding Fathers had in mind, and which is narrated, in a series of walkabouts, by Rick Santorum. Indeed, Santorum himself showed up to host the premiere and, in his introductory remarks, he made the case not only for America, Fk Yeah!, but also for Founders, Fk Yeah! as well. &amp;quot;The biggest crisis we face is an identity crisis,&amp;quot; Santorum said, as a great number of people noshed on pulled pork and imagined themselves to be standing on Concord Bridge, rather than in a tent where the air-conditioners roared like the engines of a C-47. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ve got a bunch of people trying to tell us that we&amp;#039;re something we&amp;#039;re not, that there&amp;#039;s a better, different way, as they always try to do.&amp;quot; Santorum \u2014 who reminded me just last night from the podium what a colossal dick he is, though he will be followed there by several more tonight (follow live-Tweetering here) \u2014 didn&amp;#039;t mention who &amp;quot;they&amp;quot; are. He rarely does. He doesn&amp;#039;t have to. The people in this tent \u2014 the modern heirs to the Minutemen, standing post at the feed store back home \u2014 know who he&amp;#039;s talking about. The They are always implied. &amp;quot;The film is a truthful insight into who we are and why others who have tried, with twists, even small little twists, have failed,&amp;quot; Santorum continued. &amp;quot;We have the secret sauce here in America. We are tinkering with that sauce. How many people tried the New Coke formula? When you&amp;#039;ve got something that works, you stick with it. We&amp;#039;re going to show you why we&amp;#039;re different, why we&amp;#039;re still the greatest nation on earth.&amp;quot; You are celebrating, weight for age, the greatest generation of political philosophers the country ever saw, and you&amp;#039;re talking to your audience about &amp;quot;secret sauce&amp;quot; and the New Coke? If anyone in the tent noticed that they were being spoken to like dim middle-schoolers, there was no indication of it from the audience. Then the movie started, and things slid downhill on a scooter. Remember those social-studies film strips you slept through in eighth grade? This has better production values. That&amp;#039;s the only difference. It is a Child&amp;#039;s Garden of Twisted Civics, featuring commentaries from such noted constitutional savants as Michelle Malkin, Mark Levin, and Victor Davis Hanson, as well as a surprise appearance by the shockingly-not-dead-yet Edwin Meese, who tells us that &amp;quot;our liberty is being sacrificed,&amp;quot; which is bold talk from a guy who once advised Governor Ronald Reagan to sic the National Guard on student protestors at Berkeley. The Our Sacred Honor film itself is a rapid walk through an extremely condensed history of the Founding period. It is spruced up with thoroughly hilarious &amp;quot;historic re-enactments,&amp;quot; in which mute actors playing the various Founders stare off into the distance, thinking Big Thoughts. (The guy playing John Adams is a dead ringer for Randall &amp;quot;Tex&amp;quot; Cobb.) Thomas Jefferson occasionally is seen on one knee in a field, writing in a notebook, his brow furrowed. James Madison is wandering a landscape that looks like it may be in Rhode Island and, occasionally, he&amp;#039;s sitting on a rock, staring at a lake, looking like the Mermaid statue in Copenhagen. (To be fair, there are also scenes where they sit in candle-lit studies, writing down the Big Thoughts that came to them while they were strolling in their mysteriously slave-free fields. More on that in a moment.) The cast makes the animatronic presidents at Disney look like the Soul Train dancers. The whole enterprise would be a colossal bore if it didn&amp;#039;t take two incredibly wild divergences into the deep weeds of conservative historiography. The first is a long passage about how the French Revolution went horribly wrong, largely because it was conducted by Frenchmen, and not Americans. The film lingers so long and lovingly on the bloody blade of the guillotine that you begin to wonder if Roger Corman had snuck into the editing room at some point. Professor Hanson pops up now and again to remind us that the French Revolution was essentially a statist plot among atheists, and that the same thing goes for all subsequent revolutions in Europe. Within this long passage, which throws the film&amp;#039;s timeline vastly out of kilter, the movie ties itself into impressive knots trying to maintain its established image of Jefferson as a mute genius kneeling in his fields, a marble man who invented the secret sauce in his garret in Philadelphia, while reconciling it with the fact that Jefferson remained a fan of the French Revolution until long after its excesses had hit high tide. To his credit, and probably because he&amp;#039;d like to go to academic conferences again without having people snicker behind his back, one of the actual professors in the film eventually cops to this problem. (And the film elides entirely the role in the revolution of Thomas Paine, probably because he went even further in defense of the French Revolution than Jefferson did, because he was in favor of a system of government old-age pensions, and because he had utterly no use for organized religion at all.) Of course, there is no mention at all of the somewhat obvious flaw in all the rhetoric about how freedom and liberty prospered here while descending into bloodshed in France. Namely, that almost all of these guys staring off into the middle distance owned other human beings, and that chattel slavery was written out of the Declaration Of Independence and into the Constitution. Surely, the violence of that institution matched the violence of the Terror in France, and was no less an affront to the clearly stated ideals of the Founders than the guillotine was to the people who burned the Bastille. There are no slaves to be seen in this film just as there were no slaves, specifically, in the Constitution. There were &amp;quot;other persons.&amp;quot; And, of course, the bloody redefinition of the nation that slavery occasioned almost 90 years later, which certainly was more sanguinary than the Terror in France, even if you throw Napoleon into the mix, which this film does, isn&amp;#039;t mentioned at all. The second detour comes when the film determines to make Jefferson, of all people, into an advocate of the notion that the First Amendment &amp;quot;protects religion from the state, not the state from religion.&amp;quot; The &amp;quot;wall of separation&amp;quot; that Jefferson mentions in his reply to the Danbury Baptists gets redefined, and the point is made that Jefferson regularly attended religious services in the Congress. The folks in the tent cheered when some author points out that Jefferson wanted the Bible taught &amp;quot;even in the public schools&amp;quot; as a guide to ethics, which is not what the folks in the tent had in mind, but they cheered anyway. And then there a clip of Santorum himself, standing in the Jefferson Memorial, soulfully reading a quote from one of the the walls in which Jefferson mentions god. Santorum admits that Jefferson&amp;#039;s views on religion were &amp;quot;complex.&amp;quot; Yes, and, because they were, Rick, they have nothing to do with yours. (It should be noted that Madison disappears entirely in this section of the film. He, of course, didn&amp;#039;t even want there to be paid congressional chaplains, and, in his Memorial And Remonstrance To Religious Assessments, wrote that: During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution. Poor Jemmy. Sit on your rock and shut up.) Founder worship is problematic at the best of times, and with the best of audiences. But it is at its worst when it&amp;#039;s infantile. At the end, when Michelle Malkin presumes to speak for the Founders and declares that they would be in &amp;quot;dire distress&amp;quot; at the &amp;quot;apathy&amp;quot; that many of us approach the defense of our rights, she misses the point. They wouldn&amp;#039;t think we were apathetic. They&amp;#039;d think we were children. FOLLOW MORE LIVE COVERAGE FROM TAMPA ALL WEEK LONG RIGHT HERE AND WITH @ESQPOLITICS ON TWITTER &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a15564/rick-santorum-our-sacred-honor-12179324/>