There was a news item the other day you might have missed, in all the to’ing and fro’ing over the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. By the by, I found the trolling over the death of this great American to be in bad taste. People on both sides immediately began arguing over her Supreme Court seat like greedy relatives clutching at jewelry. How about a moment of silent reflection or a prayer, in place of politics, calls for violence or virtue signalling?
But this is not about that. It’s about the news you missed. Seems they discovered the first automobile ever created. Intact. And still functioning, if by functioning you mean capable of moving its passengers forward under its own power, which was/is not much. Which is pretty amazing for a two-hundred and thirty-one year old piece of equipment.
Now most cars don’t last a decade, but back in the day, they built them to last. Its longevity stems from the fact the owning family kept up with the maintenance, periodically making small changes here and there, but mostly because the family still had the original owner’s manual–on parchment!
The car ran on burning logs, but was eventually upgraded to charcoal & steam. There was that time a nephew decided to pour ethanol into the water pipes in a misguided attempt to “supercharge” performance. That explosion precipitated a replacement, gas-powered engine for the car and a trip to reform school for the nephew.
The family likes to tell the story about the odd shaped device near the driver’s seat: it easily held a Big Gulp, so it must be a cup-holder, or so they thought. But upon consulting the manual, they realized it was originally a spitoon which had transformed into an ashtray before settling on its current usage.
Of course the car had to change with the times: pulling into a gas station and asking for fireplace logs is a drag. Replacing the solid tires with inflatable ones was very popular, but then there were those annoying flats. But the family kept returning to the manual to see what was what, and why things were the way they were. And to understand how all the various moving parts worked together to create a functioning . . . car.
When Uncle Rico got a little tipsy and tried to drive it into the lake, claiming it would float, the car did not behave like a boat, because it was a car. The manual helped explain how to dry it out, and if the family had wanted, they could have used the manual to figure out how to seal the undercarriage and make it float. But then it would be a floating car, not a boat.
What’s the point, you ask (if you haven’t been checking the links above)? Well, obviously, it pays to know something about a device, a vehicle, heck even a recipe before changing it. Not just what it says, but what did the people who originally designed it mean when they wrote the manual. If you’ve stayed with me this far, but still haven’t caught on, you just received a brief parable on the judicial concept of originalism.
Why? That goes back to my original lede, about the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. When I heard she had lost her battle with cancer, the first thing (after a brief prayer) I thought of was how happy she would be to see her good friend Antonin Scalia again. When I first mentioned their friendship (upon Scalia’s death), I was scolded by some progressive friends saying “the notorious RBG” was only being polite if she did indeed say anything nice about Scalia. Au contraire, they were close friends whose families spent New Year’s Eve together.
Scalia was the chief proponent of originalism, and he was so successful that he changed the nature of the argument over constitutional law. Justice Elena Kagan, no conservative herself, famously said “we are all textualists now” (textualism being almost identical to originalism), not suggesting she agreed with Scalia but that because of the Scalia’s influence, all justices had to contend with this judicial philosophy in the future. And they do. Which is a good reason to understand the concept–even if you don’t agree–and even at the cost of reading my tongue-in-cheek car story. And no, there was no “oldest car” found.
Finally, if there was anybody Justice Ginsburg should have loathed, it was Antonin Scalia. He skewered her opinions and reasoning, and she returned the favor. I imagine their debates in the afterlife would be standing room only, except they must agree on everything now. Few of us can aspire to the greatness of these two figures, but in their personal friendship despite professional differences, we can see a model to emulate, and one sadly in great need today.
Uncle Rico drove a van.