Founding Father

dinkum commented on the word Founding Father

TERM: Founding Fathers

DEFINITION:

(1) According to Kurt Vonnegut, the Founding Fathers were rapacious, marauding "sea pirates" (read: white Europeans), who "founded" new nations in North, Central, and South America by displacing, exterminating, or enslaving the indigenous inhabitants.

(2) ' The Founding Fathers of the United States of America were political leaders and statesmen who participated in the American Revolution by signing the United States Declaration of Independence, taking part in the American Revolutionary War, and establishing the United States Constitution. Within the large group known as the "Founding Fathers", there are two key subsets: the Signers of the Declaration of Independence (who signed the United States Declaration of Independence in 1776) and the Framers of the Constitution (who were delegates to the Constitutional Convention and took part in framing or drafting the proposed Constitution of the United States). A further subset is the group that signed the Articles of Confederation.

' Many of the Founding Fathers owned African American slaves, and the Constitution adopted in 1787 sanctioned the system of slavery. The Founding Fathers made successful efforts to contain or limit slavery throughout the United States and territories, including banning slavery in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, and abolishing the international slave trade in 1807.

' Some historians define the "Founding Fathers" to mean a larger group, including not only the Signers and the Framers but also all those who, whether as politicians, jurists, statesmen, soldiers, diplomats, or ordinary citizens, took part in winning American independence and creating the United States of America.

' Historian Richard B. Morris in 1973 identified the following seven figures as the key Founding Fathers: John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington.' -- Wikipedia

EXAMPLE:

' A lot of the nonsense was the innocent result of playfulness on the part of the founding fathers of the nation of Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout.

' But some of the nonsense was evil, since it concealed great crimes. For example, teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy:

' = 1492 =

' The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.

' Here was another piece of evil nonsense which children were taught: that the sea pirates eventually created a government which became a beacon of freedom to human beings everywhere else. There were pictures and statues of this supposed imaginary beacon for children to see. It was sort of an ice-cream cone on fire.

' Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new government owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery, and, even after slavery was eliminated, they and their descendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machines.

' The sea pirates were white. The people who were already on the continent when the pirates arrived were copper-colored. When slavery was introduced onto the continent, the slaves were black.

' Color was everything. '

-- From Kurt Vonnegut's 1973 novel Breakfast of Champions -- Chapter 1 (page 10 - 11).

CITATION:

1973 KURT VONNEGUT, JR. Breakfast of Champions, or, Goodbye Blue Monday (c) 1973 by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Delacorte Press / Seymour Lawrence. Second Printing.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data:

Vonnegut, Kurt. Breakfast of champions. I. Title.

PZ4.V948BR PS3572.05 813'.5'4 72-13086

August 27, 2013