This started in james_nicoll's post here, but I like the idea, so I'm going to run with it. This is primarily for Americans (as defined broadly--citizens, naturalized aliens, illegal immigrants...anybody who would have a reason to particularly care)...

From memory, without references, how many Amendments to the United States Constitution can you identify/explain?

There are 27. It's enough to give what the Amendment is commonly referred to as. (Except that you can't say the First Amendment is "the First Amendment" or the like, of course.)

Bonus points for identifying/explaining Articles of the Constitution itself. There are 7 of those. There are also some particularly important Sections of those Articles, and indeed some pretty major Clauses--just knowing what they are and what they do, no need to number them.

Here's my list:

( Amendments )

I have some idea on 24 of 27, I'm unsure on 7, and I probably missed details of a few more. Not bad, but not great. Then again, I'm in law, we live and die by citation and reference material.

( Articles, Sections, Clauses )

So. Seven Articles, I know three pretty well, one I know the most important part of, two I'm much more shaky on, one barely courts. I know some a couple of significant Sections and Clauses, too. Again, not great--I bet that I could memorize the whole thing with a bit of work, but haven't done so--but not awful, I think.

Oh, and I can recite the Preamble, but that's a cheat--see music line.

I lost all respect for Ray Bradbury when he decided to complain about the title of Fahrenheit 9/11, but this is just insulting.

"Oh, no," cries Bradbury. "Fahrenheit 451 isn't about censorship! It's about television!"

Right. Uh-huh. Sure. So, Mr. Bradbury, about this coda, written by you, in 1979...

"'Shut the door, they're coming through the window, shut the window, they're coming through the door,' are the words to an old song. They fit my lifestyle with newly arriving butcher/censors every month. Only six months ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with the censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy-Lynn Del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place."

(Emphasis mine.)

Nice try.

See, the only thing I can think of is, when you wrote that coda, censorship was really a game of political correctness. You write at length that you will not bow to a group which doesn't like your portrayal of them: "If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters."

I can't help thinking that now that censorship is the provenance of the side you tend to support--besides your idolatry of our current President[1], you didn't have a leg to stand on by complaining about title theft[2] so I have to assume you didn't like the politics of Fahrenheit 9/11[3] and decided to do what you could to muddy the waters--you have a choice between retracting the novel and declaring that maybe those people you support aren't always right.

Nice to see your principles are so consistent: my guys can do no wrong, truth be damned.

[1]Of President Bush: "wonderful. We needed him. Clinton is a s***head and we're glad to be rid of him." --Salon, 2001. Ironically, the linchpin of his support was "now we can get some education reform." I doubt No Child Left Behind is what Ray had in mind.
[2] Or would you like to justify Something Wicked This Way Comes and I Sing The Body Electric?
[3] I thought it was a bad movie, plain and simple, but that's a different matter...

(NOTE: This isn't an update about my life, nor is it the promised filk. The latter is coming; the former, probably not, at least until something interesting actually happens. But this is something I've been thinking about today.)

I spent my formative years in and around one of the largest racial and cultural mixing bowls on the planet.

And yet the vast majority of my time was spent either in a rich suburb at an exclusive private school with maybe a double handful of black students--most of whom did in fact sit together at their own table--or within an area populated mostly by people like me.

I like to quote the Jargon File: "if one's imagination readily grants full human rights to future AI programs, robots, dolphins, and extraterrestrial aliens, mere color and gender can't seem very important any more."

And yet most of my friends are either white or Asian. And most of the people who write science fiction are white.

I claim to be colorblind to skin tone.

And yet I assume people are white unless I have evidence otherwise; and I often find names to be good evidence.

I express disgust at arbitrary restrictions based on ethnicity and especially racial profiling.

And yet if I was in an airport and saw four men who looked to be of Middle Eastern decent and kept to themselves, I'd at least be suspicious.

I often use my Judaism as a dodge ("I'm Jewish...we're our own category in the race and religion wars") or defense against prejudice ("How can I be prejudiced? I'm Jewish!").

And yet I have never, in my life, suffered for being Jewish, and my entire family was in the United States long before World War II; to my knowledge, no one in my immediate or extended family tree died in the Holocaust. And Jews aren't free from prejudice, either..."I had the whole time to watch out that this Shvartser doesn't steal us the groceries from the back seat!"[1]

I support the concept of international peace and cooperation.

And yet as the news about Israel and Lebanon builds up, I wonder whether it wouldn't be easier for everybody to be with their own kind.

According to kate_nepveu, this week is International Blog Against Racism Week.

And yet I wonder whether I have the right to participate.

I'm exaggerating for effect, of course, and no, I'm not making a reverse-sympathy play, either...I was friends with a number of the black students at school, I can dismiss my mental conception without issue given new data, I don't assume every Middle-Eastern person is a terrorist, I don't really talk about my Judaism in those terms, and there's no way I'm going to spend the rest of my life with people exactly like me. But there's at least a kernel of truth in each of the above contradictions. I try to take the advice of my music to heart, but sometimes I have to wonder just how little--or large--that bit is, with me.

[1] From Maus, by Art Spiegelman. For those who haven't read it, the speaker is a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor whose daughter-in-law has just given a black hitch-hiker a quick lift. "Shvartser" is Yiddish, and...well, it's not as harsh as "nigger," but it's definitely not a neutral word. No, I've never used it, but...

http://www.stwing.upenn.edu/~wmfrank/declare.html

"When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to repudiate the actions of their government, a decent respect to the opinions of humankind requires that they should declare the actions which have led to their disavowal..."