Over the years, the old Bill of Rights has taken quite a beating. It started with drugs. Once they decided you didn’t have the right to determine what you put into your own body, for good or ill, the gloves were off. The government is now able to confiscate your car, boat, or home if it finds even a marijuana seed in them under the downright brilliant theory that it is the car, boat, or home that is committing the crime of drug possession, and it is up to you to prove your property is innocent. This is handy, because no one has ever maintained that property has civil rights of any kind, so good luck trying to get your stuff back, even if it wasn’t your marijuana seed and you had no idea it was there.

Then came RICO, the Racketeer Influenced something or other, which was written to go after the Mafia. From what I hear, it’s done pretty well. A lot of goombahs who thought they’d never go to jail are now serving life sentences because of it. Trouble is, in the process it made exceptions to certain rights here and there, “Just this once, and only against racketeers!” particularly the ones about wiretaps and warrants, and it can be used against absolutely any group of people acting in concert, from the Rosicrucians to the Camp Fire Girls, merely by defining them as racketeers. It’s being used against anti-abortion protesters and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church today, and hey, I didn’t mind that much more than I minded it when they used RICO to put John Gotti’s sorry ass in prison, but tomorrow it can be used against your affinity group or political party. Kiwanis, beware! Democrats, watch your backs! 

Most recently we’ve had the Patriot Act, which has pretty effectively disposed of what civil rights were somehow missed by the drug laws and RICO. 

Oh, well. I don’t mean to be alarmist here. Most of us will never miss a bunch of amendments to the constitution written over 200 years ago. It’s been proven many times that a solid majority of Americans refuse to sign the Bill of Rights when circulated as a petition. It sounds vaguely Communistic, many of them say. But I can’t help feeling a little nostalgic. Darn it, I liked the fussy old thing, I got a warm feeling when I read it. I’d like to have something in its place, just for old time’s sake. 

And I have discovered that it could be possible to have a new Bill, merely by transposing or altering a few words here and there. The result is some rights that I think very few people would object to, and wouldn’t get in the way of law enforcement in the endless fight against dope fiends, Italians, Catholics, and Arabs. Some of these are pet peeves of mine, some are things that probably irritate everybody, and some are modest proposals to right social injustices, admittedly in a rather topsy-turvy way … but if your rights can’t be a little fun in the exercise of them, what’s the point of having them in the first place? 

FIRST AMENDMENT: Freedom From Speeches. Let’s face it, nobody’s given a good speech in America since Martin Luther King died. Let’s make them illegal. It would instantly improve public discourse, and have a profound enlivening effect on gatherings from Shriner’s Conventions to wedding receptions to retirement banquets. It would put the fun back in public demonstrations, where all we’d need to do is carry signs and sing songs and not have to listen to drivel from Jane Fonda or Dick Cheney. 

The effect on the Oscar ceremonies alone would make this amendment worthwhile. I mean, I’ll bet you thought nobody could ever top Julia Roberts for sheer preening, self-indulgent, camera-hogging excesses … and then Halle Berry came along. Let them do one-arm pushups, smile, lick the Oscar all over, and then get them off the stage to make room for the next massive ego. 

The greatest boon bestowed by this amendment, however, would obviously be in politics. No president since JFK has had any speech-making talent. Not even that “Death Valley Days” actor guy who played The President for a while, I forget his name. President Clinton could talk ... and talk and talk and talk. Couldn’t shut him up once he got rolling, but none of it was great oratory. Our current president has verbal abilities beneath those of your average shellfish; Winston Churchill could have farted a better speech than GW Bush.  

All political speeches do these days is distract us from the real issues. If the idiots are yakking their inanities all the time how are we going to judge the artistic merits of the fast-cut editing of their television commercials? How can we properly appreciate their hair styles and orthodonture? I worry that the torrent of confusing words will make it hard for me to remember which candidate has more money in his War Chest and is thus the more electable. Limit all political statements to one sentence, I say, and try to keep that sentence down to ten words or less. Do you think I got nothing but time? I’m busy here! 

SECOND AMENDMENT: The Right To Arm Bears. This is not original with me, but I like it. I propose to write into the Constitution that all bears have the right to own firearms, and to shoot people who come into the woods carrying guns. Now, I admit I am not a hunter, I will probably never understand the attraction of stalking and killing a deer or a rabbit or a spotted owl, but I am not anti-hunter, either, any more than I’m anti-lion or anti-shark. We are predators as well as plant-eaters, and killing is an honorable part of our heritage. It is arguably better to go into the wilderness and stalk and bring down your own venison than to hire strangers to raise calves in tiny lightless enclosures so you can have your veal piccata. Most hunters I’ve talked to speak of the thrill of the chase more often than of the rush of bloodletting. They claim to have the deepest respect for their prey, as the Indians did, though I can’t recall ever hearing a white hunter singing a song of praise to the spirit of his kill. All I’m proposing is to even the playing field a bit. 

I expect some hunters will object, at first, but I think they’ll come around to my way of thinking soon enough. I mean, how much more thrilling would it be, out in the wilderness, if you knew somebody was out there hunting you as well? Only the best and bravest would venture into the woods, the true hunters. Who would it inconvenience? Why, precisely the guy that everybody hates, hunter and vegetarian alike: the beer-swilling, cow-shooting, jacklighting disgrace who’s more apt to blow off his own nuts or the foot of his companion than actually hit a deer. I guarantee, the first time a grizzly puts a load of buckshot into his fat ass he’ll sell his rifle and take up pitching horseshoes. 

And let’s face it, how good a shot is a bear gonna to be? I’ve seen them riding bicycles, but jacking a round into a Mossberg? Gotta be a clumsy operation, with those long claws.  

Of course, if they’re too bad, we can define “a man in a bear suit” as “a bear,” for purposes of this amendment.  

AMENDMENT THREE: (This Space Available) The Third Amendment is a prime example of why so many people thought the Bill of Rights was outdated, and worked so hard to destroy it. Here is what it used to say: 

“No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.” 

Wha ….? Is this a burning public issue? Think about it. When was the last time the 101st Airborne bivouacked in your rumpus room? Been bothered lately by the sound of marching boots in your driveway, or artillery practice in the back yard? Is the USO show in the garage keeping you up all night? I don’t know about 1789, but today the army bunks on army bases, or in Iraq. This is the kind of unnecessary legislation that leads to contempt for all laws, like making it illegal to ride a hippopotamus (an actual Texas law, years ago) or trim your toenails in public, or makes it a crime to shoot Nazis and Klansmen. Let’s just forget this silly amendment ever happened, and good riddance.

I’m open for suggestions to fill the empty space left by this turkey. There are several rights enumerated in the old First Amendment (which was damn crowded, as written, but pretty empty now) that I might plug in here and there later, but if there is some new, unsuspected, right we need, here’s the place for it! 

AMENDMENT FOUR: Freedom From Seizures. This one was about illegal searches and seizures and warrants, all largely wiped out by the Patriot Act. I once wrote this entire amendment on the front door of my residence at 1354 Haight Street, incensed about some imagined atrocity of police breaking and entering at the time. The first cop to stroll by on the beat smiled at me, patted his sidearm affectionately, and reeled off six circumstances whereby he could legally ignore the Fourth Amendment, so it wasn’t really worth spit even back then, huh? The only one I remember was “hot pursuit.” 

It didn’t take long to write it, it was only 54 words long. And that’s another problem with the original Bill: it was, at the same time, confusing, and not confusing enough. That is to say, on the one hand it’s full of wide-open phrases like “cruel and unusual punishment,” which it prohibits. What are we to make of that? How can you have a punishment that is not cruel? I’d say locking a person up in a jail cell is pretty cruel. Try it, I’ll bet you’ll just hate it. On the other hand, it is sadly lacking in the obfuscatory word-vomit that is the sole reason we have many times more lawyers per capita than any nation on Earth. Did you know our legislators in Washington passed 70,000 pages of laws … just last year? If all our laws were written like the Bill of Rights, millions of lawyers would be out of work. I don’t so much care about the lawyers (who could?) but they employ vast armies of underpaid paper shufflers. Our economy would collapse. 

Anyway, who could argue about the new amendment, freedom from seizures? I’ve never had one, not even a petit mal, but I’ve seen them and they’re gross. We should do all we can to help those afflicted with any seizure disorder, make it like the old War on Cancer (and can anybody help me out here: how did that one come out? I haven’t heard any reports from the front in ages, seems we should have won it by now), devote massive resources to a search for a cure. Have telethons and bake sales and car washes, get some Hollywood stars involved. Go door to door collecting money, sort of like the old March of Dimes.  

AMENDMENT FIVE: The Right to Double Jeopardy. The infamous Fifth Amendment. Everybody knows this one, it’s the one that allows criminals to weasel out of convictions for their misdeeds under some flimsy legal theory of “self-incrimination.” The granddaddy of all “legal loopholes,” in other words. Well, last I heard it’s still in place, probably because the scumbag politicians realize they will all probably need it some day.  

But there’s other rights in there, too. Such as: “No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a … indictment of a Grand Jury … nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb … nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” 

Okay, forget about the Grand Jury stuff. I don’t know what it meant in the eighteenth century, but a grand Jury today is a prosecutorial dog and pony show. The well-known joke is that a Grand Jury would indict a ham sandwich if the DA wanted them to. You don’t need a Grand Jury to protect any of your rights, trust me. You may someday need somebody to protect you from a grand jury, but that’s another story. 

As for “due process of law” concerning property … oh, pleeeease! Does anybody think that “right” still exists? 

But double jeopardy … there’s a right worth saving. I first saw “Jeopardy” in 1964, in New York City, as part of the studio audience. And, other than souping it up a little for the electronic age, using television screens instead of cards in slots, having a few of the answers taped by celebrities, doubling the amounts of money in each round for each correct question … it’s the same game!  And I don’t think they should be allowed to tamper with it! No new “Triple Jeopardy” rounds, no forfeits to pay for missing an answer, like winning a three-legged sack race or something, no audience participation, voting for the winner, no Richard Dawson “Family Feud” happy-talk “Survey says!” hoopla. You may think they’d never tamper with a winning formula, but have you seen “Wheel of Fortune” lately? Jeez, so many bells and whistles now I can hardly follow it. Don’t let it happen to “Jeopardy!” 

Actually, I’d like to somehow expand this right to include all the TV shows I like. We have laws protecting our precious wildernesses and public lands, historical landmarks, architecturally significant buildings. Would you want them to bulldoze a Frank Lloyd Wright building in your neighborhood? Of course not. So why not protect television? Most of the shows I’ve liked over the years are gone! Kaput! Available only in re-runs, if at all. I miss Dick Cavett! I miss Carol Burnett and Mary Tyler Moore and Steve Allen and Dave Garroway! I miss Topo Gigio and Senor Wences! Bring ‘em back! (Well, bringing Dave and Steve back would be tough, them being dead, but still …) 

AMENDMENT SIX: The Right to a Media Circus. This used to be all about various rights Americans had at trial: speedy and public, nature of accusation, confront witnesses, right to an attorney, etc. Most of them are now obsolete or strongly modified by the Patriot Act or RICO. They hadn’t been of much use lately, anyway. Let’s face it, a trial is a crap shoot at the best of times, but you can load the dice, and that’s what we need a right to these days. Right to an attorney? How about a right to Johnny Cochran? That would be a right to reckon with. How about a right to a jury consultant, a right to a research department at your law firm, a right to one or two attorneys solely devoted to putting a media spin on your case? And most basic of all, the right to be on the TV. 

What I’m advocating here is that we televise all trials. Sounds harebrained, I know, but you might be surprised how close we are to that goal already. Court TV covers all the most interesting ones as they happen, and there are a half dozen other channels whose staple fare is digging up old cases and explicating them. There must be twenty or more of these shows, like “City Confidential,”  “I, Detective,” “CSI,” and “American Justice.” Soon we’ll have the thousands of channels and the bandwidth needed to televise everything, from Traffic Court in Peoria to the Supremes themselves.  

And why not? Much is made of the fickleness of the “Court of Public Opinion,” and if you look at the current Laci Peterson madness it sure seems that Scott Peterson is already convicted and sentenced. (I heard one “commentator” on Court TV say this: “You can tell when Scott Peterson is lying. His mouth moves.”) But do you think trial by jury is very different? Do you think many people sit down in that box thinking that scumbag sitting at the defense table is innocent?  

So it’s a crap shoot either way … and with a televised trial, at least you get a shot at being famous. Every once in a while, you might even get off. Ask OJ, if you can get him to take a few seconds off from working to find the real killers. With a little valuable face time on television you might land a book or movie deal. Why should Scott Peterson, Eric Rudolph, and Martha Stewart get all the goodies?.

AMENDMENT SEVEN: Freedom From Religion. Old No. VII used to be about trial by jury … and weren’t we just here a minute ago? I see no sense in squandering two valuable amendments on a right that we hardly need anymore in the first place, so I’m going to use this space to plug in one of the Freedoms from the old First Amendment. 

Basically, this one prohibits Jehovah’s Witnesses from coming to your door selling The Watchtower, and Hare Krishnas from chanting and dancing and being pains in the ass in airports. Okay, so this one wouldn’t even have been on Tom Jefferson’s radar screen, but I think it’s really worthwhile. 

AMENDMENT EIGHT: Old version: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” Well … point by point: A) Plenty of offenses aren’t bailable at all, especially if you haven’t been charged with anything in the first place, as the inmates at Guantanamo Bay could tell you if they were allowed visitors or lawyers or telephones or mail. B) The right to cheap and reasonable fines will be preserved eternally, Bill of Rights or no Bill of Rights, so long as it is cheaper for corporations to pay the fines than to clean up their acts. Depend on it. And C) as already discussed, a merciful punishment is a contradiction in terms, and we are well beyond the point where incarceration, our preferred punishment, is at all unusual, with a larger percentage of our citizenry in prison than any other nation on Earth. So screw the Eighth Amendment. Therefore … 

And here I’m afraid I’ve run out of ideas. That Amendments Nine and Ten are useless is easy to demonstrate, thus: 

AMENDMENT NINE: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. 

Translation: “Hey, maybe we forgot to mention all the rights we wanted to give y’all, but if you think of some more, well, you got ‘em!” Any judge in the world should toss this one out of court in a heartbeat.  

AMENDMENT TEN: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. 

Last time I checked the only right retained by the States is the right to pay for laws and programs mandated by the Feds but not funded by them. As for reserving rights to “the people,” … we ARE the people, which means we ARE the federal government and ALL the state governments, so we already HAVE all these reserved rights. More redundancy. 

Who said there have to be ten amendments, anyway? Eight seems like plenty to me. In the spirit of the times, of the Bush tax cuts, let’s trim the fat from the Bill of Rights by reducing it twenty percent. 

Gotta go now. A SWAT team from Homeland Security has just broken down my door and they’re running around pointing weapons at everything and shouting and it’s getting hard to see the screen through the tear gas. They say I’ve mentioned the name Osama a suspicious number of times in recent emails, which it turns out they’ve been reading, the scamps. They’re going to have to confiscate and examine my hard drive for evidence of subversive activity. And heck, I don’t mind, John Ashcroft has assured me that, although it is necessary to institute the full apparatus of Fascism to combat terrorism, real Americans don’t have a thing to worry about, it will never be used against us, and I tru 

(This article hereby terminated for National Security reasons under the Patriot Act.)