“Conservative” is a prevarication, not because those who claim the adjective do not intent to conserve or even con or deceive, but because what they are really about is a bastardized form or imitation corporation.

In recent years, commercial corporations have been routinely identified as nefarious agents by lawmakers endowed with the powers to bring them under control even as they deploy those corporations to do their unsavory anti-social bidding. Would that be a double-fake?

But to start at the beginning, the authors of the Constitution designed an artificial body, a corporation with specific duties regarding public and private property, not personal properties, and a number of prohibitions or limits. A corporation, in addition to being artificial, as opposed to natural, is man-made, as opposed to being born of woman. This of course suited the men who sought to be in charge perfectly.

Although the Constitution was ostensibly promulgated by the people, at the time it was written and approved, only white males were classified as people. This, only enough, only became obvious to me when I read the speeches of Representative Josia T. Walls in the Congressional Record. The first Representative from the State of Florida, was an erudite black man, who had served in the Union Army and clearly considered himself as entitled to distribute “liberties” to the populace. A close reading of his language makes clear that natural, human or personal rights were not only not addressed in the Constitution but, for all intents and purposes, did not exist. While he delivered a lengthy oration in favor of federal funding for a Centennial Celebration (in 1876) in honor of the Declaration, Walls’ argument was all about touting enterpise and productivity.

Welfare was entirely monetarily defined. No chamber of commerce could have done better. It was what the Constitution provided for. By then, of course, Lincoln, the champion of government by the people had been dead a decade, killed by a man sympathetic to the Confederacy and State’s Rights in a quarrel that was, at base, commercial. That it was all about the Negro, free and slave was a convenient cover for the spread of corporate endeavors, as long as they remained firmly in male hands. Which they did until the 1963-1965 era.

Vietnam, Nixon and civil rights served to effectively obscure the rising challenge to male hegemony. Negro women had always been amployed for wages outside their own homes and the notion that white women would seek exonomic parity received little consideration.

When I graduated college in 1963, Im was disinclined to seek corporate employment as my mother had done. So, I applied for government jobs and landed at the Library of Congress only to discover the very essence of corporatism. And still I thought surely the academic world would be different until, as a faculty wife, I was soon to discover I was still wrong.

Now I have some sympathy for poor Donald if he thought to find autonomy at the pinnacle of the U.S. Corporation. If he had read the Constitution, he would have known he was enmeshing himself in a web of regulations from which there is no escape. Was he suckered? As a native born male he should have known better but it is probable that the siren song of male hegemony bewitched him.