A week ago I was at a bar with some friends, celebrating a milestone birthday, at a typically trendy yet historic area of Boston. Many of these bars were frequented by the likes of Paul Revere and Samuel Adams. As I was facing my friend, I looked up at the wall above his head and saw a picture of Revolutionary War-era patriots with tricorne hats...drinking, scheming, thinking of ways to not only break away from the tyranny of the British empire but also thinking of ways to convince their fellow working-class Colonial citizens to do the same.

Then I looked around the bar. The band was decent for a bar band but they didn't seem to know any songs past 1996. The women were dressed with glittery dresses, with friends or boyfriends, and the men were baseball cap-wearing zombies with little to offer except their outward appearance - ripped jeans, maybe an ironically trendy label on a shabby t-shirt.

This is a far cry from the brave leaders who saw America for what it could be instead of what it had been. However America turned out, those first hundred years or so saw men who risked their lives to set up a form of government which worked when the elite were allowed to rule and liberties protected to keep the ideas of revolution fresh in the minds of the citizenry (and perhaps to discourage those thoughts at the same time?). I like to think of them as the most famous leaders who saw themselves as mostly replaceable. Whether they felt such a society could last before caving in on itself within a few hundred years, we'll never know.

Today, our Founders are not revered but looked at as hypocrites by the same people that frequent these silly bars without giving a thought to these pictures what they mean, not knowing what hard times truly are, laughed at by illegal immigrant factions who can't believe how easy it is to steal their tax money and how little these Americans know of reality. These same people are the ones who rail on about how the Founders were slave owners and rich land owners. Well, of course they were...did you really think a peasant class alone could have achieved victory? Smart, capable men like General George Washington helped destroy a huge British infantry, not just farmers with pitchforks, despite what Hollywood would have us believe.

Most people can't imagine a life without cell phones, Macintosh computers, or their MySpace page. I find it hard to imagine a country based on the kind of values espoused in The Constitution and Declaration of Independence inhabited primarily by nitwits who can barely read the printed matter on these documents - let alone translate that into solid leadership.