1. Among the many absurdities of the American mind is the notion that a revolution can be legal. Consider the incessant quibbling over whether, say, Southern secession was ‘legal’ or not under the Constitution. In the first place, the question of whether leaving the Constitution is or is not permitted under the Constitution you are trying to leave is ridiculous. In the second, who honestly cares? Inter arma enim silent leges: Laws are silent in time of war.
The question is whether or to what extent the rebellion is justified or not on moral grounds. But an armed rebellion or secession or revolution, by definition, cannot be ‘legal’.
2. Actually, I understand the thinking; it’s the American idolization of written law, a deep-dyed relic of our Puritan past. Central to the old Protestant mindset is the notion of Sola Scriptura: that the Bible alone contains the sum total of true Christian doctrine and anyone can find it who searches with a fair mind. Consequently, that anyone who does not find the true doctrine in the Bible is not reading with fair, or at least not with an educated mind.
Apply this to the political sphere, and we say “a fair reading of the law / Constitution shows that we are right, therefore it is our opponents who are really violating the law / Constitution when they dispute our reading of it. If you actually read the law / Constitution with a fair mind, you’ll see how right my side is.”
Liberalism is Protestantism applied to politics, and it has all the same problems, including producing endless variations that each think they’re the only ones who are reading the texts correctly (just that in politics there’s more of a pruning process, since these different groups have to compromise with each other in order to form viable voting blocks, but we’re getting into deeper waters there).
3. At this point someone might ask “So, you think all political parties are equally wrong?” And the answer is “No, but their rightness and wrongness have very little, if anything, to do with the Constitution.”
4. The awkward thing about reading old books and such in which the stock stodgy conservative circa the inter-war years laments that “The country is going to the dogs!” or “The morality of the nation is being destroyed!” is that we of the future know that they were completely correct and have been thoroughly vindicated.
5. Went to see Monkey Man this week; Dev Patel’s directorial debut, in which he basically takes the Hong Kong Kung Fu movie format and transplants it to modern India. It was…okay. The martial arts were pretty impressive and brutal (at times overly so, in that it gets a little dull just to watch a man methodically punching someone to death), and the view of urban India was very interesting. I’m also entirely in favor of Mr. Patel re-inventing himself as the Indian Donny Yen: we can’t have too many first-rate actors who are also talented martial artists.
The plot was by-the-numbers and rather too drawn out for being so standard, and the directorial style was, I thought, a worthy experiment that didn’t work. The fights (and most of the movie itself) are filmed in close-up, with rapid camera movement to give you the impression that you are in the fight itself. That’s an intriguing concept, but the problem is that being in a real fight is a very jarring and disorienting experience, and especially on the big screen the effect was a little headache-inducing.
All in all, I’m glad I saw it, but I’d call it an ‘interesting’ rather than a ‘good’ film.
6. My impression also was that India is a demonically-haunted land, which I doubt was the intention…though I don’t know, maybe it was (there’s actually a rather positive theme of worship woven through the film, where the first line is a sleazy fight promoter saying that they all worship the Indian Rupee and the final line being a declaration that “we worship God alone,” though I’m not sure whom they were referring to with that name). The wild festivals with grotesque masks, the brutish hedonism and materialism, the twisted ‘gods’ and weird philosophies on display gave me the sense of a more naked evil than most other civilized pagan societies, with none of the counterbalancing elegance or nobility of, say, Japan or ancient Rome. Though that’s just my impression from this particular film, not a blanket judgment on India as a whole (I’ll reserve that until I learn more).
7. Nose rings are something I will never understand; not only are they ugly (like giant metal zits or boogers), but I always wince at the thought of someone willing putting a chunk of metal by the interior of their nostrils.
Serpent's Den 
1: As I understand it, the argument about secession and the Constitution is essentially an argument about which side bears the moral responsibility for starting the war. If you believe that the Constitution was a free compact between sovereign entities, any one of which had the right to withdraw when it saw fit, then the Union’s refusal to recognize Confederate independence, as expressed concretely in the continued occupation of Fort Sumter, was an unprovoked outrage of a neighboring nation’s rights, and the fact that a Southern gun happened to be the first discharged doesn’t change the North’s essential culpability for what followed. On the other hand, if you believe, as Lincoln seemed to have done (or at least to have persuaded himself), that the states were no more than glorified provinces, then Edmund Ruffin’s shot makes the Confederate provinces guilty of treason, according to Andrew Jackson’s famous formulation about disunion by armed force. So there are occasions, I would say, when legal interpretations do reflect upon moral grounds.
2: Which isn’t to say that your point is wrong in general. It’s the same kind of disorientation I always feel when I hear people quoting John Adams’s aphorism about “a government not of men but of laws”, or read Thomas Paine’s effusions about how, in America, “the law is king and there is no other”. You want to ask them what on Earth they think a law is, or what a government is, or how a passive object like a codex can do an active thing like ruling. (I suppose your theory about it being the residue of Protestantism must be right; someone who was in the habit of attributing a sort of spiritual agency to the Bible, and not clearly distinguishing that the agency really lay in the Holy Spirit who was supposed to attest to and illumine the Bible to the individual believer, might well retain this vague homage for important documents even after his Christian faith had effectively dissipated. It’s just the sort of cheerful irrationalism that nobody did better than the Age of Reason.)
6: The thing about India, I think, is that it’s where paganism developed most nearly according to its own internal logic alone. Shinto is paganism tamed by an implacable secular system, Mahayana Buddhism is paganism shaping itself awkwardly around an austere school of philosophic nihilism, but Brahminism is the real thing: a god for every little village, a gorgeous cycle of myths, a limitless cavalcade of sacrifices and festivals and ascetic devotions, and half a dozen philosophies attempting non-bindingly to make sense of it all. So, yes, if the gods of the pagans are devils, then it would follow that southern India is where they’d be most inclined to drop the mask.
7: Would you say that? Honestly, I can’t regard it as any worse than ordinary earrings. If you’ve swallowed the camel of “let’s pierce holes in our flesh in order to be beautiful”, the gnat of “and let’s put metal in our noses” seems a silly thing to strain at. (Unless you’re just especially sensitive about things nasal in general, of course. I have members I’m that way about myself, so I could understand that easily enough.)
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