- There is a startling image of James Madison wearing Google Glass in the Sunday New York Times (19-Jan-2014). In an opinion piece titled Madison’s Privacy Blind Spot, the 1816 portrait of Madison by John Vanderlyn is updated to show him sporting the futuristic monocle. Jeffery Rosen, the current president of the National Constitution Center, states that Madison — the Father of the Constitution and champion of the Bill of Rights — was
more concerned with abuses of legislative and executive power than of unregulated commercial power.
Rosen scans Mandison’s views towards abuses of power and concludes that the Constitution may need to be amended to protect the people from both corporate and government surveillance.
James Madison’s Blind Spot
C. Vann Woodward has written of Jefferson, It fell to the lot of one Virginian to define America.
It was in his private life that Jefferson defined the relationship between blacks and whites in America, acting out in the most specific sense the psychosexual dilemma of the whole nation. Other great men in history have loved unlettered women, among them Rousseau and Goethe, each of whom lived for years with virtually illiterate mistresses and then in the end married them. But Jefferson’s dilemma was peculiarly American. So savage were the penalties of this kind of love in the New World that he could neither admit it nor defend it without fear of social ostracism, and he had to keep up an elaborate pretense that it did not exist. He could not openly, and perhaps even privately admit his paternity to Sally’s children.