Free A Twist in Time by Frank J. Derfler Page A

his head and looked at her, "Damn, old Tom Jefferson was a rascal in some ways, but he was pretty good at projecting into the future." 
     
    "Well yes," she replied, "but you could argue that Jefferson's revolution doesn't have to be in government.  Electricity was a revolution, the automobile was a revolution, and the Internet is a revolution.  Every election is a revolution."
     
    Bill nodded and they were both silent for a while.
     
    "What's the quote about big government?" she asked. 
     
    "Jefferson?" he asked, but then answered his own question.  "But it wasn't really Jefferson, was it?  Something about how a government big enough to give you everything is a government big enough to take away everything."
     
    She supplied, "I've seen it attributed to everyone from Jefferson and Franklin to Ronald Regan.  I think it was really Gerald Ford." 
     
    "Kidding?"  He asked.
     
    "Not!" she replied, "Ford." 
     
    "Wow!" Bill said and then he was silent for a minute.   "How about faith in government?" he asked.  "If government is seen as grossly out of balance, then Americans will lose faith and won't stand still for it.”
     
    Bill stuck his right leg over the side of the hammock and gave a push to get them swinging.  He said, "The separation of powers between the three branches of federal government works pretty well as long as all three segments of government are not corrupted in the same way at the same time."
     
    "One man's corruption is another man's ideal condition," Janet observed. 
     
    “Exactly,” Bill replied. “Perhaps the United States has become too large, too diverse, too ethnically unwieldy and too polarized for a federal system to work.  Could we today get a simple majority consensus on our national interests?  How can we be effective without a shared consensus?”
     
    Janet made a face, “Have we ever been able to do that?  Big states versus little states, agriculture versus industry, capitalists versus labor, upstream versus downstream.  The Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention were hotbeds of political maneuvering and personal greed.  Is it any worse now?”  
     
    They spent another hour in the hammock before wandering into the house for lunch.  They took their sandwiches into Bill's office.  Janet's laptop had a spot on the credenza, but Bill had promised her a desk and chair as a wedding gift.  Bill had a large whiteboard on one wall of the office.  It was full of "to-do" list items and some diagrams for projects around the house.  He erased most the board, leaving one small diagram with a border around it.
     
    "That's an idea for a fountain I had for the back yard," he explained almost shyly. 
     
    "And I love you for it," Janet said. 
     
    "Wow," Bill said quietly.
     
    They both smiled at one another and then Bill took a professorial stance in front of the white board. 
     
    "So what have we got?" he asked rhetorically.  "We've got books full of examples of governments that rose, flourished, and then fell.  I am no expert on the Chinese, Mongols, Japanese, or even Egyptians, but they were royalist and feudal, so I'm not sure whether they apply."
     
    "I'd say not," Janet said from his desk chair.  She had her feet gracefully tucked under her and he was reminded of how she looked a dozen years ago in Destin.
     
    He smiled at her and then took off again, “Okay, so in participative government, you have Greece, particularly under Alexander, that lasted a couple of hundred years.  Rome, under the Caesars, lasted more or less three hundred years.  The Roman empire was, to use your term, the ultimate mixing bowl." 
     
    She swung the desk chair around in a circle and came back to facing him, "Ah, yes, but it wasn't peaceful.  Caesar crossed the Rubicon and fought Pompey.  Anthony and Octavius fought practically everywhere.  The history of the Roman Empire is shot through with civil war.  And I would argue that it was the British Empire that