President Obama appointed the first black female Librarian of Congress who, naturally, is a fan of Rap music, and who therefore invited rapper/flautist “Lizzo” to sound a few notes on a rare and valuable crystal flute presented to President Madison in 1813.

The grotesquely obese Lizzo performed enthusiastically and indecently attired, accompanying her flute performance with the kind of sexually-explicit movements referred to in the lamentable popular culture of today as “twerking.”

NPR, as you might expect, was overjoyed:

As all iconic moments go these days, it started with a simple social media exchange. Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden tweeted out an invitation for Lizzo to visit the world’s largest flute collection, housed at the Library of Congress in D.C.

“@Lizzo we would love for you to come see it and even play a couple when you are in DC next week,” Hayden tweeted. “Like your song they are “Good as hell [with a winking face emoji].”

The singer responded with gusto.

IM COMING CARLA! AND IM PLAYIN THAT CRYSTAL FLUTE!!!!! <link>
— FOLLOW @YITTY (@lizzo) September 24, 2022

After making a stop at the Library of the Congress to tour the collection and practice on a few instruments, Lizzo’s dream became reality when she got the chance to play the historic flute on stage Tuesday night. …

“You never know what you’re going to see with the U.S. Capitol Police!” the agency tweeted Wednesday morning. …

Handlers brought the flute onstage at Lizzo’s concert. She carefully accepted the instrument and carried it to the standing microphone, saying “it’s like playing out of a wine glass, so be patient.”

She performed on the flute, adding a few of her signature moves, of course, as the audience wildly cheered, and then Lizzo gave back the historical flute and ran back to her mic.

“B***h, I just twerked and played James Madison’s crystal flute from the 1800s,” she shouted. “We just made history tonight!”…

Lizzo took the time to thank the Library of Congress for “preserving our history and making history freaking cool.”

Video link.

I’m obviously a racist old fogey since I think placing a relic previously belonging to the Father of the Constitution in the hands of a popular entertainer of the lowest order who accompanies a performance with the kinds of dress and public behavior that for most of my own lifetime would have gotten her arrested is insulting to Mr. Madison, to the country’s history, and to decency and public morals. In a properly governed America, that librarian would be fired.

Today’s Jacobin “elite” culture, of course, absolutely delights in these kinds of revolutionary gestures. That culture systematically inverts all values. James Madison is an evil dead white man, who owned slaves. Lizzo is black and therefore the giant economy-size embodiment of everything great and admirable! For them, the profanation of Mr. Madison’s flute is “historic,” “an iconic moment,” and “freaking cool.” What an age we live in!

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Seeing someone like Lizzo disporting herself pantsless on stage reminds me of the story of the crusty old New Englander who spied an unusually ill-favored woman in church one Sunday, and remarked, loudly, “My God! that must be the ugliest woman in six counties!” “Hush!” admonished his offended wife. “You know the poor thing can’t help it.” “Yes, but, she could, by golly, stay home!”

“The House of Representatives cannot only refuse, but they alone can propose, the supplies requisite for the support of government. They, in a word, hold the purse that powerful instrument by which we behold, in the history of the British Constitution, an infant and humble representation of the people gradually enlarging the sphere of its activity and importance, and finally reducing, as far as it seems to have wished, all the overgrown prerogatives of the other branches of the government. This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.”

— James Madison, Federalist 58.

Prominent liberal blogger Matt Yglesias is finding that American democracy isn’t working out his way these days, and announces that it’s time to change the rules.

The smarter elements in Washington DC are starting to pick up on the fact that it’s not tactical errors on the part of the president that make it hard to get things done, it’s the fact that the country has become ungovernable. …

You can have a system in which a defeated minority still gets a share of governing authority and participates constructively in the victorious majority’s governing agenda, shaping policy around the margins in ways more to their liking. Or you can have a system in which a defeated minority rejects the majority’s governing agenda out of hand, seeks opening for attack, and hopes that failure on the part of the majority will bring them to power. But right now we have both simultaneously. It’s a system in which the minority benefits if the government fails, and the minority has the power to ensure failure. It’s insane, and it needs to be changed.

You can see just how badly they taught Civics at Dalton and at Harvard. Mr. Yglesias is clearly unaware that the basic role of the Senate as conceived by the framers was to obstruct the will of the majority and to prevent majorities tyrannizing over the minority.

In Federalist Paper 63, James Madison writes:

I shall not scruple to add, that such an institution may be sometimes necessary as a defense to the people against their own temporary errors and delusions. As the cool and deliberate sense of the community ought, in all governments, and actually will, in all free governments, ultimately prevail over the views of its rulers; so there are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn. In these critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career, and to suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice, and truth can regain their authority over the public mind? What bitter anguish would not the people of Athens have often escaped if their government had contained so provident a safeguard against the tyranny of their own passions? Popular liberty might then have escaped the indelible reproach of decreeing to the same citizens the hemlock on one day and statues on the next.