The Declaration of Independence for Dummies: What If Our Country's Senior Founding Father Were to Come Back Today? He Might Have to Give Us a Refresher Course on the Precious Union He Helped to Create

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For the Bicentennial of our country in 1976, our founder Benjamin Franklin appeared to author Isaac Asimov in a series of dreams. Franklin wanted to discuss the development of the country he was so instrumental in creating. Unbeknownst to everyone at the time, even us, Franklin left us his cell phone number if we ever wanted to talk to him again. (Could you blame us, though? We didn't even know what a cell phone was. We now figure they've had them in Heaven for some time.) Anyway, for his upcoming 300th birthday in 2006, we once again wanted to get his take on how his country has turned out.

Wha's shakin' y'all? I must say it's been fun for us Founding Fathers up here in Heaven to watch the country that started as a blank sheet of paper in Philadelphia grow and grow. If you're wondering who the Founding Fathers are, we're the people who founded this country. I know, no one says "Founding Fathers" anymore; they now call us "the Framers," whatever that means, or "the Founders," which sounds like a mysterious villain on Star Trek. The term "Founding Fathers" is apparently not what people call "politically correct." Neither were we. That was the whole point of creating a new country.

Many of us have been pleasantly surprised by how America has grown. I know Georgie didn't think we'd last longer than a run of the Anna Nicole Smith show. But we gave you the tools, and you ran with it and created something magnificent, Michael Moore notwithstanding. Not that everything is perfect ...

I'd like to say that life here has improved considerably since my time. And, to be sure, in many ways it has. For instance, when I flew my kite in a lightning storm, all I could do was discover electricity. Today, I could both discover electricity and sue the manufacturer of the kite for millions of dollars for not putting a warning label on the kite against doing something stupid like flying it in a lightning storm. You have a rather sarcastic saying that such-and-such is "the greatest thing since sliced bread." Well, in my time we could never have used such a description--we …