There used to be a simple analogy that could answer almost any question a young child might have about the U.S. Supreme Court.  Since most of America’s children were farm-raised, you could tell them that just like the chore of candling eggs – that is, holding them close to the light of a candle in order to see if they were healthy – so the Supreme Court candled the nation’s laws.  Only the light they used was a really, really bright one, the Constitution of the United States of America.

How incredibly naïve that little lesson seems in today’s world.  How sad the loss of belief and innocence. 

And how impossible to explain the Court to a young child today.

First of all, because you can’t be anywhere near the Supreme Court building itself.  If the child has been reading his American history, he has the picture in his head of Thomas Jefferson drafting the Declaration of Independence in a boarding house room in Philadelphia, the log cabins, or modest Constitution Hall.  And so it will be hard for him to reconcile those earthy, humble images of America’s foundation with the Supreme Court’s palace in Washington. 

A chamber graced by twenty-four columns quarried from the Montarrenti site in Italy and walls lined with Spanish ivory-veined marble.  So ostentatious a space that an embarrassed justice serving at the time it was opened in 1935 joked that the Court should enter it riding on elephants.

Then you’d have to explain why a majority of those nine black robes ever turned off that light but kept the power and authority we gave them. 

I suppose that most children know the story of the serpent whispering into Eve’s ear in the Garden of Eden.  And so you could put it that some very convincing, sibilant voice like that must have whispered into their ears, but do you want to tell a young child that?

Or that when the light went out, you didn’t do something?

Or try to justify yourself telling them about the countless legal arguments that were taken to the court hoping they would reverse themselves? 

Or the debates and the vicious politics involved in appointing replacements when justices died or retired?

Because if you do you know what’s going to happen, don’t you?  Yes, you’re going to bump into de Tocqueville and his point that democracy works only because most people expect the will of the majority to come down on their side from time to time.  And when it doesn’t – sooner or later America will stop dead in its tracks, and its wheels fall off.

Finally you don’t want to pass on any of your black thoughts, do you?  Like maybe before the wheels do fall off, the people should ride elephants inside that palace themselves, trample everything to matchwood, and start over?

So explain the Air and Space Museum to your kids instead.  And hold off on the Court until they’re older. 

Richard F. Miniter is the author of The Things I Want Most, Random House, BDD.  He lives and writes in the colonial era hamlet of Stone Ridge, New York, blogs at richardfminiterblog.com, and can also be reached at miniterhome@aol.com.