The Constitution gets memory-holed

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A republic, if you can remember it

Unlike the Battles of Lexington and Concord, we do know who shot first at the Mos Eisley cantina.

In the original cut of “Star Wars,“ Harrison Ford gave audiences everything they needed to know about his character in the time it took to pull a trigger. Han Solo shooting bounty hunter Greedo under the table established him as a survivor who was charismatic and heroic, sure, but also impatient and impulsive. In a binary world defined by Jedi goodie-two-shoes and Sith baddies, Solo made a living in the grey areas.

At least, he used to. In re-releases of the seminal space opera, Greedo fires an errant shot from feet away before the smuggler fires back, as director George Lucas wanted to scrub the grime off of Solo’s character. It’s been a source of controversy among the “Star Wars” fandom ever since, though they’re far from alone in having to keep the original version alive in their memories.

Streaming services and re-releases in recent years have scrubbed all manner of material from movies and TV shows. Controversial gags have been removed from everything from “The Office” to the 2024 “Mean Girls” musical. Entire episodes of NBC’s “30 Rock” and FX’s “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” have been memory-holed. Series that only saw release on streaming platforms become inaccessible once they’re removed from digital syndication.

The U.S. Constitution is a bit more serious than an episode of network TV that included depictions of blackface or the shotguns that officers held in “E.T.” And yet, a recent glitch at the Library of Congress is one more exhibit in a case that archivists and pop culture obsessives have been hammering for years: get yourself a physical copy of the media you care about.

According to the Library of Congress, a “coding error” caused several sections of Article I of the Constitution to disappear. The fact that the missing text included the right to challenge detention by authorities, at a time when President Donald Trump is pursuing an agenda of widespread arrests through Immigration and Customs Enforcement, raised more than a few eyebrows.

President Trump gave name to the era of alternative facts. He’s spent the last month trying to convince his followers that the case against Jeffrey Epstein, compiled on his watch, was a hoax perpetrated by Democratic politicians.

New technologies allowing easy deepfakes and edits to the record turn that tendency for fudging the facts when they’re inconvenient from comical to frightening. The U.S. Constitution is as unlikely to become lost media as a Gideon Bible. Still, a copy that can’t be modified, crudely with Sharpie or via a few backend alterations, is a necessity when those in power are so willing to lie about history.

What do you think? Do you believe the glitch explanation offered by the Library of Congress? Are people who remember their rights against illegal search and seizure going to be treated the same as true believers in the Sinbad movie “Shazam”? Sound off in the comments.

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