The Embarrassing Second Amendment

One of the best known pieces of American popular art in this century is the New Yorker cover by Saul Steinberg presenting a map of the United States as seen by a New Yorker. As most readers can no doubt recall, Manhattan dominates the map; everything west of the Hudson is more or less collapsed together and minimally displayed to the viewer. Steinberg's great cover depends for its force on the reality of what social psychologists call "cognitive maps." If one asks inhabitants ostensibly of the same cities to draw maps of that city, one will quickly discover that the images carried around in people's minds will vary by race, social class, and the like. What is true of maps of places-that they differ according to the perspectives of the mapmakers-is certainly true of all conceptual maps. To continue the map analogy, consider in this context the Bill of Rights: Is there an agreed upon "projection" of the concept? Is there even a canonical text of the Bill of Rights? Does it include the first eight, nine,