Justice & Law Quote by Adrian Cronauer

There is a sly bit of radicalism hiding inside this very reasonable-sounding sentence: if laws lose the plot, the people get to rewrite the script. Cronauer frames the claim like a polite footnote - “a corollary” - which gives it the calm authority of logic rather than the heat of protest. That rhetorical move matters. It smuggles a disruptive idea (even the Constitution is revisable) into the conversation as common sense, not rebellion.

As an entertainer best known in the public imagination for Good Morning, Vietnam, Cronauer’s politics are inseparable from performance: he’s arguing for civic flexibility in the same register he used to puncture wartime absurdity - plainspoken, pragmatic, anti-pretension. The line’s power comes from its gradient. He starts at “simple local regulations” and climbs to “the highest law of the land,” nudging the listener from the familiar (nuisance ordinances, outdated rules) to the sacred (constitutional worship) without ever changing his tone. By the time you reach “our federal Constitution,” you’ve already agreed with him twice.

The subtext is a critique of legal fetishism: the habit of treating laws as moral artifacts instead of tools. “Out of touch with the people” is doing double duty, too. It sounds populist, but it’s also a warning about legitimacy - laws that drift from lived reality don’t just become inconvenient; they become unstable. Cronauer isn’t romanticizing revolution. He’s normalizing amendment, insisting that democratic authority is not the law’s permanence but its responsiveness.