38 / CHRONICLESnvital and creative popular movement. Historians should paynclose attention; the experience of the “soldiers” is apparentlynextraordinarily intense and often not what one wouldnexpect. Of course reenactment need not be confined tonmilitary events.nSecond, ethnodrama, which is a new technique designednby anthropologists and performance experts to enact centralnritual or social activities from other cultures and periods—nmarriages, funerals, and other social dramas. The Smithsonian,nto its credit, has recognized the historical value ofnthis form of knowing by doing.nThird, the use of events taking place now, of which ournexperience is peculiarly sharp, to partially model pastnevents. Those modern events may be the more useful asnmodels because of their divergence from their analogue. Forninstance, the current state of conflict in the Middle Eastnmay valuably model the Thirty Years’ War in Germany andnthe other postrenaissance religious conflicts in Italy andnFrance.nFourth, war games and their extension into the diplomatic,nsocial, and economic spheres. War games have in thendeveloped world now largely replaced actual battles as thenmost efficient way of resolving military struggle; we arenengaged in such a war with the Soviet Union at thisnmoment, and have been for some years. The actualnweapons are little more than gold reserves, so to speak, keptnin the bank to support the working currency, which is thengames. With the advent of better computers, we should benable to game-model a variety of historical situations andncultural processes, altering the parameters, variables, andndegrees of feedback until we get a course of events whichnmatches the historical data. The point is, the datas need notnbe especially rich, or even reliable, to provide, as annensemble, extremely rigorous and exclusive criteria to bensatisfied by the model. Leontieff’s mathematical model ofnthe economy of the United States is a nice example of whatncan already be done along these lines.nFinally, I would suggest the careful attention to fictionalnand dramatic accounts of history, their performance, andneven their fresh creation. This is a time-honored andnenormously fruitful practice; but it may be even morenfruitful if we treat it as serious historiography. Here we mayntest the validity of historical ideas by seeing whether thenevents of history are psychologically and narratively consistentnwith the fictional model.nWe are perhaps ready now to apply Marx’s dictum—thatnthe point was not to understand history, but to changenit—in a way quite different from what he intended. Thatnart which changes history may be its most intimate andnprecise study.nJUDICIAL EDITING ANDnCONGRESSIONAL INACTION by Kyle E. McSlarrownMuch has been written in recent years on how courtsnconstrue law, whether it is the Constitution or anstatute. The discussion typically addresses the judiciary’snsearch for the “intent” of the framers or legislators andnreflects a continuing debate on what limitations our systemnof government places on a court when it applies written lawnto the facts of a specific case. This debate has, for the mostnpart, focused on the extent to which courts usurp legislativenfunctions by interpreting statutes in a way that adds theirnown ideological gloss.nUnfortunately, the ambiguities frequentiy found in textsnof statutes passed by Congress invite—even demand—nresort to external aids of interpretation, if only because thenlegislative branch has sometimes embraced ambiguity fornpolitical reasons with every expectation that the judiciarynwould fill both the political void and the text of a statute. Asna result, the judiciary increasingly has had to search for thenmajority will with relatively little help from the legislature.nIs the resort to anything other than the text of laws everninappropriate? Phrases such as “original intent” and “evolvingnstandards of decency” and “supported by the legislativenhistory” reinforce the impression that the text of a statutenrarely serves to resolve its meaning. When interpreting anstatute that is ambiguous, internally contradictory, or po-nKyle McSlarrow is assistant to the General Counsel of thenArmy.nnntentially conflicting with other law, such external aids asnlegislative history are necessary. But what of a statute whosenmeaning is clear on its face? We might expect to findnjudicial opinions that are no more than a recitation of thenrelevant statutes. Instead, a court may well decide to editnthe text because it perceives incongruities between thenstatute as written and its purposes as gleaned from externalnevidence.nAlthough this type of interpretation represents a morenblatant exercise of judicial power than the interpretation ofnambiguous statutes, in doing so the courts encounternsurprisingly little protest. Judicial editing may appear tonconcern some observers less than unrestrained judicialninterpretation, in part, because Congress could more easilynrectify the result. While judicial interpretation of an ambiguousnstatute is so subtle an exercise of legislative prerogativenthat the cloak of legitimacy provided by “statutory construction”nwould generally shield a decision from scrutiny,njudicial revision of an otherwise unequivocal text is sondramatic that it should compel a legislature to react.nThis is, however, too simple. When would a court takensuch a dramatic step? A case involving insignificant issuesnhardly invites a court to bother with reading beyond thentext. It is more likely that a court would feel compelled tonignore the text and search for something more, in controversialncases, and it is not at all clear that Congress wouldnever be able to rise to the judicial challenge when greatn