Thursday, January 27, 2005
Freedom’s Just Another Word for the Bit Between Your Teeth
I’m not really sure where I’m going with this… but it’s been a week since I avoided listening to the inaugural speech, and slightly less time than that since I heard Jon Stewart lampooning it, and there’s a theme that has stuck in my head since then like a bad pop song you don’t quite know the lyrics to. It’s the idea that this is a “free country,” and as such should be seen by the rest of the world as an exemplar of all that is fine and right. As I recall the tally I saw on television (or the T-V, as some wags call it), Bush invoked “freedom” 27 times and “liberty” 15 times in a speech that celebrated the peaceful retention of incumbent power - a speech which I understand to have lasted 45 seconds, much of which time was dedicated to a musical number wherein he danced with an animated apple pie and a drugged monkey. But I digress.
I understand from the “T-V” that lots of people who live in other countries are tired of having us jam the polished apple of our freedom down their comparatively fettered and downtrodden throats. They don’t want to hear how free we are - especially when the platitudes we are mouthing obviously have so little to do with the reality on our mean streets. This isn’t San Andreas, people - we can’t just do as we like. There are rules in this country, at least for the wee folk like myself. And really, that’s a more important philosophical point than Grand Theft Auto credits it to be. Government should not, in my opinion, be in the business of guaranteeing absolute freedom, in crafting the perfectly-level playing field - because in the absence of oversight, the bullies and vandals will steal everything worth anything and befoul whatever’s left. Rather, I expect my government to ensure a fair chance for all - to learn, to earn, to thrive, and to pursue happiness, but not at the expense of others. Government, I think, should be in the business of restraining the strong and defending the weak, so that all of us get a fair shot at happiness.
For this to work, we have to trust our government. Maybe not the individual players, but the institutions as a whole. I want to believe that the national policy is transparent, that the people we elect (or place in office) are doing what they said they would do, that their promises of freedom and liberty and self-determination are some vague reflection of their intentions. And here’s my problem: it just ain’t so today. We are told something as a “confirmed fact,” like the Sadaam-9/11 connection or the consequence of certain behaviors or the state of the environment or the economy - and then we find that it’s not true at all, and the response from on high is either that it is so true, or that they never said it was true in the first place. Revisionist history has given way to the revisionist present day, in which the basis for what is being done here and now is a moving target unworthy of credulity. We’re being fed lines of crap on every front. Social security is not fatally out of balance. AIDS is not transmitted by tears. Marijuana eases chronic suffering. Most poor people are not to blame for their own woes. But every damn day we get buttered up afresh with a bunch of “freedom and liberty” hooey and while we’re sitting there grinning like cretins with cousins, they slide another bag of burning poo onto our doorstep and tell us it’s the liberty torch.
And the thing is, we are not so goddamn free. I don’t mean that we’re not free to smoke in schools or to carry firearms around Disneyland; these are the sorts of restrictions on personal liberty that benefit those of us who prefer to be free from random sprays of bullets or from lung cancer and fouled air. But there are other personal liberties that are much more, shall we say, liberating for the individual than they are destructive to society. I think so, anyway, and the countervailing opinion is grounded in a religious zealotry of moral sanctimony and egocentric dominion that is inimical to the founders’ ideal of the pursuit of happiness. (And don’t give me that crap about how religious those wankers were. Ben Franklin would get thrown out of any evangelical synod you’d care to name, assuming you can name any, and that you care.) And this was what got me all huffy and puffy when I heard the coverage of the inaugural speech: If we’re so goddamn free, why can’t we:
* Marry the consenting adult of our choice
* Breath air that is meaningfully and progressively protected from huge corporate polluters
* Have choice in mass media (since megamergers have resulted in an unprecedented concentration of resources, and the FCC has defaulted on its stewardship of bandwidth)
* Craft our own response to reproductive issues (rather than having the government actively working to elliminate choice)
* Go to court or to school without having some fundamentalist jamming his gawd down our throats
* Set local educational policy locally to provide the foundation that children today need to make intelligent decisions about sex and drugs, instead of conditioning educational funding on fealty to an ordained and suspect ideology like pure abstinence
* Take the medicine the government has approved without it hurting or killing us
* Get and use the best medicine available for the woes that ail us
* Get the best price on the medicine we need even if it means shopping across the national border
(This is just a hodgepodge list off the top of my pointy head. I know there are a lot of other freedoms that the government denies to us. I just don’t feel like getting any more upset than I already am by thinking of them.)
And as we are unceasingly told how free and liberated we are, even in the face of these inhibitions and restrictions, and even as we berate the rest of the world for failing to meet our lofty standards, we are denying them critical health care support because we disagree as a matter of national policy with their approach to local population control and STD issues; we are even preventing them from working together to address environmental concerns that scare them but that we insist don’t exist. The freedom we laud, the freedom that we export in the barrels of guns and inculcate in unnamed detention centers where people learn its value by its utter loss, is not the freedom that other people actually value. It’s the freedom we tell them they want, and if they disagree with us, they pay a terrible price. Which, in this particular instance, is four more years of having to avoid hearing our president’s voice. If I could be free of one thing, that might be my first choice.
I was right, I had no idea where this was going. But I went and said it anyway. Maybe by tomorrow I’ll get my focus back and I’ll have a cute little essay about drinking beer or buying cheese or something benign like that. I mean, to the extent beer-n-cheese are benign. I suppose, in the proper combination, they can be pretty lethal too. But at least they don’t tell me what kind of government I need.
