TIMES
EAGLE
NORTH
COAST
VOL23NO1 50CENTS
In a dark time the eye begins to see
JULY 2001
-Theodore Roethke
DAVID SHANNON
AN ASSUMPTION OF FREEDOM
"As Mark Twain once said about America: 'it is a
civilization which has destroyed the repose of life; replaced
its contentments, its poetry, its soft romantic dreams and
visions with the money fever, sordid ideals, vulgar ambitions,
and the sleep which does not refresh.
-ART CRUMB
"We can have a democratic society or we can have a
concentration of great wealth in the hands of the few. We cannot
have both. “
~ LOUIS BRANDEIS
July is a month celebrated as the birthday of the United
States of America — in 2001Yankee Doodle is 11score & 5 —
and its founding principles of 'Liberty & Justice for All.'
The larger voices loudly proclaim the USA as the freest,
most wonderful country on Earth and unfurl the flags of worldly
preeminence and Godly jingoism. Smaller voices disagree:
which is not to say the ideals of liberty and justice for all are not
articulate in the nation or that their intent is less than political
and personal freedom (and something akin to equality under the
law however discriminatory its actual practice) for everybody
now and in the future who live within its geospace.
The persistent conundrum is that the actuality is far less
than advertised — that neither freedom nor equity is the daily
reality for millions of Americans who are governed instead as
if they live in a police state because they are poor or are of
a minority race; that the old evils of worth measured by wealth,
gender and race continually and perversely undercut the
foundations the nation claims to stand upon and believe in.
The oldest struggle after survival is for freedom, of
being part of a community, not enslaved by it — the eternal
pitiless struggle between haves and have nots, the despairing
rage of those condemned to live bitterly wretched lives in the
shadows and as menials to the economic and politically powerful
few who are in their turn angrily terrified by this rage.
History shrieks with the pain of injustice, only briefly
muffled by excesses of gross brutality. Sometimes the
oppressed overthrow the lords and bosses, but elites always rise
in even the most originally classless societies. If the American
Revolution is accepted as more than a revolt of colonial
bourgeoisie and that it gave birth to an entirely egalitarian
society in which the common citizenry had a chance to be their
own rulers, it should also be realized that every reform has been
bitterly and often bloodily resisted and only adopted with great
reluctance Reforms that have been ratified are usually
countered with vicious backlash and unrelenting reversion
Vemon Parrington believed that American history has
been 'largely a struggle between the spirit of the Declaration
of Independence and the spirit of the Constitution, the one
primarily concerned with the rights of man (s/c), the other more
practically concerned with the rights of property." He could not
understand why intelligent Americans confused the two and
thought of them as complimentary 'Their unlikeness is
unmistakable," he wote in Main Currents of American Thought,
"the one a classical statement of the French humanitarian
democracy, the other an organic law designed to protect the
minority under republican rule" Historians have long debunked
his ideological division of the nation's two most important
documents, yet as early as the 1820s Alexis de Tocqueville
observed, as R.R. Palmer wrote, "that 'equality' was one of the
most fundamental ideas of the United States; but he also
thought that the American Revolution had been of little
importance in producing this spirit of equality " Or as Nicholas
Chamfort put it, "Society is composed of tw large classes;
those who have more dinners than appetite, and those who have
more appetite than dinners."
Those two classes form a single system, Henry Adams
wrote, "...and that system is the price at which the proletarian is
to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses." (George Bernard
Shaw "A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always
count on the support of Paul.")
The obsession for world power, which is America's self
proclaimed manifest destiny, has given it the myopic paradox
of patriotic corruption. General Eisenhower said in his farewell
speech as President forty years ago in 1961, "Every gun that is
made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in a
final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those
who are cold and not clothed "
Nationalism, a packaged product that disguises
inequities and rot within a nation while simultaneously promoting
the imperial ambitions of a powerful and avaricious minority, is
a prerequisite for expansion (primarily economic colonialism in
this new millennium): and ideologies, which are fictions, are yet
justifications for tyrannies and terrorisms large and small.
The greater cost is the ultimate loss of liberties in the
holy names of national defense and national security. Govern
ment hides its clandestine acts against foreign nations and its
own citizens under official secrets classifications which deny
access to the citizenry. Operating away from public scrutiny and
on behalf of the narrow interests of the elite few, the government
cloaks its corruption with pieties of patriotism and the blessings
of God. Our cultural pashas proselytize our obviously superior
and enlightened supremacy to a wary and suspicious world
while subverting opposition at home to our post-Cold War mode
of Pax Romana 'War is the enemy of democracy," Howard Zinn
says unequivocably. He might add that militarism leads both to
war and domestic subordination and is as much the nemesis of
freedom
The assumption of freedom is that the average human
being is intelligent and inspired by compassion and that most
people will think and act reasonably most of the time The usual
assumption of government is the common citizenry is unintelli
gent, primitive and brutal and must be shielded from its own
perfidious nature. The tendency of government is to rule and it
is a parasite. Government must by the implication or force of its
sovereignty feed upon and subtract the political liberties, rights
and powers of those it rules It is the responsibility of the people
to always contain the power of their government, which without
that restraint will relentlessly take away power from the people
In the past century the U.S government has usurped much
power for itself, some of it for the betterment of the people such
as civil rights laws, but also much of it against the people such
as the rule of terror, secrecy and doubt that characterized the
Cold War and nuclear arms race with the now defunct Soviet
Union
The idea of the authority of law is a recognition by most
of us that a few of us wll cheat, rob. murder and otherwse make
life uncomfortable for the rest A majority desires protection from
the psychopathy of an avaricious minority For exactly the same
purpose, to protect us from predatory or cruel government, the
political freedom and power of the common citizenry has been
made the law of this nation. Yet a government of the people
is assumed to also be a government for the people, so it is
entrusted to act in the people's behalf to prevent or correct the
excesses of monopolistic and unprincipled private interests,
which is in contrast to the current era of virulent capitalism.
Former President Reagan was wrong when he said that a free
government must be free from government The dismantling of
government protections which has accelerated since his admin
istration alters government's role from acting as benefactor and
protector of civil rights and liberties to its more ominous nature
of guardian and enforcer of the reigning status quo, which is
increasingly articulated by the wealthy elite and the religious
right.
Freedom implies a mature citizenry while the nature
of authority requires that no one grow up To be free and remain
that way is a large responsibility and many people don't want it.
Political freedom insists upon the value of the individual but the
accelerated complexity of American society is constructed on
aggregates and consensus and makes the contributions and
usefulness of each of us less valuable. Our thinking and sense
of self-worth are critically affected. An individual and ultimately
collective sense of personal and political helplessness
settles in.
Our freedoms seem to be only wishful lies, bedtime
tales told by those we democratically select to alkaseltzer our
minds of thought or responsibility Reality is treated as event
vtfiich translates into what entertains. Almost everyone seems
apprehensive of the penod we are trying to live through, and of
this new century we step warily into, an unscripted frontier
without horizons Zestful prophecies of humanity uber alles are
proclaimed, as are apocalyptic visions The law of parsimony
is not helpful: the simplest answer is probably the wrong one.
(If God is dead who is there but Homo Jones to believe in, the
great 19th century idea that made the 20th century a malestrom
of hubris and horror?)
"From top to bottom the whole system is a fraud,"
Henry Adams wrote "All of us know it, laborers and capitalists
alike, and all of us are consenting parties to it." He thought the
entire society would "go to wrack if we really lay hands of reform
on our rotten institutions." Forest Amsden, former news director
of KGW-TV in Portland (he died in 1990) wrote that "the federal
and legislative branches" of the U.S. government "are so corrupt
that reform requires insurrection."
James Madison argued 210 years ago in 1791 when
he introduced the Bill of Rights to the Constitution as its first ten
amendments that "the people, not the government, possess the
absolute sovereignty "
Abraham Lincoln said that if the people retain their
virtue and vigilance, no administration, "by any extreme of
wickedness or folly," can very seriously injure the governmental
concepts of our founding ancestors
If we wsh to take hope and some encouragement in the
long struggle ahead to right the balance of power in this country,
perhaps it is not too late to agree with James Boyle, who wrote
in the New York Times, "One reason we have a democracy is
because people make unspeakably stupid decisions without it."
-MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER
I