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N O R T H C O A S T T IM E S E A G L E , JULY 2005
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 a minority
race; that the old devils of worth measured by wealth, gender and
race continually and perversely undercut the foundations the
nation claims to stand upon and believe in.
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 that the common citizenry is lazy,
unintelligent, 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 implication or force
of its sovereignty feed upon and subtract the political liberties,
rights and powers of those it rules.
Our ancestors who wrote the Constitution knew very
well that governments swallow the rights of their citizenry and
that the natural inclination of authority is to concentrate and
perpetuate its power by any means. Reflexively government
subverts the rights of all but its ruling classes, even if a system
originated to provide rights to the governed. The laws of the
Constitution simply make it more difficult for the leaders of
government to expropriate complete power.
It is the responsibility of a democratic people to contain
the power of their government, which without that restraint will
relentlessly take power away from the people. In the past century
the U S. government has usurped much power to itself, some of
it for the betterment of the people such as civil rights laws, but
also much of it against the people epitomized by the half century
rule of terror, secrecy and doubt that characterized the Cold War
and nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union.
The political freedom and power of the common citizenry
has been made the law of this nation to protect democracy from
predatory or cruel government. 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’ behalf to prevent or correct the
excesses of monopolistic and unprincipled private interests,
which is in contrast to the current era of virulent capitalism
abetted by the government. Neoconservatives are wrong when
they claim that a free government must be free from govern
ment. The dismantling of government protections which has
accelerated since the Reagan/Bush administration two decades
ago 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
rancorously articulated by the wealthy elite and 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 crucially affected An individual and ultimately
collective sense of personal and political helplessness sets in.
The USA probably should, as so many suggest, refresh
itself in this dark period of crisis and uncertainty with a fresh
infusion of original principles, but these are difficult to pin down
and incredibly problematic to apply to an evolving millennial
society. The newly reconstructed Federalists of the current
Presidential administration share a constrained interpretation
of the Constitution: its rights and privileges belong to the wealthy
and privileged, its dues and obligations to everyone else. They
would like to suspend the Bill of Rights and believe in what they
call the ‘original intent' of the framers of the Constitution — the
rule of propertied white men. The Bill of Rights and subsequent
amendments clarify that original intent of the Constitution was
not as restricted as the so-called strict reconstructionists claim,
but instead it is an amendable document able to reflect and serve
a continually changing civilization despite hardships, frustrations
and bloodshed that accompany the amending process. The
actual intent of the original framers was to make the Constitution
broad enough to reflect future problems and ideas they knew
they were unable to anticipate or too contemporarily divided in
opinion to immediately resolve, among them the movements to
emancipate slaves and women.
James Madison argued in 1791 when he introduced the
Bill of Rights to the Constitution 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 seriously injure the governmental concepts of our
founding ancestors, whom it should not be forgotten were traitors
and terrorists relentlessly in revolt for freedom.
And as James Boyle wrote in The New York Times a few
years ago, “One reason we have a democracy is because people
make unspeakably stupid decisions without it,"
9/11 precipitated a crisis of democracy that might well
be more momentous and more prolonged than the war on
terrorism. Civil liberties are dramatically threatened and average
citizens have little say about it. Ordinary people are rendered
The man was smiling. It was the 4th of July.
Somewhere else small children were parading in patriotic
costumes under American flags.
The man's face was proud and his smile was gentle.
Look! He must be Thomas Jefferson! People pointed at a
small boy with a powdered wig askew, who laughed shyly at
their attention. And that must be George Washington — that
little girl just has to be Betsy Ross.
Perhaps his smile was sad. The crowd laughed at
another boy who was Abraham Lincoln trying to keep his
whiskers from falling. Mothers and fathers affectionately
waved to their children parading by
His friends were not smiling. Great brass bands
followed the marching children, crescendoing the air with
stirring American songs, the sun shining molten gold on
trumpets and bassoons.
The smiling man and his friends did not move.
Behind the bands came the veterans, marching to the drums,
wearing blue American Legion or VFW caps, some of them
with empty sleeves pinned to their shoulders; others stumped
by on artificial legs.
There were four of them, counting the smiling man,
and they lay on the wet ground of a coconut grove. In the
afternoon, after the picnic lunch, some of the men and boys
played baseball on the local park diamond while politicians
swore their undying patriotism to the crowd sitting on the
grass. They threw out such catchwords as "Liberty" and
“Freedom for alt' as if they were baseballs.
Above his sad smile and wide open eyes, the smiling
man's head was neatly cut away, the round lower half almost
resembling a child's cereal bowl. His friends laying on the moldy
ground had parts of their bodies missing also. A veteran without
an arm, who did not wear an American Legion or VFW cap,
attempted to shout down the politicians, calling them "Liars!"
and “Murderers!" He remembered the smiling man and his
friends, would in fact never forget them, although in the course
of almost a year at war he had seen thousands of dead, most
of them farmers and their families whose bodies were strewn
like rubbish around their burned homes or out in their rice fields.
The loss of his arm seemed almost a justifiable penance, but
he was more often bitter about it.
He remembered walking over to the bodies in the
coconut grove. He had killed them the night before. He had
seen them by the light of a flare trying to set up a machinegun
and blew them apart with a hand grenade. It had rained the
rest of the night and in the morning the bodies lay leeched of
blood. The smiling man stared at him with dead eyes. He was
transfixed by the smile, the neatly cut away head resembling
one of those cornflakes bowls with a comic face his mother had
given him when he was a boy. A friend shook him out of it and
he walked away into the months ahead until the war took his
arm.
Police took his arm and led him away, warning him to
not disturb the festivities again or they would lock him up. The
smiling man and his friends were left to rot in the grove. The
sun set behind tall mountains and night crept over the bodies.
Somewhere else great colored starbursts flared in the sky,
showering the thrilled crowds with streamers of flaming oranges,
reds and yellows. One magnificent burst formed the Stars &
Stripes for a few seconds and everyone applauded. Elsewhere
on this night heavy jet bombers shot into a tropical sky and
turned toward a jungled coconut grove.
impotent. Most are at the bottom of the crisis and are affected
every day by the consequences. The country is at war, initiated
by lies and illegal assumptions of power. Social services are
withdrawn as well as public health because tax money is being
diverted toward war, and of course to the corporations of the
military/industrial mafia that unabashedly profit from making war
possible and continuous. The USA Patriot Act that was cobbled
together with hardly a whimper of protest by Congress in the
wake of 9/11 circumvents and erodes Constitutional rights and
liberties.
liberty and give it all away to a powerful clique of ambitious
imperialists who manipulate our history as well as our passions
and fears. The paradox is that our Bill of Rights are not for us
alone, nor is the manifest destiny our leaders wish to export in
a rather twisted and malevolent, entirely self-serving vision.
The endless circle of individual rights and obligations
melding within collective necessities and community conscious
ness is distinctly at play in this period of trauma and crisis. It is
time to confront and attempt to comprehend at their core the
most cherished vanities, theories, philosophies and moral roots
of our civilization at their most vulnerable levels, in particular the
faltering myth that the will of the citizens is inherently able to turn
government around.
Bewildered, exhausted and despaired by the cold
realities and complexities of modern government and its unholy
alliance with corporate avarice and military force, perhaps we
should adhere to parsimony instead of surrender; patiently trace
the confused, corrupt tentacles to their origins, and from that
basic point, realize how we got off the track of the history we
intended to navigate when our ancestors declared they could
no longer abide the oppression of a king.
What is freedom?
The right to not be recognized by gender, race or class
but by the simple fact of a person's existence on the planet
The right to be counted on and respected for personal
and independent expression of belief and opinion.
The right to be the only person on the planet who
believes in something no one else does.
The accelerated movement to noveau Federalism since
9/11 shows up in five critical areas: diminished freedoms of press
and speech; imposition of religion into affairs of state; increased
suppression of civil rights of women, racial minorities and the
poor (and consequently everybody else); curtailed judicial rights
synchronous with rising police powers; and continued trickle-
down and flood-up of the nation's wealth The President tells the
country it will only have peace and security through war. Dissent
is inhibited, treated as unpatriotic and possibly a form of terror
ism. Huey Long said, “Fascism will come to the United States
wrapped in the American flag.”
The essential issue is whether we are going to uphold
what our ancestors started or if we are going to undo nearly two
and a half centuries of hardwon and often bloody struggles for
-MICHAEL McCUSKER
NORTH COAST
TIMES EAGLE
A JOURNAL OF ART & OPINION
PUBLISHED IN ASTORIA, OREGON
757 27TH STREET 97103
MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER
EDITOR & PUBLISHER
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