American Liberty

"Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past,--as it is to some extent a fiction of the present,--the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology." HDT

"And in this country one sees that there is always margin enough in the statute for a liberal judge to read one way and a servile judge another." RWE

[I'll admit to a slight grin as I typed "servile judge".]

It was not until 1828 that Dissenters gained legal equality in matters of religion and education in England. Hazlitt, in 1818, wrote the following eloquent praise of his coreligionists, the sectaries--the men and women who embodied what Edmund Burke had called "the dissidence of dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion." The nonconformists, Hazlitt wrote, "are the steadiest supporters of [England's] liberties and laws, they are the checks and barriers against the insidious or avowed encroachments of arbitrary power: and they are depositaries of the love of truth." Dissent or religious individualism was always more a state of mind than a doctrine, and it was opposed to the Establishment...[emphasis added]
--Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company

"The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."
--F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Handle With Care", Esquire Magazine (March 1936).

I would like to think one might be able to conceptualize "individualism" in two distinct ways, both of which seem readily applicable to what we think of as "mine".

1) Property
2) Liberty

You can see how these two "ideas" are difficult to hold in the mind at the same time. And perhaps we are coming to what seems like a clear rift in our national consciousness in consequence of these ideas "coming apart" in our minds.

Let's define the terms:

1) ownership; right of possession, enjoyment, or disposal of anything, especially of something tangible

2) freedom from control, interference, obligation, restriction, hampering conditions, etc.; power or right of doing, thinking, speaking, etc., according to choice.

We are a nation beholden to propertied interests--and that includes our own if we are owners or debtors--houses, cars, land, etc., yet we are a nation whose mythology is one where Liberty is a central tenet.

It turns out, though, that Liberty is only an abstraction (a powerful one to be sure, but most useful for the human drive to creativity); and that Property is regnant in the world at large.

1) Conservative: Possessive: Tradition: Establishment: Servile
2) Liberal: Creative: Subversive: Dissident: Equality

Which do you prefer?

I saw the Sacs & Foxes at the Statehouse on Monday--about 30 in number. Edward Everett addressed them & they replied. One chief said "They had no land to put their words upon, but they were nevertheless true." RWE

Hedges--Apocalyptic Rage

**Update--An Affirming Flame

Chris Hedges speaking at the University of Toronto--The Death of the Liberal Class.

This is not about our "divisive" politics and about Left and Right...it's about our current despair--we are judged only on our monetary value (we are all commodities). "A mafia economic system." Exploiting both human beings and the natural world until exhaustion and collapse...

"I don't see any way out."

Here is a bit of the sunshine transcribed poorly by me. This is has to do with how we respond to our very physical realities--this from about the 34 minute mark to 36 minute mark:

"legitimate rage is now being expressed through emotionally consistent but absurdest polices...None of it makes any sense but you can't penetrate large sectors of the populace who have been driven into the arms of these movements through despair...and despair is always the engine of totalitarianism; and what's happened...is that when the real world no longer works when your community physically breaks down and brings with it all the attendant problems of sexual abuse, domestic violence, struggle with substance addictions then you seek a world of miracles and magic. And the rage or anger that is engendered when you try to push these people back into the real world, ie, through rational discussion or an attempt to present them with facts, is the anger of people who feel that they are being forced into a world that almost destroyed them. When you go to places like Detroit for instance the end of the world is no longer an abstraction.

And that of course brings with it this love of apocalyptic violence which is fundamental to the ideology of the Christian Right.

The only way...the only avenue that was open to us to save what was left of our anemic democracy was to incorporate these people back into the economic system; to give the disenfranchised working class hope...this chance was lost when we funneled hundreds of billions of dollars back into these speculative concerns."

No ray of sunshine...but the question I think needs to be how to NOT engender Christian Apocalyptics in these communities but rather create new communities that are small and self-sustaining and ones that disdain the current Corporate colonization of our very towns, cities and states; disdaining work for "money" that goes nowhere but to fund this very "external sovereign exception" that we've allowed to dominate our very souls.

(fun stat--almost EIGHT THOUSAND people per DAY have been forced out of their homes over the last two years)

Hedges at U Toronto

**Update

Hedges closes with a story from his war correspondent days in Serbia that is heart-rending and yet reveals "an ocean of hope"--please stick with it till the end. He finishes by quoting the end of Auden's poem September 1, 1939--

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages;
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.