With Liberty and Freedom for All

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With Liberty and Freedom for All

All this blather about liberty, freedom and democracy being vomited up by Bush and his spinmeisters is making me dizzy.

The worst thing about it is that it’s so ironic, and yet I know that Bush wouldn’t recognize irony if it hopped into his mouth and gagged him like a fork load of overcooked okra or a sourdough pretzel.

Yet Bush would have the world believe that what we have here in the United States is the land of milk and honey, that we’re all dancing around the Maypole like one big happy family, and that we’re all bathing in one huge bubbly bath of liberty and freedom.

Well, maybe we are, unless, that is, you’re gay. But then, if you’re gay, you’re really not one of America’s finest and hence, according to the new morality, are unworthy of all that liberty and freedom. In fact, you’re so far down on the liberty and freedom totem pole that you deserve to be marginalized, shunted back into the closet and constitutionally denied the right to love and marry. Or to adopt children. Or to have anything that even resembles a family, be it socially or legally.

Or perhaps you’re one of the poor slugs who got snared in the round-up nets of Ashcroft and Rumsfeld during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. You will quickly have learned that the land of liberty and freedom considers you as about as worthy of our beneficence as a pile of tsunami-driven sludge. For it is upon you that our great heralds of freedom and liberty, like the recently-confirmed Alberto Gonzales, have no compunction at all practicing both physical and mental torture. Nor do they care that you will wallow in some rathole on the island of Cuba for years on end without legal representation.

In fact, one of our leading generals in Afghanistan recently pronounced that it’s “fun” to kill people. Obviously war to him is tantamount to some skeet shooting contest, in which the guy with the howitzer gets his jollies by bumping off people whose ideologies differ from his. Yet in the land of liberty and freedom we’re told we must support the troops, so I suppose it’s kosher to let this maniac off the hook with a sanitized reprimand and send him on his murderous way. Freedom and liberty indeed.

Yet we should support our troops, though they too occupy a questionable place in the grand framework of freedom and liberty. Told by a bunch of political hacks who conjure up lies faster than a séance leader conjures up shades from the underworld that they are defending their country, they are being sent off by the thousands to the death grounds of Iraq. There they are ordered to serve sentences longer than those to which they agreed, while their deaths will be noticed by no one who doesn’t read the daily list of the killed that is buried in the bowels of the New York Times. Yet they are the mailmen delivering the same kind of freedom and liberty to Iraq as we all enjoy here. And, poor souls that they are, they believe it.

Or maybe you belong to the now passé group known as the poor. In the land of freedom and liberty we don’t talk much about the poor anymore. Nor are we interested in those who have lost their jobs as a result of corporate outsourcing or the single mother trying to raise three or four kids. Again, according to the new morality, we all know that freedom and liberty pertain primarily to the wealthy, to our great corporate leaders and to the millionaires who populate our national legislature. And, since they are best served by cutting programs for the poor and the children of the poor, we shall do so without recrimination. Conversely, we shall enhance the freedom and liberty of the rich by granting them immense tax cuts to assure their happiness and reward them for their productivity.

But that’s not all. No, in the land of freedom and liberty we are all, thanks to our Alfred E. Neumannesque (What, me worry?), Fearless Fosdickensian leader and his pack of neoconvicts, now to be involved in the grand concept of “ownership.” That’s right, in order to relieve corporations of the onerous weight of health insurance, the burden will be shifted from the shoulders of the companies to our shoulders, whether we can bear it or not. We’ll all “own” our own health care plan. Of course, if we can’t afford to own our own health care plan we’ll wind up in the same category as gays when it comes to freedom and liberty. But not to worry. There’s just nothing to be done about the poor, so you might just as well get over the fact that they’ll be a pain in the butt from now until the day of rapture, which is certainly just around the corner.

And we’ll “own” our own retirement accounts. How wonderful it will be to rid ourselves of that bugaboo known as Social Security. What on earth was FDR thinking when he concocted that bowl of mash? So we leave a few of the old folks with nothing? So there really is no crisis in the system? So we have to borrow a few trillion to get rid of that safety net? So what? Someone has to think about those investment bankers. What about their freedom and liberty?

Yes, this is the land of liberty and freedom, and it is this liberty and freedom that we want to spread round the world through our grandiose scheme of Pax Americana. Let the nations of the world construct strong divisions between rich and poor, and let them know that Wealth is the new god. Let there be no universal health care, no retirement security, and certainly no gay marriage. Let there be hatred between Christian and Muslim and Jew, between enraptured Christian moralists and non-believers. Let there be a grand intolerance toward those who are different and a world of armies to participate in religiously-driven crusades against weak nations who simply won’t bow to our wisdom.

Let liberty and freedom reign. And let all the constitutions of the world be just like ours. But let them be tempered, as ours, by the wisdom of the USA Patriot Act. After all, we don’t want people to get the wrong impression about freedom and liberty. Too much of a good thing obviously benefits no one.

February 10, 2005