Freedom and Democracy No Longer Apply

The words rather than the ideas that define freedom and democracy have been used incessantly over the last few years to explain everything that has gone wrong, every fear dredged up from nightmare, every sleazy and secretive action by what is supposed to be our representative government. Although we would like to believe such a thing impossible, it makes one think the ideas, as well as the words freedom and democracy, have been subverted.

If, as our Constitution tells us, we are a Republic because we are a state with a political organization which rests in the principle that the citizens or electorate constitute the ultimate root of legitimacy and sovereignty, and

If, as Epictetus, Thomas Jefferson and Alexis deToquiville suggested, freedom depends upon an educated populace, and

If democracy is an exercise of freedom because it recognizes the need for equality of opportunity, and

If democracy is a form of government where the population of society controls the government, and

If freedom is when you can say what you mean and democracy is when the government listens,

Doesn’t it then follow that we are not truly free and also, in defiance of our Constitution, no longer a Republic with democracy as its form of government?

No doubt your immediate reaction to such a question is negative. But, think about it. Think about it in the context of the last few years. Think about it in the context of the state of our educational system and in the quality of minds, both young and old, that cannot speak coherently or perform the functions of basic math without a calculator, that immerse themselves in the vacuous offerings of prime time television, that accept the marketing messages that acquiring ‘stuff’ is more important that doing good, that is apathetic to the normal requirements of good citizenship, that can name the Three Stooges but cannot name the three branches of their own government.

Perhaps we should also ask whether it is worse if we allow freedom and democracy to be subverted by our present government, or if we are instead allowing our indifference and inattention to encourage us to commit cultural and societal suicide. Is the ‘them’ that a questionable majority appointed to lead our Republic down a torturous pathway a greater danger to our longevity than the ‘us’ that allowed the erosion of education and intelligence in the first place? Without the ‘us’ would we have ever been faced with the ‘them?’

Ineptitude within the populace seems as great a contributing factor to our current situation as does incompetence and greed among our leadership. Our Constitution was once the bedrock of our thinking and our actions, but we are now standing idly by while the document that defined our thinking is chopped to pieces – a politicized version of the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” Deluded religious fanatics are seeking to eliminate the separation of Church and State by revising both the reality and the reasoning behind the founding of this country. Those same zealots with the assistance of the fearful and hate filled are working toward total conformity and submission to some nebulous authority in order to eliminate the differences that were once celebrated for being allowed under our Constitution. We are being encouraged to embrace tactics against perceived enemies that only mirror barbarity, tactics we would never condone during our earlier time of unconscious greatness, tactics that view others as less than human and prove our own inhumanity.

And, all during these turbulent days, we wonder what went wrong. We rarely stop to consider a truth put forth by Earl Riney - that freedom without obligation is anarchy but freedom with obligation is democracy. Nor do we consider that the comfort of freedom is in our choices, just as the success of democracy is in those same choices. We seem blind to the awareness that it is the educated mind that has and makes the best choices; that as Aristotle said, it is an educated mind that can entertain an idea without accepting it.

It is the questionable choice that will cross an ocean to fight in a war but that will not cross the street to vote for an ideal. How does that prove our freedom? And how does that show that the root of democracy – the electorate – is healthy?

Freedom no longer applies. Democracy as our form of government is no longer apt.

Distorting Reality, Memory and History

As of this writing, we are two days and counting away from the fifth anniversary of 9/11, the fall of the World Trade Center and the massive loss of innocent lives to the demented ambitions of unscrupulous men. The years since that event have been intense with extraordinarily high levels of stress, fear, subterfuge and ugliness. Perhaps the anxiety is one of the reasons reflection says those years passed quickly when time as it occurred seemed unnaturally slow and burdensome.

We humans seem consumed by a need to recognize common benchmarks in our lives with various forms of monuments and reaffirmation. Certainly the tragedy of 9/11 falls into this category, not just because it changed our parochial view of the world, and the world’s view of us, but because it has changed our relationship with ourselves and over 250 years of the concept of democracy. Since our normal functioning is eerily dependent upon the electronic media, it is no wonder that the bulk of our moments of recognition of 9/11 will be in rerunning five year old film clips and in creating new ‘commemorative’ films, be they dramatizations, documentaries or mockudramas. The latter, of course, is propaganda at its worst.

During the last five years, many unanticipated monuments have been erected. Our governing of ourselves has changed. Our view of privacy has been altered. Our willingness to take on the worst aspects of a dictatorial society has expanded. Our trust in our leadership has been shattered. We have given unearthly powers to a small group of fanatics with an extreme ideology but not a country. We have learned to hate. We accept smear campaigns as truth. We have let fear rule our intelligence and emotion channel our energy. Many of us have grown embarrassed at ourselves, our actions, our inactions, and our inanity.

As with most things that are emotion laden, the reality of what was becomes garbled and warped. When real emotion is the cause of such re-writing of events, it is easily forgiven because we are all frequent victims of the heat of such feelings. When that warping is premeditated, however, and then disseminated as propaganda to achieve some political end, the distortion is unforgivable. That is the situation with ABC’s projected presentation of a docudrama about 9/11 produced for questionable reasons by highly biased individuals.

As history, five years is a very short time. Individuals involved in actions and decisions relative to 9/11 are, for the most part, still living and still capable and coherent enough to personally relate their part of those events. Ergo, using the excuse of literary license or historical interpretation to alter those events is not only arrogance of gigantic proportions, but is foolhardy in the extreme. Memories about that day are still sufficiently fresh to automatically expose any glossing over or exaggeration, so why would anyone, regardless of their motivation, blatantly alter events, words or deeds? The entire viewing public is not stupid, yet revisionists seem determined to view us all as easily fooled, easily led, and easily duped.

During the last five years, there have been sufficient government displays of incompetence, disdain, arrogance and indifference to the welfare of the people of our nation to last over several lifetimes. Most of us are thoroughly tired of it, and very probably the 2006 and 2008 election results will prove the point. This latest attempt to force knowledge and memory down a crooked, unlit path is not only bad theatre and shoddy craftsmanship, but it is rotten politics.

Sense, Sensibility, Sensuality and Sex

Sunday night during television’s prime time viewing slot, ABC produced a ‘investigative’ show entitled ‘The Outsiders.” It was an appalling hour, not for the show’s content, but for the program’s attitude – an attitude that will further reinforce, if not re-infect, the sad and pathetic mentality of George and Martha, typical non-thinking, easily swayed viewer.

The ‘outsiders’ in question were people who neither view nor participate in sexual thoughts or acts endemic to the absolutist minds of individuals taught to believe all forms of perversion exist relative to the miracle of the human body. In other words, the attitudes of these ‘outsiders’ was not a mainstream attitude of sexual fear, disgust, preoccupation, or lasciviousness. While I hesitate to call them more enlightened than their peers, I feel free to say they are far less inhibited and far more realistic.

The bulk of the program was geared toward exhibiting, or in the program’s terms, exposing happily married couples referred to as swingers, individuals who refer to themselves as asexual and female dancers of the ‘exotic’ persuasion. (Perhaps the hour droned on to showcase other groups with differing attitudes to the human body and its natural functions, but annoyance was displayed in the flick of a channel change.) Considering the mind-set of the run-of-the-mill American, there was ample room and opportunity for titillation, condemnation, the tsk-tsk of pity, and all forms of head shaking in denial and confused consternation. What rot.

Why, who, how and for what reason were we originally taught to feel and see shame in our bodies? Why, who, how and for what reason were we originally taught to feel and see shame in our thoughts about those bodies? Why, who, how and for what reason do we attempt to fully separate mind and body, thus being able to condemn two things instead of one and thereby achieve some doubly powered adrenaline rush in our self righteousness?

Does not our mind and body combine to make one entity, one whole person? After all, we take both with us no matter where we go.

And, why and how have we contrived to not only maintain this abnormal separation of self, but expand upon it? There is nothing natural to the prevailing views that any celebration of the sexual, naked self in either body or mind is a perversion, or the devil at play, or that a denial of such naturalness is the puritanical embodiment of absolute morality and superior thinking. It is not even a question of accepting different viewpoints of normality until we first recognize the right of differences to exist.

Had the television production attempted to retain objectivity in their presentation, I would not have been so disgusted in their program, but they did not. The subjectivity was obvious from the first moment, simply in the name they chose – The Outsiders. The first question has to be ‘outside of what?’ If the answer is ‘outside the norm,’ the next questions has to be about who and why and how those ‘norms’ were established. And at no time should anyone lose sight of the fact that it is only when a radical idea is explored that advances to civilization are achieved. Being designated an outsider should not automatically be construed as negative, yet in flouting that designation with sarcastic disapproval, the program offered up an automatic reason for George and Martha, average person, to fear, to hate, and to condemn.

ABC primetime might not have intended to make itself an arbiter or morality, but it did make itself a rubber stamp of those too powerful and self aggrandizing elements in today’s society that seek conformity, seek authority, and strive to punish any human difference they choose to place outside their own rigid strictures of what humans can be allowed to think or do. It was another absurdity given flesh and air time, as offensive and non-human as absolutism.