This weekend our great nation celebrates its 235th birthday. Hurrah! I am proud to be an American, proud of my country, and proud to defend my country against all its enemies, foreign and domestic. I am a writer. My weapon of choice is, therefore, not one of one of mass destruction, but one of mass persuasion. I promote the use of narratives—stories—to counter the destructive influence of extremism at home and abroad.
This year I have contributed two books to that noble cause, one a co-authored text with Jeffry Halverson and Steven R. Corman, Master Narratives of Islamist Extremism (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2011) based on an interdisciplinary grant project designed to identify and counter extremist narratives in Indonesia, the Middle East, and North Africa. The other is a solo authored effort, Counter-Narrative: How Progressives Can Challenge Extremists and Promote Social Justice (Left Coast Press, 2010).
Chances are good that these two books will be my last books. Earlier this summer I learned that I have stage four pancreatic cancer. For those of you familiar with this disease, you know that even with aggressive chemo treatment, I am probably celebrating my last 4th of July weekend. I’d like to think I will beat the odds and live longer, and I am certainly working toward that goal, but I am a realist and those are the facts. (To read about my journey into Cancerland, please see my blog).
So it is that I have come to that part of life where it seems entirely appropriate to sum up things. As we celebrate our independence – together with our freedom, justice, and democratic way of life – I want to take stock of those ideas. I want to think about them in relation to the way we live now. Which is to say I want to tell a story about America that is both personal and political, one that questions how well we have lived up to those founding ideals and that is immodest enough to suggest that we still have a lot of hard work to do if we are to truly realize them.
As a white, male, middle-class American citizen, I grew up in the 1950s and early 1960s without giving much thought to the ideas of freedom or justice. I was, to use today’s preferred term, “privileged” by virtue of my race, class, and gender not to have to give much thought to what I could take for granted. I, like so many other white, middle-class American males of that era, just “assumed” it.
My first brush with freedom as something other than a “god-term” associated with our Constitution, the right answer to a 4th grade exam question about what made the U.S. different from Communists, occurred one summer when my parents and I drove across country from our home in Cheyenne, Wyoming to visit our relatives in Martinsburg, West Virginia. Somewhere in Nebraska, or maybe it was Missouri, we stopped for the night at a roadside motel with a swimming pool. This was in 1963 and swimming pools were the treat my parents offered me for enduring long hot hours in the sticky plastic backseat of our un-air-conditioned fire engine red Ford Falcon Futura.
I changed into my trunks, entered the pool with great enthusiasm, splashed around a bit, and then noticed two young Black boys staring at me through the pool fence. “Is everyone allowed in the pool?” one of them asked me. I was speechless. The question made no sense to me. “Why wouldn’t they be?” was my confused response. The boys looked at each other with an expression that I recognized as fear. “Just because,” the other boy replied.
I got out of the pool and opened the gate. They joined me in the pool and we played together as boys do. Later my parents cautioned me about my behavior. “Not everyone is as liberal in their thinking about the races,” my father said. “You could get yourself into trouble.”
It was my first experience of racial differences in America. Of differences in freedom and justice. Of more than one “American Way of Life.” Here again I am reminded of my own privilege in ways that today make me angry and ashamed, but Cheyenne in 1963 was a white town except for the Mexican population of refinery workers and migrant ranch hands who lived literally “across the tracks” on a side of town I heard about, but never saw. The only Black people I saw were pictured in history books.
That was all about to change.
In July 1963 the famous “Poor People’s March on Washington for Freedom and Jobs” took place and Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. We watched it on television from my grandmother’s living room. My grandmother – a retired garment worker who worked proudly for the union – was entirely sympathetic to the plight of the poor, and for her this march on the nation’s capitol was a landmark event. “The rich don’t care about us, Bud,” she told me, “and don’t you ever forget it.” She pointed to the protesters on the mall. “Those are brave souls,” she added. “Braver than we are.”
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Over the next decade I joined in what we now call “the youth movement.” Freedom was our rallying cry, a centering strategy that aligned all of us with each other, whether the cause we were protesting was civil rights, women’s rights, dress codes, bans on long hair in school, or the Vietnam war. We were equal opportunity freedom fighters. We flashed peace signs to each other over the steering wheels of many Volkswagens and sang along with Janis Joplin the ironic lyrics to “Me and Bobby McGee.”
We understood ourselves to be on the right side of history when it came to freedom and justice. We were liberals because many of our parents and the rest of the silent majority stood for the opposite of what we stood for. It was all one big party, yes, but it was a serious party for some of us. We went into politics, we worked for issues and for McGovern, and then for Jimmy Carter, and then, with the election of Ronald Reagan, we saw the whole thing fall apart.
A lot of my friends, good students with ambitions, turned thirty, got good jobs, moved into the suburbs, acquired debt and some status, and had children. They exchanged peace signs for Jerry Garcia ties and Earth Shoes for polished black brogues. They no longer got haircuts but instead styled their hair and wore sharp suits. With that change of clothes and hairstyle came something else for many of them: a change of mind.
We had always been passionate in our convictions and we distrusted weakness, despite our hippie past. So in some ways I wasn’t surprised to see some of my old friends vote Republican in 1980. Reagan offered hope and strength. He articulated a vision for America that wasn’t drenched in the stain of Vietnam or Watergate. His spin machine dominated the news and church circuits with a simple message that repeated often enough became gospel for two disparate classes of Americans: the now reformed hippies who distrusted government to begin with, and the disaffected middle and lower-middle classes who hated taxes and loved guns and Jesus. The rich remained quiet during the Reagan Revolution. And why not? They bankrolled the Republican Party, and no one benefitted more than they did, or would, from lower taxes, smaller government, and less regulation.
Freedom, a “god-term” for most folks of my generation, became one of those words that changed by the politics of the times. No longer defined as “freedom to” pursue our own lives unobstructed,” it became, from Reagan on, the “freedom from” government regulation of commerce. The liberty to define our selves and to pursue our own destinies without interference became thoroughly appropriated, and then corrupted, by the right.
For example, the liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s nuanced treatise on “positive” and “negative” freedom became – again ironically - a major tool in the right’s toolbox of rhetorical tricks designed to prop up their talk radio and Fox News propaganda with intellectual rigor. Borrowing a line from another of Berlin’s works, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” the right was content for the left, like the hedgehog, to “know many things” (to advocate on behalf of many diverse liberal causes), while the fox, in this case the conservatives who were also media savvy about the importance in propaganda of repeating the same message, “knew one thing very well.”
That one thing was this: taxes are bad, government is very bad, and government regulation is very, very bad. As a result the people in virtually every state elected representatives on both sides of the aisle and one Democratic president who promised to lower their taxes, reduce the size of government, and get rid of those pesky government regulations and “red tape” that got in the way of making an already large profit even larger. Ever wonder why the rich got richer? Now you know the formula. Apply that formula to elections for 30 years and what do you get? The largest income disparity in the history of America.
And all in the name of liberty.
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Here’s how the rich Republicans and wealthy corporations did it. The idea of “individual liberty” that 60s liberals championed as a Constitutional guarantee against the intrusion of government in our affairs was rhetorically extended to corporations by the newly fashioned neoliberals who now dominated conservative thought. The Chamber of Commerce, now entirely run as right wing front organization promoted the virtues of unleashed capitalism on a global scale without regard for legitimate questions about the morality or even the ethics of practices designed to enrich the already wealthy at the expense of the global poor and the ecology of the planet.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. The same passion for self-determination that defined the 60s rebels was itself refashioned by neoliberals as the very thing that government must be used to restrict, particularly when self-determination was associated with a woman’s right to choose, or workers’ right to organize, or public employees right to collective bargaining, or marriage equality, or a majority of the people’s desire for government sponsored universal health care.
As the already blurred line between conservative politics and evangelical religion became erased in the name of the new “prosperity gospel,” the Jesus I knew and the God I prayed to were reduced to Wall Street style investment bankers who were less interested in our souls than in our vote for politicians who would enact social legislation with a decided conservative agenda.
Because self-determination was associated with unholy “desires,” and pejoratively labeled socialist “rights” were newly defined as the enemies of conservative thought, they were – and are – challenged, ironically, by the same battle cry of “freedom” that, if you have been the least bit of attention, makes America less safe and secure from corrupt business practices and the evil that rich men do. Freedom became just another word, all right, but not for “nothin’ left to lose,” but for income inequality and social injustice.
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Today we live in an America than threatens to become less free and less just than the America I grew up in. True, we have made important advances in civil rights, so nowhere I know of in this country will two young African-American boys have to ask that embarrassing question that was posed to me long ago. But everywhere in America new and proposed Republican legislation is hell-bent on restricting the rights of workers, the rights of women, the rights of gays, and the rights of anyone who would dare question the Supreme-Court given privilege of wealthy individuals and corporations to control the politics and laws of this country.
My grandmother was right: “The rich don’t care about us.” And they never will.
When I think back to that day in July 1963 when my grandmother gave me what became my first lesson in class politics, I also recall her admiration for the protesters. “Those are brave souls,” she said, “Braver than we are.” I said the same thing to my wife when we watched the protests in Wisconsin and Michigan as well as those in Egypt and Tunisia. There and then as is the case here and now the same issues – freedom and justice – are rallying cries for those who dare to stand up against tyranny, oppression, a lack of economic opportunity, and fairness in how the good things that are earned by hard work, investment, and innovation in a just society are distributed to the public in order to promote, as the founders put it, “the public good.”
We may cheer the protesters, but it is no longer enough. Protests seldom result in change unless they are accompanied – as was the case in Egypt and Tunisia – by a peaceful revolutions not challenged by tanks, armies, and guns. We only need look to Libya for hard evidence of what happens when peaceful protests are met with weapons instead of words.
In America we have no time and no stomach for revolution. What we do have is the vote. If the election of Barack Obama proved nothing else, it proved that our country embraces progressive change when it is accompanied by an inspired vision based on freedom, justice, and the American Way of Life.
That President Obama has been somewhat of a disappointment was and is to be expected. After all, the right is much better at messaging than we are. They spread fear and cultural division through their Fox propaganda and radio talk show machine, and they pay self-righteous politicians to repeat it. Look around. Can you honestly say that the “party of no” is interested in the quality of your life? When the Speaker of the House says “taxes are off the table” and the leaders of both houses on the Republican side say they want to shut down the government and let us default on our debt, which likely will throw millions of us out of work, don’t you cringe? I do. These rich asshats do not care what it costs the country. They are not patriots. Nor are they women and men of conscience. They are schoolyard bullies who act like they should be running the school.
These bullies did everything they could to bring Obama down, from causing panic over the failed Bush economy to launching an unprecedented and unprincipled attack on the president’s patriotism, his birth, and his values, and to otherwise disrupting government in ways that led to the midterm manufactured disillusionment disaster right down to the present Congressional gridlock. They are like that bad guy in the insurance commercials, a bully who calls himself “Mayhem.” Like him, they destroy whatever they can so you buy more of what they are selling to protect yourself and your family from what they are doing to your neighborhood.
And what they are selling is the lie. The big lie.
Democrats, for the most part, are the feckless and ineffective by-standers to Mayhem’s indiscriminant destructive force. We elect people who make promises they know they won’t keep because they are largely financed by the same rich corporations who buy the votes of the opposition. In the end, nothing gets done. Nothing. Not for 95% of Americans. The other 5% continue to make the big money on Wall Street. That is the whole point. Politics is little more than a commercial distraction, something to entertain us while those who rule and who really run the country use the “freedom” they have paid for to amass even greater personal fortunes.
So this is where the corruption of American freedom and justice has brought all of us. We are a democratic people no longer defined by the common good or by individual liberty, but instead by greed, hatred, inequality, and intolerance held together not by a grand idea but instead by our lack of realistic options.
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We aren’t going to have a revolution. You know it and I know it. The Tea Party can dress up in costumes and misrepresent history, but that’s not a revolution. The smarty pants talking heads on MSNBC can express liberal outrage, John Stewart and Stephen Colbert can make fun of the circus elephants and their handlers, Noam Chomsky can continue to be right but completely irrelevant, and so on. None of that good talk will inspire a revolution, either.
We don’t really want a revolution.
For a weekend, in the name of celebrating our independence, we wave American flags, eat hot dogs, and blow things up. We openly profess our love of America and freedom and apple pie. We’ll say we wish it was always like this, and someone will once again add that if we could just find that 9/11 feeling of unity again, we could put aside our differences and solve our problems. But we’ve been hearing people say that for years.
On Tuesday, we go back to gridlock. We return to the politics of division. And who knows? By August, if the government shuts down and we default on our bills, we may find that we are in real trouble. I doubt that will happen. The business community has too much to lose if our credit goes south. Besides, money is cheap on world markets. So I’d be surprised if we shut down.
But that’s not the real issue. That’s part of the circus sideshow that we have mistaken for reality. The antics of elephants and donkeys performed to patriotic tunes while the rich get richer and the poor lose their unemployment insurance.
So what’s the solution? I wish I knew for sure. I am a hedgehog by nature, but lately I’ve become more appreciative of the wisdom of the fox. It seems to me that the one thing we should know, the one thing we can all agree on if we just pause long enough to think about it, is that freedom and justice are worth whatever it takes to reclaim them.
It is a freedom “to” that is balanced by a freedom “from.” It’s a “freedom to” that is classically liberal and therefore all about an individual’s liberty to pursue self-determination relatively unencumbered by government. It is “freedom from” other individuals – say, the rich - and corporations treading on our individual liberties. I agree with one of my Republican pals, who put it this way: “your freedom to swing your arm ends at my nose.” Yes, exactly! But thanks to thirty years of Republican propaganda and the Roberts’ court, my nose is broken and the right is still swinging at it. That has to change.
Reclaiming freedom and justice is also about remaking an American government that actually does the real work of American governing. To do that means electing officials who, in addition to whatever else they believe will help their constituents, are rededicated to the one idea that all of the founders agreed on: “assent … to laws that promote the public good.” It also means electing officials at all levels who agree to do the will of the vast majority of the American people: raise taxes on the rich, end the loopholes that allow corporations to pay nothing or next to nothing, and making laws that protect us from oil spills, mining hazards, toxic chemicals, genetically modified food, unreasonable corporate profits, defective products and unethical practices.
We don’t need a revolution. What we need is a change from the way things are to a place, to a country, that lives up to its own ideals.
It really is all about freedom and justice and the American Way of Life. And it is about time we stood up for it.
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