Taking a Stand for Freedom

"Let’s hope that as talk radio hosts find time for reflection, and commentators step back to take a deep breath, they will recall that one of the most hopeful aspects of the current conservative revival is its reclamation of the American constitutionalist tradition. That tradition is anchored even beyond the Constitution, of course, in the Declaration of Independence. And that document, let’s not forget, proclaims that, 'Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends [life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness], it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.'

An American conservatism that looks back to 1776 cannot turn its back on the Egyptian people. We should wish them well—and we should work to help them achieve as good an outcome as possible."

from The Weekly Standard

The above was penned by Bill Kristol, a man I normally have very little time for.  In fact, on more than one occasion, in the heat of intoxicated argument, I have demanded he be brought before the Hague and tried for war crimes (how is that for championing civil discourse?).  However, a call to honor the commitment to liberty and the revolutionary courage of our forefathers, that I can get behind.  It is bizarre that self proclaimed standard-bearers on both sides of our debilitating political discourse always take these calls for rhetorical consistency, for a return to core ideas and values, as acts of heresy.

I also have to show a little begrudging respect to the libertarian Republican house members who stood by their convictions and voted against the PATRIOT ACT renewal.  There is a lot I do not like about the tea party movement, but if just a few of these men and women continue to vote their conscience the dynamic inside the beltway may be better for it.  It will surely give their benefactors a shock to the system.

Did anyone look up from the chip bowl long enough before the supergame to witness this madness:

It was a very surreal experience.  Not the heavy handed patriotism laced into our media/sporting events, <911 I have made my peace with that.  It was the total strangeness of having soldiers and aged athletes perform a cold reading of what is essentially a revolutionary manifesto.  

The Constitution is our founding document, it codifies basic rights and freedoms and puts in place protections for those rights and freedoms.  It does not sound that odd when read aloud by school children.  The Declaration of Independence is a document of a different stripe.  Its lines call out an occupying power on its many grievances.  The words "tyrant" and "despotism" appear to great effect.  It demands certain rights with the explicit threat that if these rights are withheld they will be taken by force.

No matter how dryly one reads "it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security." from a teleprompter it will still carry a touch of menace, that goes double if one is surrounded by uniformed soldiers on the deck of an aircraft carrier.
  

The Night of the Whore-hopper - 2010 edition

"There are too many whores in politics these days, but the night of the whore-hopper is coming. Many will be called, and 9 out of 10 will be chosen-- to be herded down the long slippery ramp and into the bottomless sheep dip, where they will wallow and struggle helplessly (some of them drowning) until their bodies are disinfected by powerful acids, vapors, and the fumes of terrible lice medicines that will fry their brains like bacon left too long in the microwave....

The end will not come quickly, like it says in Revelations 22:7. First will come the shit-rain, then the sheep dip, and after that, the terrible night of the whore-hopper, which might last 1,000 years." - HST - Better Than Sex

Well it is going to be interesting at the very least.  Quick, totally unfounded, predictions: 

Republicans pick up 45-50 House seats and 9 Senate seats.  Rand Paul becomes Mitch McConnell's worst nightmare.  Joe Lieberman holds the Democratic caucus hostage for the next two years.  Neither party learns a damn thing and double down on idealogical short sightedness.  Discouraged, voter turn-out drops to 20% in 2012.  Politicians rejoice as we continue our decent down the slippery ramp and into the dreaded sheep dip.  

The June 4th Incident

Like many important events of the 1980s, my experience of the Tiananmen Square massacre results from news reports preempting my Saturday morning cartoons. I'm at my grandparents' house where I stay most Saturdays, it's a warm day in early summer and I probably have a million outdoor activities planned that will be postponed for another day as I sit unmoving, transfixed by the events unfolding on television in place of my beloved Kidd Video. I'm a middle class kid in the suburbs of New Jersey. I'm in no way ignorant of current events or other cultures but the world beyond my everyday experience, let alone my national border, is still distant and ethereal, unconnected to my daily life, but these images of horrifying, darkness shrouded violence will bring the reality of the outside world cascading in to my grandmother's front room.

The post-gulf war technology that journalists wield today didn't exist then so when the PRC cleared international press from the square and cut the satellite feeds the reporting was plunged into darkness. Frantic reporters shouted down scratchy telephone lines over shadowy pieces of smuggled footage and repeated images taken the weeks before of the young protesters, sunlight on their faces, with no knowledge of the horrors to come. I know that the image from the following morning of the brave solitary figure standing against a line of tanks is the iconic image of the massacre for a culture founded on the cult of the individual. For me, however, it was the images shot weeks before the crack down, of a group of people larger than any I had yet seen, all standing together, smiling in their conviction, making their mere presence a statement of political intent, their occupation of physical space a defiant gesture, locked arm and arm singing out with one voice a song I would later learn was The Internationale. These images locked in stark and tragic juxtaposition with the crackling telephone line reporting of violent repression, mass chaos and raging fires punctuated by automatic weapon fire and desperate shouting are the images that I carried with me from June 4, 1989 into adulthood.

My faith in governments to protect their people and to enact the will of those people above their own interests has never recovered from that day. It was torn to tatters not only by the oppressive acts of the PRC but by the pitiful actions of my own government which was willing to put its own political and economic gains ahead of the lives of young libertines who had naively looked to the US as a beacon of freedom and justice. I have since found myself in a number of strange and tense protest situations, from the pitiful group of fifteen that shouted in vain in the park against our university's inhumane treatment of animals, to the anti-WEF protests just after 9/11 where the percussive hum helicopter rotors drowned out the chanting and we all knew that we stood in the sights of a hundred sniper rifles; or the marches against invasion of Iraq that saw my girlfriend and I constantly scrambling from under the hooves of trampling horses. In all these mad and dangerous situations I've always found a strange calm of conviction and it may be that I believe that in my resistance I owe this much and more to a group of brave young students that I watched be massacred by their own government now twenty years ago.

I'm a pretty rational person, but I have a rather irrational faith in the power of of people united in spirit to stand up against the forces of oppression. The evidence that street protests in the Untied States are capable of effecting social and political change is not strong. The current political and media climates in this county do not suffer the street level activist well. It often appears that this form of political expression is antiquated and futile, but I have always held the conviction that for an individual to turn their physical presence into on a statement of conviction, to have their occupation of physical space be an act of resistance is an integral part of the democratic process and essential to the maintenance of liberty in a society. I think this conviction is grounded in lessons I learned sitting in my grandmother's front room watching a million brave Chinese citizens stand firm against oppression twenty years ago today.