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Harvey - The Spirit
Of Independence, Revisited
By Diane Harvey
merak@sedona.net
7-3-2

At a moment in our history when attention is almost entirely focused on a temporary external enemy, stubborn attempts to continue rudely pointing a finger toward the permanent internal enemy are, in the natural way of these things, immediate targets for reactionary growls and snarls and gnashings of teeth. All over the country, knees are supposed to be jerking in perfect rhythmic synchronization to our martial marching orders, as minds are simultaneously dutifully emptied of rational thought for the duration of the hostilities. And because we are now promised War Without End, the subtext of the shrill angry noise emanating from Washington is that we had better be prepared to remain in abject uniform obedience to governmental dictation- forever- "Or else".

On the occasion of Independence Day, we therefore had better remember just what it was we were originally celebrating independence from, and to reconsider certain cogent warnings from those whose lives and thoughts we are presumably celebrating. Because according to their own words- which no one will hear proclaimed in public- we would be far more appropriately holding funeral ceremonies than setting off fireworks. No politician would dare say aloud today what earlier leading thinkers had to say about certain vitally important and now excruciatingly touchy subjects. The following thoughts are in effect utterly taboo, considered impossible, and shunned in the light of day: even, or especially, in the light of Independence Day.

"When all government ...in little as in great things... shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power; it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another, and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated." -- Thomas Jefferson

It is necessary adamantly to refuse the increasingly intimidating demands from Washington for perpetual, enthusiastic, uncritical approval of their policies. Many of us will decline to dance to this urgently throbbing drumbeat, however much we are told that our attendance is mandatory. We recognize our obligation at present to worry more about the everlasting internal enemy to liberty, even while keeping watch for whatever external variety may rise to various occasions.

"It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of citizens and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. The freemen of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle. We revere this lesson too much ... to forget it." -- James Madison

Ah, but here we are, so very far from it. We no longer revere this lesson too much to forget it; we have forgotten it as completely as if it never existed. We no longer even collectively understand, let alone believe in, the fundamental principle behind the establishment of this nation. This idea nevertheless demands continual restating, even though, or better yet because, it echoes mournfully in a near perfect vacuum of forgetfulness. And that astonishing idea is that all governments are always dangerous, and that the citizenry must therefore be resolutely protected from them, at all times and under all conditions. Ours was meant to be the first government that had the insight to thoroughly arm itself against- itself.

"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries *by a government*, which we might expect in a country *without government*, our calamities are heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer." -- Thomas Paine

If governments were individuals, they would all be locked up by now in maximum-security prisons as dangerous repeat offenders. But since governments are amorphous, and constantly spreading themselves around in multitudes of elected and appointed particles, they are quite difficult to trap and arrest. What,s worse, many of the more urbane governments also do the odd morsel of good here and there, as a cost-effective way to entrench favored particles. And as villainous as governments are by nature, the crumbs they drop always gain them a strong measure of devoted cupboard love. But even the occasional good they do is so inherently dubious that an armed guard must accompany it at all times. Our particular armed guard is called the Constitution of the United States of America. At the moment professional thugs have overpowered it, and its original weapons are being systematically removed, with the staunch approval of a crowd of frightened citizens looking on.

"The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of the people." -- Justice William O. Douglas

All governments, at all times, are genetically predisposed to go straight to hell. The history of the human race attempting to create and preserve decent governments: read it and weep. In our country, in our times, the archetypal downhill devolutionary spiral is playing out as usual, but faster than ever before. There is nothing new or difficult to understand in this same old pattern of good beginnings, followed by a slow steady evisceration of the original energy, which then speeds up toward The End. This continues until the sleepy populace wakes up one day to discover itself entirely inside a cage, bereft of all power of any kind, and the government entirely outside, heavily armed and roaming around on the loose. We are pretty much there now, except that the public in general is still cheering the government on, its short attention span being carefully directed elsewhere at all times, as the final walls of the people,s penultimate pen are being erected.

"Never could an increase of comfort or security be a sufficient good to be bought at the price of liberty." -- Hillaire Belloc

"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression: for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach unto himself." -- Thomas Paine

Whenever they meet, whether casually or by clandestine appointment, greed and the lust for power routinely murder virtue. After all, such profoundly opposing forces cannot occupy the same space at the same time. When entrenched worldly authority crosses paths with the common good, the common good is consistently left bleeding in the gutter. This is the pattern throughout history so far, yet we nevertheless continue behaving as if it comes as a shocking surprise.

"Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent." -- H. L. Mencken

The winners of our elections are normally the morally ruined victors of a long series of expensive and ferocious ego competitions. The exceptions to this are historically so noteworthy we practically worship them, rather than having the good sense to demand a system that selects for wise and honest servants in the first place.

"The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money." -- Alexis de Tocqueville

What good does it do us now that our revered Founding Fathers, for instance, were so nobly rational and so inspired by the divine spirit of independence? The memory of brilliant leadership in the past is only useful if such a standard is energetically applied to the present. The very last thing the founders of our nation had in mind was to be the nearly the first and last of their kind. They meant to generate a very long unbroken line of equally self-sacrificing servants of the people- not to stand frozen in memory as the tragic monuments to lost possibilities they have in fact become.

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote." -- Benjamin Franklin
 
By now we have accepted a system of electing officials that positively enforces natural selection for sheer rapacity. At the same time, we still manage to be perennially surprised and aghast at the inevitable results. What was called for, as the very basis of a democratic system, was not eternal disgust, but eternal vigilance. Vigilance is a concept no longer even remotely understood as it was originally meant. Try to explain what it actually means and most people will become immediately terrified at the seditious nonsense they are hearing. Such is the profound success of the forces of materialism in slowly devouring the inner spirit of the United States of America. They have had freedom and justice for all on the run for a very long time.
 
"I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which have already bid defiance to the laws of our country."---Thomas Jefferson 1812
 
The long, slow, fatal hollowing out of our nation over generations is the direct result of the abdication of all sense of responsibility in maintaining the spirit of liberty by the majority of its citizens. Liberty is by now hopelessly confused in the average mind with the economics of unbridled greed, and with the continued unruffled rule by prevailing vested interests. As a country, we no longer know or care about the difference between fighting for the principles of freedom and fighting for corporate profits. We were warned about this all the way along the incremental downhill road, but we never once listened.
 
"Corporations have been enthroned.... An era of corruption in high places will follow and the money power will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people until wealth is aggregated in a few hands . . . and the Republic is destroyed." --Abraham Lincoln
 
No generation of citizens has had the spiritual courage to rebel in any useful numbers against the insidious corrosiveness of corporate greed, which was present from the very beginning as the seed of our eventual destruction. Corporations continually made us an offer, decade after decade, that we didn,t refuse. By now, the interests of multinational profiteers have thoroughly permeated every aspect of national life, from the military to the educational system to the actual self-image we have of ourselves as a country. We took their product interests as a worthy substitute for liberty, handing over the reins of government in exchange for steady jobs and steady comforts, as if there was no other way to invent a living for ourselves. All along we ignored what we were doing, through endless rationalizations, by looking the other way, and by pretending we were not really doing what we were doing.
 
"All governments are more or less combinations against the people. . .and as rulers have no more virtue than the ruled. . . the power of government can only be kept within its constituted bounds by the display of a power equal to itself, the collected sentiment of the people." -- Benjamin Franklin Bache
 
We have not been forced at gunpoint, against our collective will, to give up the principles of the Constitution. The spirit of our nation has not been stolen from us: we have ourselves willingly, and increasingly eagerly, generation after generation, exchanged it for temporal material comforts, a sense of security, and the freedom not to be bothered with the difficulties and sacrifices of effective self-rule. We took the easy way out, and now we are living with and in the inevitably degenerate results. Throughout our history, we have been told exactly what was happening, in plainest English, but we have never yet cared enough to renounce our lazy materialism and fearful insecurity for the responsibilities of genuine freedom.
 
"We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others, the same word many mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name - liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names - liberty and tyranny." -- Abraham Lincoln
 
Even the self-sacrifice of several generations of brave young people along the way has not shamed us into resurrecting the dormant principles they died hoping to preserve. We are at present not the free citizens of a noble Republic but, by and large, merely the hypnotized consumers of incredibly wasteful lifestyles- and these two choices never were and never will be compatible. We have collectively severed all ties with the original idea behind the United States of America, in favor of the all-encompassing paradigm-parody offered by corporate government. We have entirely failed to maintain the principles of a democratic system in the face of the forces of greed, fear, and materialism that inevitably oppose it. The idea of the Republic persists here and there, but the Republic does not. We are merely carrying on in the decaying remains of the body of principles for which it stood.
 
"This is a government of the people, by the people and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations." - President Rutherford B. Hayes
 
We hire to represent us the very embodiments of everything most of us say we don,t like personally in a human being. We elect those who are rigorously trained to hide everything they are and think, lest we see the real person. We hire those who speak in bone-wearying platitudes so as not to offend anyone with actual living thought. We hire those who have been the deftest in taking sticky money, festooned with invisible ties that bind, from the very beginning of their careers, in order to be elected at all. Then we are told to refer to this buying-and-selling of cheap consciences as "free and fair elections". No oxymoron could be more moronic.
 
"Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods." -- H.L. Mencken
 
"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule--and both commonly succeed, and are right... The United States has never developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an intelligentsia really intelligent. Its history is simply a record of vacillations between two gangs of frauds." --- H. L. Mencken
 
When finally succeeding to high office, these poor prize-winning egotists, more often than not entirely owned and operated by the forces of corporate greed, are forced to try to act under the terrific strain of pretending to work for the good of the people. Yet the actual relationship between a people and a government is almost always like the relationship between a naïve, gullible woman and an experienced, successful rogue with serious predation on his mind. The results are predictable, no matter how many history books are written spelling this out for the benefit of hapless posterity. In each new generation, the woman continually falls for it, and the rogue continually helps himself.
 
"The politician attempts to remedy the evil by increasing the very thing that caused the evil in the first place: legal plunder." -- Frederick Bastiat
 
There are many understandable fears lurking behind this year's celebration of independence. We all have so much more than usual weighing on our hearts and minds. First and foremost is the safety and security of those we love. Yet security and safety have many guises and levels and meanings, and behind the obvious concerns that are preying on us all, there exists a terrible underlying reality which will not be wished away. Having an external enemy again is not a cure for what has ailed us from the beginning. Our nation's outward enemies have come and gone, and still we have continued to fall further and further away from any resemblance to our original noble principles. Indeed, the very concept that nobility in political life ever existed at all is widely disbelieved.
 
Those citizens whose chief concern is ever-increasing secrecy in government and the generalized corruption of the entire system are looked upon as eccentric at best, and as traitors to the cause at worst. To be a vocal traitor to the cause of unregulated multinational corporate profit and secret government operations is becoming more than an unpopular attitude: it is becoming dangerous. Those who strenuously object to living in the deadly levels of pollution blithely accepted as necessary for business as usual are beginning to be labeled "soft terrorists". Those who point out the absurdly obvious yet officially fanatically secret aerosol operations in the atmosphere, which adversely affect us all, are not only marginalized but viciously attacked for their troubles on behalf of their oblivious fellow beings.
 
The list of similar accumulated governmental offences against the citizenry of this country, and the spirit of liberty and participatory democracy itself, is very long and still lengthening dramatically. The angry mockery of a multitude of fear-ridden adherents to the American Corporate Way, toward all those who have not bought into it, is steadily worsening. As tensions in the world increase, and as the barbarism of greed which has been funding our overweening materialism is being exposed for what it always was, the people of America are being forced to choose sides as never before. We must decide once and for all whether or not we know what freedom really means, and what the difference is between runaway materialism and the democratic process. We must decide once and for all whether or not we trust secret military, government and corporate operations as a reasonable form of government.
 
Either we renounce once and for all the pretense of being a functioning Republic, and freely embrace the Brave New World of technological global fascism- or we don't. But let us not openly accept the pretense that what we are celebrating at present in any way factually resembles the original idea behind the United States of America. Because that would be a lie so shameful that no one with the slightest understanding of and genuine reverence for our history would ever say it, no matter what.





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