| Monday, December 8, 2003 |
01:42 - Talk about freedom not being free...
http://WWW.nicedoggie.net/archives/003455.html#003455
|
(top)  |
I'm continuing my long series of e-mails with that person I mentioned some time ago, dancing ever so gently around the fact that he and I are about as politically diametrically opposed as two people can be. I have only to read his online journal (in which he links with goggle-eyed sycophancy to this piece of Eric Blumrich-spewed drivel) to know where he stands; he as yet doesn't know where I come down, because he only knows me through a pseudonym, and I fear that should the veneer slip, the game will be well and truly up.
My missives to him are always long, carefully thought out, and studiously apolitical. Every attempt he makes to draw me into a snicker of agreement at Bush's stupidity or the evil of the born-again Christian South, I deflect it by subtly changing the subject. Sometimes I can't resist a tiny little dig at the more outrageous of his claims (such as that he is risking arrest and imprisonment for the very crime of disagreeing with the administration, to which I said merely, "Yeah, I'm sure they're casing you out even as we speak. Sigh."), but so far the extent of my attempts at wearing him down have been of a much more roundabout nature.
To wit, I've been setting little rhetorical traps. I let him go off on a tirade about how stupid the people are around him, how ignorant they must be to have these red-white-and-blue bumper stickers and to actually be proud of the fact that the President came from their home state, or how benighted and unworthy of fair consideration their views obviously must be. And then I respond by saying simply that I make it a point not to judge people so quickly. That every human being's life is a story, full of years and years of decisions and rational choices and love and fear and joy and death and dreams. I talked about how I deal with maddening SUV drivers on cell phones: I remind myself that some woman driving a $50,000 SUV has to have arrived at that financial position through some means or other, and that means is unlikely to be that of barking idiocy. You don't get to drive Cadillacs wearing suede suits by being a feckless moron; you don't get to pull down a six-figure salary by accident. And in any case, who among us hasn't made the odd mistake in traffic-- pulled out into an intersection briefly, mistakenly, a few feet before stomping on the brake upon realization that it was the left-turn arrow that went green and not the straight-through light? I give each person the benefit of the doubt, at least until I can determine more fully whether the person is really in fact a dunce and unworthy of my attention-- unless I'm in their blind spot.
Thus do I sow the idea that to dismiss huge swathes of the population as too stupid to live is just a trifle contemptuous. There's more rationality in the world than one might think who sees the majority of the country laid out against one's political leanings, and far more people are rational on the micro level, seen up close, than are irrational. Henry Rollins put it this way: "The powers that be, that make up all these TV shows, are under this weird misconception that we're stupid. They think you're *dumb*, they think I'm *dumb*-- that's just so much bullshit. No one's *dumb*, man. They just get dumb media. This being 1998 in this country, you can't be dumb-- if you're dumb you're dead. You just can't even hack it if you're stupid. You know? You can be *stupid*, but you're gonna be reeeal tough, to still be alive. If you've done eight years working Burger King, you may be a dumb motherfucker, but you're one tough sonuvabitch."
And it may be working. He's agreeing with the things I say, finding reason in them, and no hostility or evil. If I come at this from a few other tacks-- like, say, the ones Bill Whittle uses in laying his foundations of credibility-- I'll eventually have tricked him into believing the tenets of what I believe, at which point I'll break the horrible news.
I hope he'll take it well.
Anyway, in the meantime, the ammunition builds itself up with hardly any human labor necessary. BC at the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler winds up and takes a big swing at the socialist paradise that is 35-hour-workweek France-- but his work is already done for him, by this article which demonstrates just what a travesty it's all been. If anyone doubts the monstrous nature of the State as a beast that grows to feed itself all the more the larger and more powerful it becomes, we've got the proof right in front of us: the French PM has said himself that France is on a one-way course to becoming a vast Holiday on the Riviera for the well-to-do... but a hideous totalitarian wasteland for the lower-class plebs who were supposed to be the beneficiaries of socialism in the first place.
Though France has gotten the most attention for its short week, it has company in Europe. Since the 1940s, Europeans have expanded their annual time off by about one week, said Lawrence Jeffrey Johnson, chief economist of employment trends for the International Labour Organization, a branch of the United Nations.
In the United States, a 40-hour workweek is standard and the government doesn't regulate vacation time.
"The U.S. labor market is much more flexible that way, to allow people to work out individual accommodations in how they want to organize their lives," said Paul Swaim, an economist specializing in labor market issues for the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
And you know what? I had never before even considered an idea like "the government regulating vacation time". Absurd! What business does the government have in telling my company when it can (and must) bar me from working? Lately I've been thinking a lot about how I demand the right to fail because without it there is no right to succeed... but it seems that in France, even the right to succeed-- the right to put in the hours you want to put in, to go above and beyond duty, to work two or three jobs, to write a book in one's off-hours, the right to claw your way up through your own teeth-gritted efforts-- is denied its citizens. Isn't that the worst of both worlds?
In France, says the article, nobody even wants to work what extra hours they're allowed to, because earning more money just gets them taxed at ridiculously high levels. So why bother? Never mind that this is tantamount to the State punishing the achievements of the best, the brightest, and the hardest-working-- the ones whose efforts have given us the automobile, the airplane, the transistor, and a million other advances that could never have come about if not for the allure of monetary reward and personal acclaim for reaching beyond the State's expectation of a person's mathematically-calculated ideal work output.
That's what freedom is. Not merely the ability to travel from place to place without having one's papers inspected everywhere. Not merely the ability to speak one's mind in the village square without fearing the Gestapo. Not merely the ability to cast a vote in a public election. I'm talking about much more visceral, psychological, human concepts. The things we don't even think about as "basic human rights" anymore, because they're so deeply ingrained into what we expect out of life.
Freedom is the ability to try a new career just because it sounds fun.
Freedom is the ability to watch whatever TV shows we want, without having to worry about Beavis being stopped from saying "Fire" or South Park from making fun of Mohammed because of some pressure group donning the mantle of the Offended-American.
Freedom is the desire to own a house and a plot of land, to build a deck out back, and to build a fire in the fireplace while scoffing at rumors of attempts by the city government to fine and tax those things away.
Freedom is the ability to train for a private pilot's license, volunteer for the Civil Air Patrol to do drug interdiction at the San Diego border zone (freeing up law enforcement to handle anti-terrorism activities), strap on a .44 revolver, and fly to another State just so you can enjoy sitting on the tarmac in your own piece of sovereign territory, immune from the gun-control laws of whatever State you landed in (until, at least, you set foot on the asphalt).
And freedom is the ability to obtain the means to pay for all these things by putting in the effort of two-and-a-half European workers in their proletarian paradises; pounding away on overtime hours and in second jobs into the wee hours, working evenings and weekends and holidays, not merely putting in the time, but excelling at making new things to contribute to the employer's financial well-being, and in so doing creating out of thin air the inventions that will define the technological advancements of the coming decades.
Sylvain M'Boussa, 30, was recently leaving the "Big Sky" mall in Ivry, a gritty suburb on the outskirts of Paris, with his wife and small children in tow. They had shopped at Carrefours, the French answer to Wal-Mart. M'Boussa, who works as a dispatcher for a messenger service, said the short workweek is great for his family life but disastrous for his wallet.
"I can't save money. I'm thinking of leaving France" to seek better opportunities in Canada or elsewhere, he said. "There, maybe you wouldn't get good health care or pension benefits, but at least for those who want to succeed, there are real opportunities. Here, you're just blocked."
Leaving aside the remark about "good health care", and omitting to note that Canada's prime minister flew to the US for his own surgery last year, and that all the prepaid health care in France's non-air-conditioned hospitals could do nothing to stem the deaths of 15,000 elderly citizens during the course of the heat wave this past summer...
Canada's a place that gets it-- at least, more so than France does. But Canada would do well to remember that, as France's example so vividly illustrates, once one feeds the Beast, it only grows larger; it never stays static or shrinks once its job is done. It must justify its own existence, and once given the tether it so badly desires, it never voluntarily comes back to the post where it's tied.
It's so easy to treat a defense of this concept of "freedom" as the simple, jingoistic rantings of a Montana survivalist. Yet how else to respond to such clear and obvious vindications of that very conviction?
As Whittle says,
Those that fear American power in the future might stop to consider that if current trends continue, we will again have no need to go forth into the world, because what good ideas that do come from outside our borders and they are legion are cooked up by individuals who almost universally want to come to America because here we admire and respect innovation, here ingenuity is rewarded in cash! rather than strangled and buried under ever-thickening, Kudzu-like mats of bureaucracy.
Its like oil loading itself on tankers and making their way to Galveston, or entire counties of prime farmland cutting themselves into sod and stowing away in container ships, to be opened and unfurled in Long Beach harbor complete with sheep and shepherds.
We've got something good going on here, and I'd hate to see it allowed to wither because we'd somehow managed to convince ourselves that the Beast was friendly after all.
|
|
Brian Tiemann
