I have to say that I’m not in much of a July 4th kind of mood this morning. Usually, this is the day each year when I enjoy waking up early and listening to a recitation of the Declaration of Independence that National Public Radio so ably produces annually. Hearing the words by which our founding fathers declared themselves separate and free from the tyranny of the British King George III tends to root a person in the revolutionary democratic idea that formed this nation.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to see that idea much in evidence today in America. People are especially demoralized now, by seeing that just before the holiday, the President chose to cover his Administration’s backside by commuting the jail sentence of Vice President Cheney’s right–hand man— before he had to think of either serving his sentence or turning state’s evidence on his former employer. Demoralization is an important tool in the arsenal this Administration employs to retain power in the face of record low public approval.
If people weren’t demoralized, we’d think about the implications of a commutation (and the continued talk by the President that he might still pardon I. Lewis Libby for his crimes). We'd ask about how it could be given hours after a lost appeal by the only Administration official convicted in the biggest con job ever foisted on the American people: the total invention of grounds for a foreign invasion. If we weren’t demoralized, we’d be thinking about what to do in response to this kind of outrageous slap in the face of a jury verdict and sentence.
Tony Benn, the former titan of the British Labour Party, speaks of the role of demoralization in keeping people down in Michael Moore’s new film, Sicko. Benn describes representative democracy as a way to wrest power from the small minority who hold sway over capital, bringing many of the benefits his people now enjoy, like universal health care. But if most people can be demoralized, that ideal is kept from them, Benn argues. If the people can be convinced that it doesn’t matter whether they vote, whether they do in fact rule, the rights of the population can be trammeled upon over and over.
Many of us feel demoralized, left outside the institutions of power, feeling that no matter what we do as individuals, the machine continues. We see the misuse of office, the lies, and the arrogant trampling of the Constitution that has occurred over and over during this Administration, unstopped. We see this week the kind of brash negation of even the smallest effort to seek legal redress against these lies and against the illegal stonewalling that Scooter Libby’s conviction and sentencing documented and demonstrated. As another blogger wrote this week, the President’s commutation shows that “them that’s got, shall get; them that’s not, shall lose.” Those in the cabal shall fear not, for impunity shall rule while the President does.
I guess that after this, I am getting into an Independence Day kind of mood in spite, perhaps because of it all. In the face of this kind of arrogant power grab, the words expressed by our forefathers have even more meaning than they usually do:
… that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Maybe it’s a good day to listen to and feel the power of words some quite ordinary and alienated people wrote down and then sent off to the most powerful monarchy in the world. “King George, We don’t recognize your power,” they essentially told their ruler. And they were ready to fight for their freedom.
Have a happy and a revolutionary Fourth.