freedom

in a week that has seen me get giddy with excitement and anticipation one night and crushed and dejected the next night. (ok that is me overstating it a little ... well quite a lot. though events of the week left me a little disappointed i am not going to inflict on the world my version of pink floyd's the wall.... Actually that might not be true either.....)

anyway enough guff also during this week i read this piece in the new statesman from terry eagleton. (actually the piece was written january 31st - i am just behind on my reading...)

"All the papers have noted the number of times Bush used the word "freedom" in his inaugural speech, or sometimes "liberty". (Who said he was semantically impoverished?) He was right to hammer it home, since "freedom" is the most usefully ambiguous term in the political lexicon. It has both a high-minded spiritual sense and a low-minded material one, so you can appear to mean the first while intending the second. Freedom is a precious human right . . . and a rationale for incinerating small children. The lost souls of Guantanamo thirst for it, and small farmers are bankrupted in its name. The language of freedom is one of the few to be spoken with equal fluency by archbishops and casino owners, oilmen and Oxford philosophers. No one is against it, which is exactly what is so vacuous about it. What will destroy us is not mean-minded materialism, but visionary idealism."

i was struck not only by how true this was but also how depressed it made me.
as a left leaning progressive i have often gotten into mel gibson mode and cried "freedom" but so often the freedoms i am chomping at the mouth about are not always the ones that others are craving or frankly needing.

in order to cheer myself up i pulled down all the respect party posters i saw along brick lane wednesday night as i went for a beigel.
in truth it did make me feel much better.