“Free” Speech in das Heimatland?

28 February 2010

THESE are the times that try [our] souls. [Dubious Supreme Courts justices] and [their Republican obstructionists in Congress] will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country [and line their own pockets, at the same time]… [Casino capitalism*], like hell, is not easily conquered…

Am I being hyperbolic to thus paraphrase Thomas Paine’s (http://www.ushistory.org/Paine/crisis/c-01.htm) famous indictment of American loyalists to George III? Language, as I hope to demonstrate, is an extremely powerful tool for the propagandist, but overstatement can also backfire if not used judiciously (pun intended). However, I do not think my paraphrase is non-instructive in characterizing the growing state of fear, ignorance and authoritarianism at large in the U.S. today as exemplified by some of the peculiar rhetoric currently being popularly circulated by politicians and the media.

I happened to be in bank the Friday before the Super Bowl, and everyone was talking about who would win; after all, what else can you say about a football game? I made the casual comment that the only football game I’ve ever enjoyed watching (or watched at all, for that matter) was the one in the 1969 movie MASH, where you rooted for the cheater underdogs against the military “establishment.” I then further commented that I was far more concerned over the recent Supreme Court decision (Citizens United v. Federal Election Committee) that overturned a hundred years of precedent regarding corporate access to our political system by equating “free speech” with money.

I was surprised when the bank teller seemed to know what I was talking about. She responded by saying that we needed a “revolution.” My initial positive assessment, however, was momentary as she went on to enthusiastically discuss Scott Brown’s election to Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat and about how wonderful it was that Massachusetts was now “Republican.”

Her idea of a “revolution” is obviously drawn from the “tea-bagger” perspective, not from that of the original Tea Party.

Another word, other than “free” and “revolution,” that seems to be being strangely misused is the current national security mantra: “homeland.” Coming to the fore post-9/11 in the creation of the new federal agency, it is now repeated endlessly, and not just by the W’s and Cheney’s ranting at the world, but by the likes of Senator Feinstein (http://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction...), as well as from the White House itself (http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/homeland-security).

Admittedly, the unfortunate (and, I would argue, opportunistic) naming of the agency makes the term difficult to avoid, but it should be avoided on the part of people in public office because it is not a neutral word, having strong associations with South Africa under apartheid (http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~cale/cs201/apartheid.hist.html) as well as the rise of fascism in das Heimatland, as noted by Mickey Kaus in 2002 (http://www.slate.com/id/2066978/).

“It's a creepy, morale-sapping word,” he goes onto say, “I know I'm not alone in this -- I've heard enough grumbling from friends who don't want to be unpatriotic but can't help cringing and wondering out loud why this suddenly became a word we all had to use.”

I would think the reason is obvious enough. Das Heimatland conjures up nationalistic (read: “jingoistic”) sentiment and is useful in shouting down the reasoning opposition. It plays into public post-9/11 fears over the decline of the nation-state as a sovereign political entity in the face of boundary-less threats like Al Qaeda and encourages the lowest form of patriotism: “My country: Love it or leave it.”

And this trend has not abated under Obama. As Henri Giroux recently pointed out in truthout (http://www.truthout.org/democracy-and-threat-authoritarianism-politics-beyond-barack-obama56890), the “imperial presidency” of Bush-Cheney has not, as hoped, ended with the new administration, quoting Roger Hodge’s assertion in Harper’s Magazine (“The Mendacity of Hope” [February, 2010], pp. 7-8) that Obama’s Justice Department has claimed “sovereign immunity” in defending itself against accusations of illegal spying which amounts to a level of self-designated privilege unsurpassed even by the Bush-Cheney ‘unitary executive.’

In Giroux’s estimation, the aforementioned Supreme Court decision “provided a final step in placing the control of politics more firmly in the hands of big money and large
corporations…democracy, like everything else in American culture, was treated as a commodity and offered up to the highest bidder.” “[C]asino capitalism”* has brought us “a culture that collapses all social considerations and all notions of solidarity into the often cruel and swindle-based notions of instant gratification and individual gain.”

…or in Kaus’s words, “creepy and morale-sapping.”

So while Paine’s “sunshine soldiers and summer patriots” continue to insist (with their tea bags waving) that true patriotism is really expressed in the expansion of reactionary authoritarianism in which Giroux claims “political sovereignty is largely replaced by economic sovereignty as corporate power takes over the range of governance,” and words like ‘freedom,’ ‘revolution’ and ‘homeland’ take on a vaguely fascist resonance, standing in, at least for the time being, for that ultimate form of capitalist cheap labor (i.e., death camps), “we the people” need a rallying cry to contradict that blatant logical fallacy (after all, what is by definition less ‘free’ than $?) recently perpetrated upon us by said justices Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Scalia and Kennedy.

“No Consumerism without Democracy” comes to mind.

Victory and health, everyone!

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Ph.D. candidate at New Mexico State University in the area of Rhetoric and Professional Communication Amy Dalzell was also a national delegate to the Democratic Convention in Boston in 2004.