Land of the free
Back in
the USA and it doesn’t matter which side of the tracks you grew up on, everyone
here seems to like Bruce Springsteen and he has just been touring to rave
reviews. He sings a lot about struggles and battlers and working against the
odds. Although The Boss is famous for keeping ticket prices down, rich people
love him, with some paying thousands of dollars for corporate boxes at his concerts.
And the words of his songs are on bumper stickers and tee-shirts and quoted by
presidents and senators and connect with the rich and the poor like.
Paradoxically some people become richer and more powerful by identifying with
and telling the stories of people who are poor. How does that work? Is it that
in our depths we all feel a poverty and through vehicles like Springsteen’s songs
we somehow feel known, feel the essence of love somewhere in ourselves and for
a time, maybe just a moment, something feels true and timeless. And there is a preciousness
about this and maybe it is the song or maybe it pries an opening in our hearts,
but whatever it is, it touches us. I guess that is what an artist does, connects
us to ourselves and frees us to sense more, who we are.
Speaking
of free, songbird Beyoncé does a heartfelt version of Lee Greenwood, “Proud To Be An American”. A
couple of lines that stand out for me are:
And
I’m proud to be an American,
where at least I know I’m free.
And I won’t forget the men who died,
who gave that right to me.
I am not
sure which men died to give America its freedom, maybe Beyoncé is thinking of the slaves who died so that by 1965
when national voting legislation was passed, there would still be some African
Americans left to vote, not that many young black men, one in three of whom can
expect to spend time in a prison during their lives, would sense that much
freedom as they abseil up America’s level playing field. Maybe Beyoncé is singing about the young Americans who are
sitting in a drone flight centre in New Mexico, killing people whose families
adhere to an old testament religion that says if a family member is killed by an
aggressor they must never, ever, ever leave that death unavenged.
"Did we just kill a kid?" asked the man sitting next to the drone
pilot.
"Yeah,
I guess that was a kid," the pilot replied.
"Was
that a kid?" they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.
Then,
someone they didn't know answered, someone sitting in a military command center
somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. "No. That was a
dog," the person wrote.
They
reviewed the scene on video. A dog on two legs?
So I guess
young men will be fighting for Beyoncé’s
freedom until infinity. Go figure that. But the irony for me is that the USA is
one of the most unfree places I visit and almost everything done in the name of
freedom seems to end up as one more way to be unfree.
For me this is evident from the minute you land at the airport to the moment
you leave.
“Remove everything from your pockets sir and
enter the x-ray booth and place your feet on the designated area”
“What’s that in your pocket sir?”
“Oh.... ah..... that’s a handkerchief”
“I said
remove everything from your pockets
sir......remove the handkerchief from your pocket sir and hold it above your
head”
I remove my dirty hanky, hold it above my head
like I am a hostage and the x-ray circles and whirrs around me.
“What’s that on your wrist sir?”
“That’s a wrist watch officer”
“Kowalski, check the man’s watch!”
Kowalski inspects the plastic watch as though it
was a piece of dog turd strapped to my wrist. “Okay sir you are clear to go.”
In how many
free countries of the world does the freedom to own handguns that can blow a
hole in a person as big as a football or assault rifles that can pass right
through a car, result in so many people getting killed for just waking up? Where
else do rich people have arguments about the freedom people who are poor have
to bad health care? I guess it’s a kind
of freedom that can be traded as a commodity. How is it that having more rules
to protect the weak, more government support and higher taxes to fund more health
care, education and freedom of choice for a greater number of people can be
seen as a lack of freedom?
My colleague
Steve is from Arizona, he has the square jaw and youthful good looks of a
comic book superhero and he makes lots of "awl " sounds when he talks
guess that is why they call it a drawl.
Steve tells me that the USA is the greatest country in the history of the
world. He is serious. I asked him about the Roman Empire that lasted 1000 years
more or less and covered most of what is now Europe, and he looked at me
blankly in a kind of George Bush 9/11 moment. So I say, what about
the British Empire that was around 300 years and covered more than one third of
the world and produced unsurpassed riches from the Commonwealth? And that I
think America’s time as a great power will be lucky to last for a hundred years
before they go bankrupt and lumber around the world like one of those 60's Chevy
Belair’s, faux luxury, expensive, high maintenance, best in a straight line, hard to park but kind of stylish in a nostalgic
way. And then I am thinking of the cars of Cuba.
Sounding a bit like
Mohamed Ali, Steve said “Of course America is the greatest country, they beat
the British........... twice” and I said that didn't mean anything, and anyway
who won in Vietnam and did that make the Vietnamese the greatest nation that
had ever been? Steve looked at me and I could see the wheel was still spinning
but the hamster had left in confusion like
Steve had just been told that he had won a million dollars but only had 60
seconds to live and in that moment I had deep compassion for Steve.
I am in Washington
DC for a conference, and on the first day attend a presentation on access to
markets for poor producers which is facilitated by a white South African woman.
The audience of about twenty-five is about one third Africans and a smattering
of others from the Subcontinent and South America and the rest Caucasians. At
one point the presenter was referring to a dynamic within communities called
the ‘tall poppy syndrome”, which as we know in ‘Anglosphere’ refers to the
tendency among some cultures to resent or attack and generally ‘cut down to
size’ those who show talent or achievements. In her broad South African accent she talked
about this “tall puppy syndrome”......... I looked around the room and saw that
this had the attention of even the sleepiest of the Africans, they may never
have heard of a poppy, but they sure know what a puppy is. And then the
presenter elaborated, saying that the people in some cultures “cut the heads off
the tall puppies”; the Africans at the back shot up like meer cats. They had no
idea how headless puppies and the alleviation of poverty fit together but she
sure as hell had their attention now.
I am
thinking that in a way we all need to have an environment in which to be tall
poppies, to be free to flourish and flower, somehow to connect with that inner
poverty that makes us strong, kind of like the lotus in its magnificence rising
from the mud. And how we are bound together more out of our collective brokenness
than through any competitive heroics.
Later I
had dinner at Le Chaumiere in an expensive restaurant in Georgetown just up
from my hotel. I didn't realise quite how expensive it was until it was too late.
At the table just across from me sits independent Senator Joe Lieberman, formally
a Democrat, stood for Vice President in 2000, supporter of gay rights in the
military, outer of Bill Clinton during the Monica thing. And he is sitting
right there almost next to me. His hair is amazing, not a strand out of place,
like the fuzz on a grey pink tennis ball. He is with his wife, who is kind of
loud and they seem to be hosted by a guy in his early 40s, who looks very
Jewish and rich and has an attractive, slightly overweight Pamela Anderson
wife. The Jewish guy has bad posture like he is keeping his head down so as not
to be noticed, perhaps he too had heard about the tall puppy syndrome and was
playing it safe. He is wearing beautiful soft black leather shoes and no socks.
No socks in a restaurant like this, that has wine for $650.00 a bottle, means
you are very rich or in the wrong place and risk finding yourself a&se up
on the footpath. Anyway, the French red wine ordered by the guy with no socks
is not on the menu........ I looked but
in the entire restaurant it was the only one that was decanted into a crystal
carafe. Lieberman looks up at one point and at me directly, okay, I might have
been staring. I nodded, he smiled, we were mates. I paid my $100 for a glass of
sparkling water, two glasses of wine, a buffalo steak and piece of chocolate
cake and left. Characteristically I trip on the sill at the door and explode
onto the footpath outside. Might have been the wine but I am blaming my bad leg
and I did the exaggerated limp thing to keep the world in its orbit for the
foursome of silver-haired people who were just about to enter the restaurant
but are now collecting themselves and their beating hearts. Ah it’s good to be
alive.
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