When I Paint My Masterpiece
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Sunday 02 July 2006
Someday,
Everything’s gonna be smooth like a rhapsody,
When I paint
My masterpiece.
– Bob Dylan
Any starting point requires that we remember that this nation which
birthed us, inspires us, blesses us, puts us to work, this nation that
challenged us to remember the original promises whenever we said the
Pledge of Allegiance all those times in school, this nation we’d all die
for, this nation we call home is, in the end, nothing more or less than an
idea.
An idea. A dream, an experiment, something sociologist Max Weber once
described as “the slow boring of hard boards,” a serious endeavor with a
good chance of success but a better chance of failure, and if the one was
to be saved from the other, there would have to be a lot of good will and
hard work and devotion to the premises that got everything started in the
first place. The lady who asked Benjamin Franklin what had been wrought
after the Constitutional Convention of 1787 got the right answer. “A
republic,” Franklin told her, “if you can keep it.”
“We the people” was a good start, if we’re talking about the premises.
No one had ever before, in all of history, bothered to lay down a national
charter with that kind of thinking in mind. “Life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness” was another original stroke. There were a dozen more at
least, ideas that have been around since time out of mind to be sure, but
ideas that no one anywhere ever used collectively and comprehensively to
define the reasons for a diverse people to stand under one flag and
salute, and mean it.
It was supposed to be a lot of things, but it was never supposed to be
easy.
That is America, or at least it was for a while. The song remains the
same, as the band once said, but we are certainly not operating off the
same ideas that marked the blueprint these last several generations, and
anyone who tries to tell you different is also trying to sell you
something. Rose-colored glasses are selling cheap these days. They’re
going for the price of a flag or a few hours of round-the-clock cable-news
talking-head pablum, and unfortunately for all of us, that’s about as
cheap as it gets in the 21st century.
Why? Because America was about a lot of things, back when it all meant
something, but there was always a virus in the matrix. George Washington
and Thomas Jefferson and the rest of the great thinkers put all the good
ideas to paper, but they also made sure the thing was hard-wired to favor
anyone with a lot of money.
It was the taxes that burned the Fathers out of neutrality, after all,
as well as the denial of commerce by the Crown. So when the revolution was
over and the smoke had cleared, the Fathers carved out a separation of
church and state, and codified free speech, and laid the groundwork for
more freedom for more people than had ever been seen before, but they also
made sure the well-to-do were going to remain thus for time out of mind.
That was fine, because they put the work in, and freedom also means
freedom to make money and be rich. Before too much time had passed, that
kind of thing was called The American Dream.
The problem, though, was the virus, which was money. Money slowly
bought
power, money slowly won elections that used to be free, money started to
be the defining reality of Congress and then the presidency, money began
writing and signing the laws, money got judges put on the Supreme Court by
the purchased aforementioned, and money made sure those judges made
decisions designed to benefit the money. Washington and Franklin would
have been horrified to see the way it started to shake out even fifty
years after they finished their work, but of course, they were gone by
then.
Two Supreme Court cases tell the story of where we’re at: Santa Clara
v.
Southern Pacific Railroad in 1886, and Buckley v. Valeo in 1976. The
first, a relatively straightforward eminent domain case, granted 14th
Amendment rights to corporations. The second declared that money spent to
influence elections is a form of Constitutionally-protected free speech.
And we roll the bones, because the 14th Amendment says, “All persons
born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction
thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they
reside,” which makes corporations exactly the same as natural-born
American humans, and further says that no state can create or enforce any
law, “which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the
United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or
property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its
jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
So corporations are the same as natural Americans, but thanks to
Buckley
v. Valeo, all the money thrown at elections and candidates and campaigns
and political parties is the same as free speech, and when massive
multinational trillion-dollar corporations throw millions at the
politicians, they do so with the same set of basic rights as the guy who
empties their trash. Except they can’t be held liable for anything,
because they’re corporations, and can hire million-dollar law firms to
defend them, and those lawyers become judges appointed by the politicians
who are bought and paid for, and it’s all perfectly legal, and that’s the
virus.
Buy the laws, buy the law-makers, and you become the law. That is the
definition of corporate freedom.
Money is why we’re in Iraq. Money is why it’s legal to spy on
Americans,
why the laws are rewritten to suit policy, why we go to war for resources,
why we torture people. It doesn’t have anything to do with safety or
national security or anything else except money. Foreign policy decisions
these days amount to little more than business deals writ large and with
body counts to boot, but the latter is always folded in somewhere beneath
the bottom line.
These are the Augean stables that have to be cleaned. It doesn’t have
a
damned thing to do with George W. Bush or any of his merry men. That pack
is a symptom, merely a cell, a string of proteins holding the genetic code
for the virus that is everywhere, and it was there before they showed up,
and will still be there when that pack is gone.
There is an election in November, which is good, because there are
some
people in Congress who know all this, and if it all shakes out the right
way, those people will be in a position to make some changes. It’s good
because elections still matter, even with the corporate ownership of our
votes. It’s good because the idea may have been paved over with a hundred
miles of money and corruption and greed, but that doesn’t mean the idea is
dead.
The nation which birthed us, inspires us, blesses us, puts us to work,
the nation that challenged us to remember the original promises whenever
we said the Pledge of Allegiance all those times in school, the nation
we’d all die for, the nation we call home is, in the end, nothing more or
less than an idea. It has trembled on the edge of dissolution for more
than two hundred years, and never more so than today, but the margin is
still there.
The margin, of course, is you and me, and everyone else. A lunatic
might
call this a great time to be alive, while a patriot would say it is a
terrible time to be alive, and in the end, they’d both be right. Only a
lunatic would think any of this could be changed, and only a patriot would
stand up and volunteer for the fight to create that impossible change.
Lunatics and patriots, and a guarantee of broken hearts. That is what
you sign up for if you get involved tomorrow, and that is what you’ve seen
and felt and choked on if you were involved today. It was supposed to be a
lot of things, but it was never supposed to be easy.
That was the idea to begin with, when you think about it. It has
always
been in danger, this idea, this dream, and it has been sustained all this
time by edge-riders and lunatics and patriots. It was a masterpiece when
it was created, and will be again when all is said and done. Too many of
us refuse, absolutely refuse, to have it any other way.
William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally
bestselling
author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn’t Want You to Know
and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.
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