Let Freedom Burn!

A student requested I watch or, at least, read Bush's Inaugural Address. Well, I found it hard to avoid, and heard much of it in snippets on the radio, finally succumbing to reading the whole thing. First impression: I don't buy any of it. It seemed like a perfectly fine address saying next to nothing. Many have commented on the number of times that the words "freedom" and "liberty" were used; I am in wholehearted support of both those concepts. But my first thoughts that they were merely empty rhetorical gestures. That is, nice speech, now back to work. I rarely pay much attention to Inaugural Addresses, and my indifference is usually perfectly apt. This case seems no different. The coming State of the Union speech will be more meaningful as a guide to what Bush wants to do in his second term.

Others have noted the obvious hypocrisy of Bush's remarks touting freedom while restricting freedom at home and cosying up to dictators who guard our access to vital resources and maintain political stability in places like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, etc. David Brooks, the reigning conservative over at the Times now that Safire has picked up his flackjacket and gone home, not only hails the speech but argues that it will lay down an important challenge to all U.S. leaders now and in the future: "It will be harder for future diplomats to sit on couches flattering dictators...." But Bobo, as the blogphiles call him, is more optimistic than I am about such things, and, of course, no where does he mention Saudi Arabia.

Fareed Zakaria, in today's Newsweek International, does a nice rundown of some of the complexities of the world we live in, arguing that Bush's speech highlights the gaps between what the U.S. says and what we do.

High Hopes, Hard Facts
The world’s a stage: His ideals are soaring, but now Bush must live and lead by his own code.

Orlando Patterson, in the Times on Saturday, had a brilliant piece on the historical changes in the meaning of the word "freedom." Patterson calls the Inaugural Address The Speech Misheard Round the World. Read it!

Finally, in the current Harpers Magazine there is an excerpt from an excellent article in the Fall 2004 Raritan Review (available through the library electronic journals page) by the historian Daniel T. Rodgers on "American exceptionalism" which I will post on my U.S. as a World Power course page (and other course pages if anyone asks). But it reminds me of the one passage that I haven't seen much commentary on from Bush's speech:

Across the generations, we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security and the calling of our time.

Uh, hello? "No one is fit to be a master ... no one ... a slave"??? This was the mission that created our nation? Only if you actually ignore the historical creation of our nation. Sorry, dear readers, but, see, there was this thing we call slavery back in the day. And it was not just some incidental leftover from the bad old days. Slavery was politically and economically central to the founding of our nation, whether we like it or not. This does not destroy the achievements of our so-called founding fathers, but it forces us to look at those achievements more closely, to wrestle with the contradictions in their lives, to face up to the contradictions in our founding and our society. Our national myth (what the historian Nathan Huggins called -- with exquisite balance of meaning -- our "master narrative") demands we ignore or sideline a central part of our national history.