Sickening Humiliation

The day after 9/11, every airplane in the country was grounded but one, the one used to fly some Saudis home. The corruption of that single act enraged me more than the destruction of the towers. I suppose I can stand our being attacked, but being reduced to a groveling nation, humiliating ourselves when we needed to be strong.....no. I didn't hear a collective howl about our sniveling to the Saudis. None.

There is less plain old freedom here, of course; at their whim, the repressive forces of the state can make me disappear, just like the corrupt regimes in Guatemala and Salvadore and Argentina and all the others used to do. In 1970, there were trials for some of the more heroic and visible domestic reformers; now, maybe, there would just be rendition. Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen, from Chicago, charged with no crime, was held for almost five years before he was allowed to see a lawyer; by that time, his mind had been destroyed. He was one of us, and I am ashamed at how we treated him.

But, so what? We've done a lot worse. This is what African Americans have lived with for centuries. The big difference, of course, is that their freedom was taken from them. The rest of us gave ours away.

We used to say, in the heyday of the changes around 1970, that someone we didn't like was a lapdog for the capitalist pigs. Well, now it has been reversed; now, we are all lapdogs for the non-capitalists pigs, the king of the Saudis and the communist regime in China. Funny how that worked out. We agree that they run the show; we tremble at the possibility that we might fall from their favor, we reassure ourselves that they need us as much as we need them, and so on. Just feeble attempts to get our dignity back. Too late; all but the most obtuse know who owns us.

Some groups have fewer constraints now. African Americans, in some important ways. Women, in some less important ways. Gay folks, but still pretty qualified. And against this we have the tremendous loss of economic freedom. Our economic best and brightest have given our enormous wealth to the Saudis and Chinese, for some oil and a bunch of plastic tchotchkes. Miles the Cat could have gotten a better bargain. It's not so much that we owe them a lot of money; debt we could just pay off, and be done with it. The problem is that we can't live without the stuff we get from them.

Pulling it partly together: Choice, freedom, and so on all describe the varying number of constraints on us. More constraints, less choice, less freedom.

What is the freedom of someone unable to move, say, two limbs, after a stroke. Not much. Pretty tough constraints, pretty great loss of freedom. What is the freedom of a country unable live without oil and Chinese economic slavery? Not much. We spend so much of our lives giving money to those people!! There is almost nothing left. Just a few toys, and some crappy houses and cars. We can't even take care of all our people! Dignity? In both the stroke person, and the crippled country, not much. Ah, the endless small humiliations of dependency, the endless wishing for what had been before. Now I know why the conservatives want to go backward; some stuff was pretty bad back then, but at least we could pretend that we ran the world. Now, all we see are constraints and failures.

I know it's a difficult case to make: How is debt to the Saudis the same kind of thing as damage to the brain? Sounds like some rejected SAT question.

Well, that's the point of the whole damn blog, as Alert Reader knows by now. Both the debt and the damage can pass under the radar, and most often do. When there is an autopsy, pretty severe brain disease is often found, in folks who acted perfectly well until the truck hit them. When there is an Enron, the disease of the economy is found in a company that had seemed perfectly well until the market hit it.

When things go wrong, when life is pushed out of being ordinary, we notice. When the price of gas hits $1o.00, we suddenly see economic pathology. When actions or speech get strange enough, we suddenly see mind pathology.

Damage can be to the economy, or to the brain, but it is only when the social fact, the social pathology, emerges that we know about the loss of freedom -- the price at the pump, the scrambled mind, or the scrambled limbs. We don't look at the brain, and say, wow, that brain is damaged. We look at how someone fits into the world, and only then look at the brain. We look at how a person can be ordinary, and then we decide about pathology.

The chorus, once more: brain is about wet stuff, mind is about how well we fit into the tribe.

Is there any way to be more obscure? I'm working on it, with the help of Miles the Cat. I've got a few ideas....and, BTW, I think this was a pretty good blog entry.

If you don't, tell me I'm a complete bozo -- c'mon, Alert Readers!!! Relieve me of the delusion that I am part of the fabric of ordinary life.