Preface
I am reticent about publishing this essay. It strikes me as inflammatory and heavily rhetoric ridden. Taken by itself and not within the greater context of the rest of my writing (or the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and selected authors of the Frankfurt school) the piece is ablaze with words of foment. The piece is grounded in political philosophy and its statements are not without factual grounding. However I’ve not taken the time to reference, expound or contextualize the essay within the works of those mentioned above. Therefore my reticence is great but I am compelled to publish because the words, like the passion they speak, burn within me. They are like a volcano erupting to make room for the magna that constantly boils beneath the surface.
So here below is written my passion, my grief and perhaps a basis of hope. I beg your tolerance, plead your understanding and ask for your trust to believe what I write is not the mere words of a radical but the thoughtful and heartfelt outcry of a learning mind struggling with the truth of our current society.
From the Start
That greatest of social contracts, the U.S. Constitution, which binds us all, has for centuries made would be kings, citizens. It has made foreign prince’s mere international participants of our great pact. It is a social contract built on the apex of the enlightenment ushered by the hopefulness of the renascence. Our constitution, born in a world of slavery physical and spiritual was conceived on the fertile ground of freedom, democracy and egalitarianism. It would propel a peoples forward like no other political corporation had in the past. While the fathers of our great social contract were no saints they did imbue in that compact ideas and sentiments that would continue to stir the passions of men long after those who wrote those great words had passed into the earth from whence they lived, bled and died to conceive.
However hundreds of years later that great paper of liberation has been obfuscated by numerous laws, orders, edicts and other rulings of magistrates and oligarchs put up and upon us by the a citizenry that deludes itself of having the glories of freedom it lost long ago. Now those politicos whether a part of the state apparatchik or separate from it trod into the dirt those lofty goals and ideas our forefathers struggled so mightily upon this land to make worthy for their progeny. The freedoms and rights so elegantly written by them that have past now lay at the feet of the super rich like so many pieces of broken pottery. They grind underfoot the rights, liberties and privileges of those to whom the very quick of the constitution were meant to preserve, protect and defend. These immoral acts of the privileged few thrust upon society reverts the citizen to that of a state of nature and let loose unfettered the evils of the tyrannical power both foreign and domestic.
Today our enemies take subtle forms and guises not readily ascribable to a single person. Instead these men and institutions of evil do their deeds of ill under the protected offices of corporations and the ambiguities of catchy slogans (war on terror, war on drugs, globalization, and market forces). They wield power over the common citizen that to the founding fathers was abhorrent and immoral. Yet the people as a whole remain still as the dead of their ancestors. Their arms are not quick to rise against the powers set before them. Their voices do not shout in protest against those that have enslaved them to the dehumanizing products of super-capitalism. Thus our nation so destined to greatness is now hemmed in by an enforcer state administration supported by lecherous super-capitalist and their corporations. This great nation of democracy no longer represents the general will but the particular will of rulers picked by the oligarchs. It is thus not surprising that the freedoms once enjoyed by the modest of men in our countries infancies is now enjoyed only by those possessing the most means.
Our contract has become the tool of the rich and tyrants of the super-capitalist corporation. Rights and privileges once afforded to the most common of men have been ceded, sometimes willing, and thus we find ourselves captured by the machines of the rich. Our power is impotent, our will subservient and our art perverted. Our ability to act and enable the good and general will is no longer within the means of proletariat but held in the iron grasp of those born into power and supported by the very institutions that were created to protect us from their immoral accumulation of power and wealth.
I find myself standing thus in the cell of the un-empowered and shackled to the wall of irrational consent to slavery. I find myself helpless, powerless and without hope. Though my cage is gilded and my desires satiated by the culture industry I still am a prisoner. I am as much a prisoner as he that is surely secured by physical chains and the bonds of prison. My watchmen are not physically corporate but they are instead ephemeral things of luxurious desire and wanton consumerism. They surely force me into submission as the most brutish of the strongman of any master.
Therein lays our greatest enemy to the greatness of the social contract of the United States. Our most dangerous enemies are not foreign enemies but enemies of our own inaction. As we stand in stupefied wonder at the pretty baubles of consumerism the rich impose inequalities on all foreign and domestic. All the while it is done in our once great nation’s name.
Finally there is little recourse to stop these horrid actions except perhaps to stand and shout and repeat the words of our founding fathers,
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
And to that I add that these words; these sentiments are my own. They and all that is written here are mine alone and not those of a corporation, a state or any one person. The words in no way represent any entity outside of my own self. I am and all I do is to support the rebirth of a nation, society and peoples once great.
Postscript
If in so reading the above I’ve transgressed upon the delicate fibers of social acceptance then I beg forgiveness. I myself, who having written and internalized the words, feel moral outrage at the conclusion but perhaps it is directed at a different phantom of injustice. I am reminded of Paul’s word in Romans chapter six to which he struggled with sin and argued that the sinful body made him sin but that through his faith he strove to do better. While I’m far from the days of my faithful past and do not by means of reference intend to return I do find truth in his words. And so I also ask my readers to not hate me but instead hate the things you find displeasing and rest in the comfort that I like you am on a learning journey and the road is not always smooth.
Indeed, this writing takes one to give time for serious thinking and re-reading to absorb the depth of words and feeling that you have put into script. I shall obviously read this many times before making any further comments.