"American Freedom"

La libertad sólo existe cuando no es de nadie.

(Freedom only exists when it is given by no one.)

- Carlos Varela

  

Of all the mendacious and misleading ideas sold by governments to their peoples perhaps one of the most interesting (or at least the one I am most qualified to write about) is the modern idea of American freedom.

To be clear, I am not one of those who suggest that Americans in reality are not free because of this or because of that; I very much do believe that by traditional standards we are “free” and I am grateful to have been born in a country capable of affording me that. My point within this topic lies elsewhere; it is the branding of this freedom as if it were something truly unique to our culture and way of life, and the consequent distortion of reality characteristic of many American points of view that is something that in my mind merits discussing.

American culture is absolutely permeated by the idea the Americans are free. Quite literally every aspect of our society reinforces either directly or indirectly the notion that we above all nations and peoples are truly free. We Americans live in the self-proclaimed “land of the free” and we are the only country in the world I am certain that could just about get away with renaming French fries “freedom fries.”

Yeah, just a little reminder -- people actually wanted to do that.

Putting aside the fact that they were just wanting to get away from the “French” part because the French disapproved of our 2003 invasion of Iraq, the mere fact that freedom would be the logical lexical replacement is curious to say the least.

The following picture is from March 2003 and was taken in Wilmington, North Carolina:

All things considered it's hardly a surprise at all that the word “freedom” has rooted itself so deeply that it can make its way into advertisements for consumer goods. Next companies are just going to replace the name of their product with the word “freedom” in order to hope for a sale in their appeal to patriotism. Who knows, things may even get to the point where a gas station runs an ad saying Get a full tank of FREEDOM! instead of a full tank of “gas”...

Oh…

What does that even mean? In what way does purchasing gasoline relate to how free we as a people are? Marathon is proud to be “fueling the American Spirit” and they are not afraid to use things like the Statue of Liberty, the colors red, white and blue, or the word FREEDOM to remind you of this. To be clear though, I am not openly mocking Marathon; they have been given such a society where an ad like this is acceptable and marketers cannot be held culpable for creating an effective slogan or advertisement which appeals to what they intend. The stranger matter is that “freedom” has become such an American trademark that it is capable of penetrating society so deeply (and so much more deeply than in the other parts of the world; try to come up with one other country that is not run by a dictator where the above could be seen at a gas pump).

Having been born and raised in the United States I can genuinely say that growing up I do not remember many people talking about what exactly freedom was, or what it meant to be “free”, I just remember countless reassurances that above all people we are indeed the freest and we are proud to be so.

Given that a democracy is, as Wikipedia defines it, “a form of government in which all citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives”, I would say that a true democracy by that definition is about as free as one realistically gets (for the sake of realism, throw out the “I’ll live on my own island” scenario). Interesting then that the Economist Intelligent Unit (from the British weekly news publication The Economist) ranked the United States in its 2010 index as not the number one or two most democratic nation on earth, but as the 17^th most democratic nation, just beaten out by the Czech Republic and Malta who hold positions 16 and 15 respectively. The Scandinavians managed to nab positions 1-4 (Norway leading the world followed in order by Iceland, Denmark and Sweden). 5 and 6 are New Zealand and Australia and at number 7 is the last of the Scandinavian nations, Finland.

*Side note* I cannot resist but to interject a fascinating linguistic note here. Let me finish out the list started above and perhaps a strange linguistic (and ultimately entirely arbitrary) pattern may jump out at you; continuing with numbers 8-14 in order: Switzerland, Canada, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Ireland, Austria, and Germany.

13 out of the 14 most democratic societies on the planet speak Germanic languages. The exception here is Finnish, which is a linguistic quirk in some ways already, as it is not even Indo-European at all let alone Germanic. Putting it aside though, for some odd reason societies with Germanic languages tend to be the “freest.” This is of course coincidental and I am not in any way claiming a cause-and-effect link between these two things; I am merely pointing out an interesting coincidence!

Returning to the topic at hand, I am quite comfortable in my assumption that in countries like the Czech Republic, Malta, New Zealand or Holland (which are in at least one primary way all statistically “freer” than the US) one would have a more difficult time selling gasoline in the method discussed above.

This obsession with freedom has by extension overtaken anything that screams “America” such as bald eagles; red, white and blue; images of the founding fathers or our national wonders, etc. Perhaps one of the best and most poignant parodies of this obsession can be seen daily on the Colbert Report with Stephen Colbert. The opening montage that begins his show every night is an ideal mix of flags, eagles, music, flying patriotic words and everything else “America” that sets up the tone for the rest of the satire that is to follow perfectly.

This predominance of patriotic imagery no longer even spares official documents. I have had the passport I currently have for eight years (a family trip to Italy in 2003 necessitated it) and I recently saw a passport which was issued in March of this year. Suffice it to say the United States passport has undergone some changes within the last decade. All of the pages in the new passports have patriotic quotes at the top and patriotic images in the background requiring all necessary text to be superimposed. One can scarcely leaf through the passport without feeling embarrassment (or perhaps fremdschaemen!) at the outright and arrogant manner that these images are being displayed. Indeed if you were to compare the American passport of today to that of every other country in the world it would be hard to not see the images as downright nationalistic. The Statue of Liberty, Mt. Rushmore, a picture of the moon (ironic that we see patriotism in such a global icon isn’t it?), the Liberty Bell, the Mississippi River and the Declaration of Independence are a few of the images that passport stampers all over the world will have to gaze at while they allow Americans admittance into their country. Here follow just a couple of the quotes found at the tops of these pages and perhaps after reading them you will see the connection between this and the topic of freedom:

The cause for freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class – it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.                

-          Anna Julia Cooper

The principle of free governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains.

-          Daniel Webster

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty."

-          John F. Kennedy

If you still feel as though I am not painting a thorough enough picture of America’s fetish with freedom, google “freedom quotes” and see all the soul-stirring words of American politicians going all the way back to before the War of Independence (the ones above will likely make an appearance).

Herbert Hoover for example said that “freedom is the open window through which pours the sunlight of the human spirit and human dignity.” The metaphor is beautiful and the sentence makes for a perfect political quote but what exactly does one mean by that?

How can a nation which held on to the institution of slavery longer than nearly any civilized country, and who had to sacrifice 620,000+ of its own most able citizens just to rid itself of the scourge claim to be the beacon of freedom and equality that the world has always dreamed of? How could the founding fathers popularize phrases such as all men are created equal and then just years later pass the Three-Fifths Compromise which by law counted African slaves as 3/5 of one human being? The irony, the double standard, the two-facedness, the hypocrisy, the lie –however you want to put it—in all this is almost unbearable.

So why do we as Americans get the privilege of declaring ourselves so free? It is a simple enough question; if we call ourselves and genuinely believe ourselves to be the freest on earth then that is all well and good but why is that so? What right do we have?

Does the American history allow us this? Certainly not.

Perhaps our citizens are familiar with the rest of the world and just genuinely prefer the United States to other countries, believing that no other country could offer them the life they have now? Certainly not.

As of January of this year, there were 114,464,041 United States passports according to the US Department of State*. Out of a population of well over 300,000,000 that means that 2 out of every 3 Americans are not even capable of a weekend getaway in Toronto or Vancouver, naturally putting Europe or Australia (or anywhere) out of the picture. Americans are known the world over to know very little about the rest of the world and its inhabitants. As European foreign exchange students year after year are appalled to find out, the average American’s knowledge of what life it truly like in the rest of the world is horrifyingly, embarrassingly and inexcusably low. To succinctly state a concept that I could easily draw out into its very own essay in a simple phrase, let it suffice to say that there are plenty of other countries on this planet earth where people live just as “free” a lifestyle as anyone in Boston, Milwaukee, Baton Rouge or Portland.
*http://travel.state.gov/passport/ppi/stats/stats_890.html

The reason why we Americans call ourselves free is not because we are entitled to or because we really have any more reason to than anyone else in the Western world, it just seems that the majority of people in this country today legitimately do not know any better. The peculiar history of our country when compared to most other Western nations has provided a breeding ground for ideas and concepts that would set us apart from the Old World. Our “freedom” is an idea passed down to us from those in power (in this modern day as much economic as political) and instead of questioning its reality the American people found it to be a pleasant concept and on that grounds have summarily accepted it as their own. As stated before, I don’t even blame those in power for this; they are merely fishing and happened to find a kind of bait that worked out nicely. What is to me so disappointing and ultimately problematic is that people are so accustomed and desensitized to this freedom-mongering that no one ever stops and says “Wait, this is a little screwy!” It is much more gratifying to believe you live in the greatest place on earth than to think there is nothing particularly special about your society amongst the others of the civilized world.

The famous Gettysburg Address delivered by president Lincoln during the raging Civil War ends with the line “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us...that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

(And as a side note, this quote too can be found in the pages of a new US passport.)

I’ll never forget the day when it was pointed out to me that although Lincoln wanted it to seem as though freedom was at stake, and that if the North lost the war that government of the people would perish from the earth, that was in all reality the polar opposite of the truth. It is true that the argument could be made that he was referring to the freedom of the slaves, but frankly the United States had been living simultaneously in a country of the people, by the people, and for the people and in a country where slavery was a major economic engine for nearly a century at that point in history and there was just no feasible way that the freedom of the northern people or anything of that sort was at stake during the Civil War.

If things had ended differently and the South had won, the two countries would have split up and the North would have remained the USA while the South would have become the CSA. It is not as if the southern motive for war was to invade the North and conquer its territory; although human history would likely have been irrevocably different with a southern victory, the very existence of freedom being at stake as Lincoln proposes in the Gettysburg Address is nothing more than an exaggeration. It is a political use of the word to appeal to a public that was fond of thinking of wars in such terms (bear in mind that many people alive during the Civil War had grandfathers who had fought in the War of Independence). It was an easy way for Lincoln to sell his speech, and as history has since told it sold very well considering the Gettysburg Address is one of the most famous (if not the most famous) of all American speeches, presidential or not.

Marathon, it seems, is not the first of the clever people who have used the word freedom to sell an idea or product to the American people, even if the underlying truth behind its use is misleading or outright foolish.

To summarize and succinctly conclude this ever-lengthening essay, I am merely proposing that freedom as understood by the American public is not reflective in any way of the global perspective. Yes, it is undeniable that in the majority of aspects we Americans are “free” and I will restate that I am forever grateful to have been born in such a wonderful country that has been able to offer me such a lifestyle. However, we are one of many nations in the world who offer their citizens lifestyles based on the freedom of personal choice and our use of this freedom tag-line to describe anything as American as if we were the only or the freest nation on earth is entirely out of touch with reality.