Four Freedoms

I'm a little encouraged that Rep Cantor is trying to be a Republican instead of a RHINO.  I use the RHINO term ironically -- to describe rampaging marauders with existential cravings to stamp out fires -- whatever brings warmth and light into the world.  The folks who call real Republicans RINOs.  I was pondering how to get the party back on a course where I might seek to rejoin it.  And I saw an article about the 10 most influential State of the Union addresses (I can't locate the article).  One of those listed was FDR's Four Freedom's speech of 1941.  Despite the flaws of the concept, it's worthwhile to adopt Four Freedoms as a proper end of social organization and government, and argue that voluntary actions in a market economy are the most reliable means to bring them about.  Republicans have been doing so since the days of Lincoln, but have lately forgotten how.

Are Four Freedoms big R Republican values?  Are they RHINO values?  Freedom of Speech?  RHINOs are muzzlers.  From a letter last year to Rep Hurt.

Juries are America's Sovereign (We, the People) exercising its (OUR!) power directly.  If juries are unhappy -- don't muzzle them (These RHINO's that have taken over my Party, and dare call me RINO, love their muzzles: voter suppression, jury suppression, suppression of standing of litigants).

One might add the suppression of science.  Also RHINOs seem to desire freedom from annoyance.  Our founders saw the incompatibility between speech rights and the right to comfort -- and knew that comfort is something gladly sacrificed for the ferment of ideas, opinions, demonstrations, and expressions.  I think the leading edges of the RHINO encroachment of the Republican party came with attempts to criminalize legitimate protest which might deface or damage a flag, but do not share my disgust with commercial exploitation of the flag.  I wrote an essay on that at the time, but alas, it was stored on GeoCities, now defunct.  I might stumble across a copy somewhere. The main thing is that freedom of speech is not something the speaker owns, but that a culture owns.  Anybody can yell FIRE in a crowded theater.  He's free to do so, by divine right of lungs and vocal cords.  What shall the culture suppress, and with what tools?  What the culture is most inclined to suppress, words which threaten its leading figures and presumptions, are subject to spontaneous private suppression -- "Them's Fightin' Words, Pilgrim."  It's only our commitment to free expression and refusal to regard verbal provocation as mitigation for violent response that keeps us free.

Freedom of Religion?  Please!  I hate that schools have become the arena for this.  Teachers lack rights of free expression.  Sometimes even students and voluntary associations among students, faculty, and administration.  I think Republicans and RHINOs are pretty much aligned against any who would have us restrained from vocalizing our conception of the Divine.  Or especially of those who would chose what's permitted ("The divine nature is impersonal, inertial, and immutable" of most science vs "The divine nature is intimate, volitional, and responsive" of most theism).  Where RHINOs overstep is their readiness to compel and proscribe behavior of others.  I cringe every time the oath-giver prompts "So help you God".  I have no problem with an oath-taker stating an unprompted "So help me God." -- the prompt, itself, violates freedom, though I suppose the omission of that gratuitous phrase (could it even be blasphemous?) would be political poison, with or without the prompt.

Freedom from Want?  Here is the rub.  We have no divine right -- no certain inalienable right -- against deprivation.  But there's another part of the preamble to our Declaration which goes beyond securing our rights, and affirms the role of government in "effect[ing] their Safety and Happiness." Here is where we get Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear.  We get it because we are sovereign, as individuals.  Office holders may have some assurance of Safety and Happiness.  Capital investors too.  Intellectual Property creators and owners.  The hired help at the top of corporations with their golden parachutes.  They have that as derivative freedoms.  As means to an end.  The end being the Sovereign's Safety and Happiness -- that of individuals.  I'm not going to try to contrast real Republicans, RHINOs, and other approaches here.  Only say that Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear are core founding values of America, not some FDR intrusion.  Pretty much came to me in writing this.  I own all four freedoms now, instead of my initial approach of submitting to a populist expectation with better means than the Democrat approach of throwing other people's money at it.  That populist expectation is both a legitimate purpose of government, perhaps THE legitimate purpose, and a legitimate reason for dismantling an ineffective government, should it fail to secure these ends.... should it fail even to honor them.

Commando weapons.

I just finished reading Grapes of Wrath.  Among the thoughts provoked was another affirmation of the necessity of a well-regulated militia.  There's a conflict between what armed men will organize to accomplish and what powerful men will arm minions to accomplish.  I think of Bacon's Rebellion, where Gov. Berkeley laments his inability to raise an army to suppress rebellion, lacking the funds.  I think of the army Tom Cruise's character was hired to train in The Last Samurai.  I think of Pinkertons and other hired goons which have been assembled to suppress organized labor.  The age old question of whether one is served by participating in the communistic system of corporations and big capital with their central planning and bureaucratic means of stratification, or with voluntary associations in the free-enterprise system of guilds and small private capital (I like to think of garages and green grocers).

The problem is that scabs and goons-for-hire are likely to be "rugged individualists" in their own mind, prey to monetized (mercenary) transactions, as opposed to filial associations of the folks fighting the encroachment of avarice-based structure of society.  It's the folks who accumulate arsenals who are least likely to commit them to constructive use (do weapons have constructive use?)  Anyhow -- non-governmental (or proto-governmental like Revolutionary Committees of Safety) militia is a worthy form for organizing the liberals and progressives among us whose ends are gracious, if not altruistic.  Though a militia with a central body on the order of an Occupy Movement General Assembly sounds like a circular firing squad.

The point being that Sons of Liberty type right-wing groups and Committee of Safety type centrist groups and SDS/Black Panther type left-wing groups all have reason to bear arms, and American ideals are served by the presence of such armed groups, but the Second Amendment supposes infantry, not commandos.  Weapons whose purpose is individual carnage are not part of what I cherish as a right of free-association.  Automatic and large magazine weapons are not infantry weapons -- they are commando weapons.  They are mass murder weapons.  They are terror weapons.  They are weapons for which I will support restrictions.  I do not support restricting persons.  Be it felons or psychotics or even sociopaths.  Especially psychotics.  Perhaps when the rights of psychotics to assemble in armed non-governmental well-regulated militias are established, other rights will be less vulnerable.  I will not be disarmed by being called Schizo.  I've been called that all my life, though have been repeatedly assured by doctors I'm not clinically such.  Or legally such.  But I still feel comradeship with those who share this label, and especially those for whom that label has deprived of society's respect and a citizen's privileges and immunities.