WATCHING THE DISGUSTING performance by Ohio's shame, Jim Jordan haranguing Dr. Fauci using the words "freedom" and "liberty" and "The Constitution" and "The First Amendment, people should come to see just how totally fucked up American notions of all of those are.
Disgraced wrestling coach, Jordan meant the "freedom" and "liberty" of irresponsible and stupidly gulled FOX viewers and other such adult brats to do things that will infect people with a serious illness which, even if you are not one of the ones it kills, could leave you with long lasting and serious physical and mental debility which may well be permanent - the freedom and liberty of those so infected by Jordan's freedom lovin' assholes totally destroyed so that they won't have to wear a mask or socially distance for a period of time while responsible medical and health experts try to halt the unhampered spread of the pandemic, the spread of which Republican-fascists like Jordan, like the Republican-fascists, those in the Congress, the Trump regime, the Supreme Court - and those in the U. S. Catholic Conference of Bishops (among other such befrocked fascists) have aided at every step of the way.
Those "freedoms" and "liberties" so championed by the likes of disgraced wrestling coach Jordan are clearly those, freedoms and liberties, which can, under our dangerously inadequate Constitution and its amendments, get hundreds of thousands of us killed and more maimed, perhaps for life, and still be peddled as an absolute good, especially in their absolutist articulation so popular with idiots left as well as right.
The freedoms and liberties the kinds that are most popular with such libertarians are the freedoms and liberties popular with the more bratty of toddlers, many two year olds but fewer three year olds, even fewer four, five and six year olds, as they grow in moral awareness and responsibility - as they start to grow up. Responsible parents try to teach their little terrors that it is wrong to exercise such freedoms and liberties because they harm others, other people, sentient creatures. Some, like Trump, never do develop, probably due to parental permissiveness or some rot in their mental development the origin of which will remain mysterious.
There are other freedoms and liberties that later come into play with puberty, often those sexual freedoms and liberties that the pedo-doctor and others in Ohio - who Jordan certainly knew about - took with the jocks who stayed in Jordan's wrestling program as they were being oogled and groped, those freedoms and liberties that Matt Gaetz is accused of taking with minors (apparently that was OK with the freedom lovin' libertarian Jordan because he is one of the few in Congress who came to Gaetz's defense).
That's the thing about "freedom" and "liberty" they are only as good as the bounds within which they are exercised and do not violate the equal rights of others, the moral restraints and bounds within which they are exercised. The absolutist notion of freedoms and liberties is stupid no matter how smart the person who asserted them are, and there are some people who have asserted them in that absolutism who should have known better. I suspect that a lot of that voluntary stupidity was on the basis of the vague and inadequately inspecific language of the First Amendment even as I know a lot of our danger is due to the similarly irresponsibly vague language of the Second Amendment. Both gets more scores and hundreds of thousands killed. Molly Ivins was one such free speech absolutist who I think was so gulled into stupidity by the language of the First Amendment and the misplaced reverence for Jefferson and, perhaps, the even more misplaced esteem for Madison. I totally disagree with her absolutism in matters of speech and press even as I esteemed her highly, otherwise.
It is one of the most telling of things about this right now is how it is fascists, Nazis, white supremacists, "Proud Boys," Republican-fascists, the fascists on the Supreme Court who are today's most frequent spouters of "freedom" "liberty" "First Amendment (and Second Amendment) etc. even as they seek to oppress and enslave and crush others with their freedoms and liberties. Orwell was prophetic.
The Trump regime, the continuing regime of "freedom," "liberty," "First Amendment," spouting fascists, Nazis, white supremacists, Republican-fascists have certainly put us all on notice that there is something fatally dangerous about the naive and promiscuous use of the terms Jim Jordan used Stalin style to browbeat Dr. Fauci the other day. Those notions are about what are actual goods when they exist within the bounds of morality, equality and decency turn into their opposites when divorced from morality and equality and decency. But just the missing qualifiers such as making them not include lies and hate speech make them anything but good as written. Just as the term "justice" turns to injustice so easily under the vague language of what the Constitution has been since the courts have been meting that "justice" out unequally and unevenly and in order to give privilege to those favored by the judges and "justices" at the expense of the rights of disfavored people. The Constitution of the "originalists" was by clear intent and not infrequently admission chuck full of such inequality, as was the law that it did little to level. Anyone who thinks "originalism" isn't a smokescreen to prevent equality and promote privilege is an idiot.
There is no getting away from the moral basis of all of this because it is the thing that determines the character of the law, of the Constitution, of justice, of freedom and even that most stupidly asserted of all of this, "liberty". A mass murderer, a child murderer is exercising their freedom, their liberty to do what they want to. That's why the pathological libertarian so popular with our pathological champions of "freedom" and "liberty", Ayn Rand in her journal drooled over a particularly sadistic child killer. Why Jim Jordan is trying to spread Covid-19 under the slogans of freedom and liberty and the First Amendment.
I think the slave owning Founders left out questions of morality from the Constitution because they wanted to protect their privilege, their freedom and liberty to enslave people, to keep others in wage and debt slavery, to rule the country as white propertied men of means. Even as they used words like "freedom and liberty" and asserted they were better, forming a new age based in science and the putrid class-based English common law. We keep up that idiotic 18th century conception of things at our peril because without the foundation of equal moral obligation freedom and liberty become tools of oppression, inequality and death.
No comments:
Post a Comment