I would like to offer a vision of a new
Independence Day, a model that transcends the one currently enjoyed by the
great unwashed and washed alike. What I mean by this new Independence Day is
independence from conventional thinking, independence from rote living,
independence from government sanctioned behavior and independence from an
inauthentic self.
If any fellow travelers out there have had the
buona fortuna of reading Ernest Becker's meisterstuck Denial of Death you must
assuredly know that nothing is absolute and "the best most of us can do is
fashion something-an object or ourselves-and drop it into the confusion, make
an offering of it, so to speak to the life force."
This is the great challenge as Becker saw it for Man. How do you fashion
something positive, live independently and authentically in a world that
compels us through existential inertia to embrace tenets and prejudices known
deep down to be false. Since nothing is absolutely absolute, Man chooses a
carefully outlined lie to live under, making sure that the role chosen and all
the rewards that go along with playing it are sanctioned and approved by the
greatest number. We all do it. Every human being on earth builds some type of
totem to worship whether it’s fealty to a traditional God or fealty to a
commercial god like the local sports team.
Thus the question arises, if it is all a
lie, what is the best lie to live under? Is it homophobia, ethnic cleansing, tyrannical
repression, anti-Semitism, unbridles patriotism? Maybe you are the self
proclaimed "chosen" leader of the most powerful nation in the free
world as George W. Bush believed. His administration closing ranks and
jettisoning reason in the pursuit of a bogeyman in the wake of 9-11 fortified
this delusion. Or perhaps you are not as ambitious and prefer to keep it simple
as a homicidal religious leader with a few thousand acolytes? Either way the
die had been cast with the endgame reaffirming the fallacy of the game itself.
Over compensation is a very dangerous state. Am I the only one who sees
a correlation between the height of the new Freedom Tower (1776 feet) and the
fact that America leads the world in erectile dysfunction?
All Weltanschauungs, whether it is of individuals or nations, rise out
of repressed feelings of cosmic insignificance. These feelings that we might be
no more than dust in the wind must be reimbursed. You see this on a daily basis
ziggurats erected in the names of true inconsequence. Religious holidays,
political conventions and celebrity worship are the three that immediately come
to mind. Pair that with a nice dose of cognitive dissonance, the search for
true significance in an indifferent cosmos becomes almost impossible. And if
all humanity succumbs to the whim of this 800 hundred pound gorilla then it is
safe to conclude that all governments negotiate in their best interests under
these same terms forever sentencing reason to the rock pile, as the results of
this partnership through history are littered with the remains of the true
believers.
The new Independence Day would forsake
bombast and hypnosis, honesty from it's elected leaders would be coin of the
realm and the voices of its constituents would hold sway harkening back to the
time when this country was founded during The Age of Enlightenment, a period
marked by "political aspiration towards governmental consolidation,
nation-creation and greater rights for common people, attempting to supplant
the arbitrary authority of aristocracy and established churches." James Madison
Not
a bad lie to live under.
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