 | The Freedom to Follow
By Robert Parry
January 21, 2005
What some Americans may have found annoying about George W. Bush’s
second Inaugural Address was his use of a rhetorical device in which he
stated obvious truisms about “freedom” with the suggestion that
opponents of his policies – from invading Iraq to privatizing Social
Security – must be people who hate freedom.
Bush has used this rhetorical technique before, as in Campaign 2002 when
he created the impression that Senate Democrats who objected to Bush’s
version of a Homeland Security bill were “not interested in the security
of the American people.”
Though employed more subtly in his second Inaugural, the rhetorical
device was back as Bush mixed together platitudes about “freedom” with
oblique references to both his foreign and domestic policies.
The presidential message seemed to be that Americans who complain about
his defiance of international law in Iraq, his assertion of near-
unlimited presidential powers in the War on Terror or his plan to revamp
the Social Security system by shifting it toward individual retirement
accounts are not just Bush opponents but opponents of freedom.
So on foreign policy, Bush told Americans that “rights must be more than
the grudging concessions of dictators,” as if there are legions of
people out there who would think otherwise. “In the long run, there is
no justice without freedom, and there can be no human rights without
human liberty,” Bush said. Take that, those who think justice can exist
without freedom and that human rights can exist without human liberty.
At another point, Bush may have left some listeners scratching their
heads: “We do not accept the existence of permanent tyranny because we
do not accept the possibility of permanent slavery.” Back off, those of
you who accept permanent slavery or permanent tyranny. More opaquely, he
added: “Liberty will come to those who love it.”
Immortality
Some longtime listeners of Inaugural Addresses might argue that one or
two of these fuzzy aphorisms are to be expected as a President tries to
grab for immortality with a phrase that may last longer than the next
day’s newspapers. But what was unusual about Bush’s speech was that
these vapid truisms represented virtually its entire structure.
Bush used the banalities, in effect, to set up a straw man of
opposition, as if anyone who didn’t agree with his unilateralist foreign
policy was both dishonest and craven. Bush said, for instance, “America
will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that
women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires
to live at the mercy of bullies.”
Again, Bush is juxtaposing himself as the brave leader who stands up for
truth against his imaginary opponents who supposedly want to pretend
that jailed dissidents prefer their chains or that women welcome
humiliation or that human beings aspire to be bullied.
When Bush wasn’t creating these lopsided debates, he often slipped into
junior-high-school-style rhetoric about freedom: “As hope kindles hope,
millions more will find it. By our efforts, we have lit a fire as well
as a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power; it
burns those who fight its progress. And one day this untamed fire of
freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world.”
But Bush wasn’t done with his pedantic lecture. “Self-government relies,
in the end, on the governing of the self,” Bush said. “Americans move
forward in every generation by reaffirming all that is good and true
that came before, ideals of justice and conduct that are the same
yesterday, today, and forever.”
And on he went: “In America's ideal of freedom, the exercise of rights
is ennobled by service, and mercy, and a heart for the weak. Liberty for
all does not mean independence from one another. Our nation relies on
men and women who look after a neighbor and surround the lost with
love.”
Idealism?
Though TV pundits and newspaper columnists quickly praised Bush’s
address for its lofty tone and supposed idealism, many Americans surely
were wondering why Bush was subjecting them to this strange lecture.
At one level, Bush may have simply wanted to wrap his controversial
policies – that have included tolerance of torture and denial of due
process to American citizens he dubs “enemy combatants” – in the cloak
of “freedom.”
But other Americans may have felt that Bush was trying to maneuver them
rhetorically into positions where their criticism of him could be
demonized. Just as Democratic senators – such as triple-war-amputee Sen.
Max Cleland – became politicians who were “not interested in the
security of the American people” in 2002, now Americans who refuse to
follow Bush can be labeled enemies of “freedom.”
Indeed, the most troubling subtext tucked inside Bush’s paean to
“freedom” may have been that the ultimate freedom for Americans today is
their freedom to follow him.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/012105.html
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