Long before this blog, I kept an equally-erratic literary journal called A Voice in the Wilderness. And while nothing written there was particularly world-shattering, I don’t want it to get lost in the mists of cyberspace. So to do my part to save the planet, I’m going to recycle and reuse that content, putting the save-worthy stuff here on Mongrel Dogs. Today we start with a piece written in reaction to an op-ed in the Washington Post written by one Victoria Toensing, on 2002 September 23, about the then-nascent Bush policy of secret detention and arbitrary arrest. Sadly it’s five years later and we are five years deeper into the pit, the cause of liberty even more undermined by its alleged defenders.

The piece is reproduced below the fold.

It is hard to imagine any more ways in which Victoria Toensing (“A National Need for Preventive Justice”, 2002 Sep 23) could completely misunderstand American priorities, American justice, or American liberty. The proper response to an act of barbarism is not more barbarism. It is a re-dedication to the cause of freedom — to the Constitutional guarantees that make the United States of America the most free and open society in the history of the planet.

I would feel more assured that her proposed “prism for dealing with the issues of detainees and the collection of evidence would not abandon our constitutional precepts” if she did not then go on to spell exactly how, in fact, it does jettison those precepts. Due process? Presumption of innocence? Separation of powers? Judicial review? Although these terms have long been identified with American liberty, Ms. Toensing sees fit to cast them on the dustbin of history.

And please do not repeat the tired — and wrong! — assertion that World War II justifies the secret tribunals, indefinite uncharged detentions, and highhanded assumption of unbridled exectuive power. In case Ms. Toensing has missed it, there is a crucial difference between 1942 and 2002: Today, Congress has not seen fit to grant — nor the President to even seek! — a declaration of war. The elected leaders of this great democracy have not said, in the voice of the people, that we are at war. Therefore, no “wartime emergency” measures are legal or justified. The President has had twelve months to make his case and to ask for a writ of war. He has not troubled to do this, making the overheated calls for rampaging executive authority ring somewhat hollow.

I mention only in passing that almost every one of the decisions so happily offered as precedent now, has been long considered a travesty of American justice, that every act of judicial deference has been long considered a regrettable mistake, and that every executive trampling of individual liberties has been long regarded as a Constitutional debacle.

Ms. Toensing finds it “bizarre” that the government was required to disclose its charges and evidence to the counsel to John Walker Lindh. What she finds bizarre, true lovers of liberty will find heartening: The Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, the Eighth Amendment, and all the attendant legal structure, exist to protect the individual from the unrestrained fury of the State. Not merely as a citizen but as a human being, Mr. Lindh was entitled to those full protections and was afforded all of them. Amazingly, the walls of civilization somehow did not come tumbling down — because America is strong enough to offer those protections even to those who wish to destroy us — and America is strong enough to triumph nonetheless.

In the case of Messr. Hamdi and Padilla, it is so comforting to know that “they are being held as prisoners of war until the end of the conflict, as has been done ever since rules of war were written.” Apparently, in this example, since the rules of war happen to be convenient, they are to be sacrosanct. But when the rules of war do not favor the administration view — such as when the Geneva Convention demands full and impartial hearings into the status of prisoners of war — then suddenly we are in a “new age” when the old rules do not apply. By the way, Ms. Toensing is somewhat untruthful. Messrs. Padilla and Hamdi are not being held as “prisoners of war”. The President’s men claim only that the two are “unlawful combatants” — a designation with no recognized meaning and thus, ironically, itself unlawful. “Prisoners of war” have rights as guaranteed by the Geneva Convention and other treaties. “Unlawful combatants” apparently remain or go free at the whim of the President.

Several times Ms. Toensing asserts that prisoners should be detained “until the end of the conflict”. Yet we are engaged in a drawn-out conflict, the very embodiment of a “long twilight struggle”. When, exactly, will the war end? How are we to know? Had President Bush deigned to obtain a writ of war, our objectives and victory conditions would be clear. But instead we are offered war without end, an ill-defined and unceasing conflict worthy of Orwell’s 1984. Normalcy will never return because this so-called “war”, unencumbered by anything so quaint as a Congressional writ, has no discernible endpoint. Terrorism is not a war to be fought. It is a disease to be contained, a virus on the body politic. It will remain for as long as regions exist in which it can incubate.

Ms. Toensing askes, “Why would we want to reveal any information about who is in custody or the basis for their detention when it could expose sources and methods?” The answer is simple: Because democracy and the fundamental liberty of Americans absolutely require an open and communicative government. If the people are to remain the government’s masters, must they not know what the government does in their name? Ms. Toensing also worries that opening deportation hearings aids the enemy, for example by “giving them pieces to complete an intelligence mosaic by which they can learn, for example, which detainee is cooperating or which cell has lost members and needs replacements”. If Al Qaeda needs to read the court docket to know which of its cells has gone missing, then this “terrorist network” poses no more threat than the keystone cops. The only ones who lose in an atmosphere of absolute, unchallenged secrecy is the American people.

Ms. Toensing bravely decries her own ability to judge terrorist trials. (By the way, the government can still close a deportation hearing — it need only show cause to the judge.) Why? Because, “Quite simply, I do not have access to the relevant investigative and classified information. Neither will the advocates of public disclosure. Nor will the press.” That is to say, the sovereign people of the United States of America cannot be trusted with the power to decide for themselves the propriety and validity of their government’s actions. If we remove the public entirely and without appeal from this, the most basic of actions, then what role is available? Or should we simply let our “betters” rule, perhaps in perpetuity?

Through her tone and her words, Ms. Toensing betrays the ultimate problem that any freedom-loving citizen has with the actions she defends: She and her ilk simply do not believe in democracy. They do not have any faith in the country they claim to defend and to cherish. They do not believe in the fundamental solidity and awe-inspiring strength of the American republic. They — more than the barbarians who felled the Towers — have wrought unneeded, unprecedented, and unwarranted changes in the political fabric of our nation. They — more than al Qaeda, more than Iraq — threaten the freedom of American citizens.

Ms. Toensing gets one thing right: “What is important for all these cases is that the courts are functioning.” They are indeed — and happily they have so far issued rebuke after sharp rebuke to the groping grasping grip of the executive. Thank Providence that the courts are open and functioning — for they alone are protecting the American people and American democracy itself against this President who purportedly swore to uphold the Constitution and now cynically strives to topple it.

We are stronger than this. We are smarter than this. We are better than this.

With respect,
-=-Bernard HP Gilroy

In preparing my second Convocation speech, I spent most of the summer at a loss. Once I had changed apartments, I sat down in earnest. Eventually, I ended up jettisoning my original effort and producing the speech as given. But in case you wonder what could have been, below I’ll post the speech I nearly gave. There are two caveats:

• I shamelessly cannibalized this for any rhetoric I thought actually worked, so the actual speech and this one overlap somewhat.
• I abandoned this and never finished editing or, indeed, writing it. So the thing given is unpolished and the quality comparatively low.

Without further hedging, let me give you the Speech that Wasn’t.

Good morning.

I’m going to break one of the cardinal rules of rhetoric and confess to the trepidation I felt in giving this speech. Or not in giving it — because, as anyone can tell you, I certainly like to talk, especially when the listener can’t talk back. But writing it gave me pause. Sometimes the only thing harder than doing a thing is doing it again. As Mr. Evans is wont to tell me, something cannot be considered “annual” until it happens the second time a year later. So in a sense, it is this speech that is intended to inaugurate an annual tradition of speeches by the holder of the Distinguished Faculty Chair.

For a while — longer, perhaps, than I should admit — I toyed with the idea of hedging my bets. The plan was to offer a searching analysis of the phenomenon of the “one-hit wonder” — the savant, found in science, in literature, in every human endeavor, who bursts onto the scene like a shooting star, shakes the foundations of a field, and then curiously vanishes back into obscurity, never to contribute again. I trust the subtext here is clear. Best of all, even if the speech fell flat, I would win: I could always claim that, rather than being a textual failure, it was a meta-textual success.

The solemnity of the occasion, perhaps, calls for something weightier — something at once soaring and deep, an exposition on the human soul and our never-ending quest for meaning. But having explored last year the very future of humankind, I found myself somewhat at a loss. When you’ve begun by debating the survivability of the species, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of places left to go.

Considering the date on which we meet, it might be considered by some to be a propos to discourse on the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The wrenching events of our time demand that we engage with them, wrestle them to the ground, demand meaning from them. On this subject there will be no shortage today of chattering on the airwaves and nattering in the papers. No one needs one more voice thrown into that cacophony. A native son of New York, I still contemplate the skyline with clenched jaw and clenched fist. It has been six years, and there is still a hole in my city — a hole in my country — a hole in my heart. And I find I am not ready to talk about that yet.

Instead, I’m going to talk about Rock, Paper, Scissors. In case you’ve forgotten, Rock, Paper, Scissors is a method of decision between two people, wherein each secretly picks one of the items and they compare. The key bit is that each item ties with itself, loses to one item, and beats the other. The traditional phrasing is, “Rock blunts scissors; scissors cut paper; paper covers rock”. It’s that last one I want to focus on. Paper covers rock? What the heck does that mean? How is that a win?

{Transition needed.}

This past summer I had the opportunity to visit the national Pearl Harbor Memorial in Honolulu, Hawai’i. Commemorating a naval attack, it is fittingly primarily a naval monument. The two great anchors of the monument are the USS Arizona and the USS Missouri. The Arizona was a battleship sunk during the Pearl Harbor attacks. Though most of the Pacific Fleet was refloated and rebuilt in the years following the attack, the Arizona could not be salvaged or moved. It sits at the bottom of what was once Battleship Row. The Navy operates a tender from shore to the stark elegant observation station that has been constructed above the wreck. From it you can look down on the coral-encrusted hulk of the Arizona, watery tomb for the majority of the servicemen killed that day.

The Missouri was BB-63, the last battleship ever constructed by the United States. Now a museum ship docked at Pearl Harbor, the Missouri is still an intimidating sight. Towering over the shoreline, she bears three turrets each with three 16-inch guns capable of throwing an explosive shell a distance of 20 miles and landing within a circle of radius six inches. The Missouri was a great and terrible engine of war, and everything in her design speaks to the awesome destructive powers that could be marshaled by an enraged industrial democracy. But standing on her deck, I found the most stirring and moving part was not her giant main guns, or the anti-aircraft machine guns still deployed on the side, nor even the capped tubes wherein Tomahawk cruise missiles had been installed in the 1980s. It wasn’t the sweeping bow or the grim turrets or the majestic bridge. It was a simple golden circle fixed to an otherwise nondescript spot on the mid-decks.

In 1945, at that spot on the decks of the Missouri, in the waters of Tokyo Bay, representatives of the Empire of Japan signed the formal documents indicating their surrender to the forces of the United Nations, ending the Second World War. In a brisk twenty-three minute ceremony, a band of perhaps twenty men — Japanese, American, Canadian, British, and Russian — affixed their names to two copies of the surrender documents to enact the armistice. From that point on the Missouri, you can just see the alabaster arc of the Arizona memorial. Between Arizona and Missouri lie a few hundred yards of open water and a few hundred thousand American casualties. They bookend the American involvement in a war that spanned a decade and a half and claimed upwards of sixty million victims — a number that, even living at the dawn of the most dangerous century, must give us pause.

Standing on the Missouri in mid August, I overhead a museum guide relate a story that struck me immediately. It’s one of those little tales that museum guides love, a tidbit that uses the mundane to illuminate the immense. Signing the Japanese surrender document was, as you might imagine, an event of great import in anyone’s life and, as you might also imagine, it could be the source of great trepidation. The representative of Canada, L. Moore Cosgrave, was apparently overcome by his nervousness and, while signing the Japanese copy, signed on the line for the French Republic. This forced everyone following him to also sign on the wrong lines. Eventually, concern over the implications of this error led General Richard Sutherland to cross out the names of the nations and pencil in the correct ones.

It was a minor, totally banal detail. Yet it was also a striking, astonishing thing. At that moment, General MacArthur stood in supreme command of the largest, most powerful military forces in the history of the world. Having brought the Empire of Japan to its knees, the Allied Powers held uncontested dominion over East Asia and the Pacific. How truly bizarre – between them, these men standing on the deck of the Missouri had fought the most devastating war ever known, had overseen barbarities of a nature hard to contemplate, had rained down obliteration on entire cities and had sent millions of men to their deaths to do it. Yet here they were, worried that somehow, a signature in the wrong place could render the document worthless and the exercise moot — that somehow, a misplaced name could unmake the surrender.

And that’s the hidden key. The Missouri, the last and greatest battleship, the apex of naval construction, serves as a very present icon of physical force — standing at the head of an unbroken lineage stretching all the way back to the first rock lifted by a semi-evolved ape in assault upon its brethren. Our long and bloody history attests to the power of that rock. But on that day in Tokyo Bay, it was not the battleship that mattered, or the airplanes or submarines, or even the atomic bombs looming in the background. To the assembled warriors of the most terrible conflict, what mattered was the document. Paper trumps rock.

And isn’t that the way, when you think about it? We often mistake the things as the drivers of history: wheat and salt, gold and oil. But somehow it’s the pieces of paper that seem to truly matter, to truly steer the course of human life. In 1914, a relatively minor Balkan War was transformed into the First World War by German violations of Belgian neutrality, codified in the Treaty of London of 1839. Informed that the British would go to war to defend Belgium’s neutral status, German Chancellor von Bethmann Hollweg expressed his shock that they would expand the war over what he infamously dismissed as a “scrap of paper”. That scrap of paper shook the foundations of Europe and remade the world order. Its spiritual successor, the Treaty of Versailles, would help engender the next world war.

The Declaration of Independence. The Constitution of the United States. The Magna Carta and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The Emancipation Proclamation. The Fourteen Points and the Atlantic Charter. Words on a page. Scraps of paper. But nothing more feared by tyrants, more despised by despots. It was no accident that the Soviets registered every typewriter and made unauthorized use of a photocopier a felony offense, punishable by jail time or even internal exile. They knew in their bones that they faced a greater existential threat from little scratches in black and white than from all the nuclear missiles in the world.

In a very real sense, the most disruptive weapon ever invented has been the printing press.

Words on a page. Scraps of paper. They give form and life to the ideas they contain. Through them we transcend the oral and enter the eternal.

Today the Hun School had its second annual Convocation to commence the year. As the current holder of the Distinguished Faculty Endowed Chair, it fell to me to present a speech. (I did this last year, too; you can find that speech online.) The text of this second speech can be found below the fold.

Good morning. Being offered a second opportunity to address the School community has been a great honor. I have to confess, it has also been a great challenge. For a while — longer, perhaps, than I should admit — I toyed with the idea of hedging my bets. The plan was to offer a searching analysis of the phenomenon of the “one-hit wonder” — the savant, found in science, in literature, in every human endeavor, who bursts onto the scene like a shooting star, shakes the foundations of a field, and then curiously vanishes back into obscurity, never to contribute again. I trust the parallel here is clear. Best of all, even if the speech fell flat, I would win: I could always claim that, rather than being a textual failure, it was a meta-textual success.

But on Sunday morning I woke up and realized that I was running away from what I needed to say. I had to abandon the whole thing and start over. I hope you’ll indulge me.

Today we meet as a School on a date both solemn and raw for the nation. It wasn’t planned that way; it’s just an accident of the calendar. But sometimes I wonder if history is anything more than accidents of the calendar. If it is, it is because we take those accidents and create meaning in them. As a native son of New York, my jaw still clenches and my eyes still tear whenever this day looms again. Six years later, there remains a hole in my city — a hole in my country — a hole in my heart. When I sat down to write, I thought that I was still not ready to speak about that day, to sift through the ashes for meaning. As I began to write, though, I made a shocking discovery.

It’s true — I am not ready.

But that doesn’t matter.

That is the first important lesson of the 21st century: We will face severe challenges for which we may not be ready. The challenges aren’t going to go away, though, so we have to get ready. Despite what the movies tell us, failure is an option — in fact, it’s the default option. We are going to have to choose success; we are going to have to work for it. Last year I laid out what I see as some of the dangers and pitfalls we might face and what might help us get past them. I remain proud of that speech, perhaps inordinately proud of it. But it didn’t take long to knock me down a peg. Within a few days of Convocation, several different people — students and faculty — had told me that they had appreciated the speech but that I had scared them sleepless. This disappointed me, because it meant that I had missed my mark. I had hoped to navigate the thin space between raising an alarm and causing a panic. Looking ahead, it’s a good thing to be a little alarmed. It’s a terrible thing to be panicked.

And this is the second lesson of the 21st century, as hard in its own way as the first: You cannot live in fear. You must not live in fear. Stimulate an animal’s fear centers continuously, and eventually it will die. Stimulate a free society’s fear centers continuously, and eventually it will wither.

We have spent the last six years cowering in a corner, huddling in our fear. It’s unhealthy for each and every one of us. It’s unbecoming of a great nation and a great people. It’s simply bad posture. Now, today, it is time to wake up. It is time to step up. It is time to grow up. My generation and the one preceding mine, we’re asking a lot of you. You’re being asked to grow up in the hardest century we’ve ever faced. You’re being asked to step up and shepherd this fractious and fearful world through fire and fury to a destination none can even imagine yet. It’s hard and it’s frightening and it is not fair. That doesn’t matter. It’s what is.

There will be those — there already are those — who will offer to take this burden from you. “Give yourself over to me”, they claim, “and I will tame the night for you. I will face down the bogeyman, I will guard you and keep you safe.” The best of these will be merely misguided. Most will be outright deceitful. No one can grow up for you. No one can live your life for you. That won’t stop them from trying to tempt you into surrender. They will bang the drum and rattle the saber and do everything in their power to convince you that your rightful place is prone on the ground, helpless and afraid. They will attempt to buy your birthright by selling you fear.

Fear of other people taking your things.

Fear of other people taking your job.

Fear of other people taking your life.

Fear of other people, period.

Fear of being different, of being outcast, of being alone.

Fear of other opinions and other beliefs and other faiths.

Fear of the different, of the alien, of the Other — of anything not them.

Simple fear.

They will tell you that there is only one path, that you must make yourself a smaller target by becoming less than yourself. We must, we are told, jettison the lessons of four hundred years of liberty. We must, we are told, give up our quaint notions of due process and restraint and fair play. We are told, “Dissent divides”. We are told that asking questions costs lives. We are told these things, and in our fear, we pretend that they are true. But in our hearts, we know that they are not.

Fear lives in the oldest, darkest corners of the brain — parts far older than humanity. Like everything else, fear persists because it offered an evolutionary advantage. But it never evolved for creatures like us, who think and remember. Those who appeal to your fear are trying to short-circuit your brain. They don’t want you questioning, because questioning gives you context. They don’t want you learning, because learning gives you options. Above all, they don’t want you thinking, because thinking gives you freedom. They want you reacting, worrying, following, fearing. It is a blatant confession of a bankruptcy of solutions; it could not be more obvious or insulting; and yet, amazingly, every day we fall for it.

You cannot live in fear. You must not live in fear.

What is the alternative? Should you go through the day in an optimistic fog, counting on the world to be always sunshine and daisies? Of course not. We face the hardest century. The world is going to be sharp edges and deep chasms. But consider this: When suddenly dropped into a frightening situation, the most primal instinct is to close your eyes and hope it goes away. It’s a very natural, a very human reaction. But closing your eyes doesn’t make the danger go away. In fact, the only safe course is to open your eyes and face the frightening thing. Even if the smart move is to run, you’re going to want to run with your eyes open.

Your would-be guardians and rulers have always been here, since our species huddled in the darkness, vulnerable and afraid; and for a time, they served a role. They interposed themselves between the sleeping masses and the vast unknowable night. Now a bright bonfire called civilization blazes and pushes back the night. Yet the fearmongers persist, hovering at the edge of the light, on the shore of the shadows, unwilling to come closer. They fear the darkness but they hate the light, because it reveals that we don’t need them any longer. Seeing the fire hold back the night, they scream that it will attract monsters and must be extinguished — that we must go back to cowering in darkness and terror, trusting only in them. But the fire doesn’t attract danger. It allows us to see danger coming and to prepare for it and thus avoid it. Our system of justice and liberty doesn’t threaten our lives; it makes them possible. It lets us see what truly is.

Despite what you’ve been told, most people on this planet are not out to kill you. Most people on this planet don’t hate you for your freedoms, whatever that means. They don’t hate you for your wealth or even for your actions. They don’t hate you at all. Just like us, most people desire little more than the opportunity to create a better life and the peace to enjoy the fruits of that labor.

Be wary of those who tell you differently. Distrust those who ring the alarm bell so loudly that you cannot think. Ask yourself: What are they afraid of? What do they fear you will discover? Fear is a powerful and dangerous drug on the body politic. It can be used to strip people of their defenses, of their dignity, of their principles. Using fear to bludgeon you into assent, people will act in your name to do the most dreadful of deeds: To abrogate elections, to spy illegally, to detain indefinitely. To discriminate and intimidate, to torture and to execute. In pursuit of imaginary security, they will demand that you surrender your privacy, your identity, your opinions, your self. They will tell you, “We cannot afford outdated customs such as judicial oversight or checks and balances or free debate.” They will say to you, “To fight the monsters, we must become monsters ourselves.” Don’t let them fool you.

We are stronger than that.

We are smarter than that.

We are better than that.

And you cannot live in fear forever.

Seven days ago I had the opportunity to relive the American experience in the Second World War in one morning. In reverse. As part of the Regal Princess‘ stop at the port of Honolulu, I took part in a tour of the memorials to the USS Arizona and USS Missouri. In case your command of WWII facts is rusty, the Arizona is a battleship sunk during the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor on 1941 December 7 – the date that will live in infamy. The Missouri is part of the American response to that act. It’s an Iowa class battleship, the largest ever built and the last in service. On the decks of the Missouri, on 1945 September 2, the Japanese government signed the papers surrendering to the United Nations. In between, tens of millions of people died – nearly half a million of them American.

For reasons having to do with long lines and scheduling, my tour group actually explored the Missouri memorial first. The Missouri Memorial is, in fact, the Missouri – all of BB 63, anchored and refit as a floating museum. It’s not exactly a WWII monument. During the half century between VJ Day and its decommissioning, the Missouri served as a flagship of the United States Navy. It saw action in Korea, in Viet Nam, and even in the (first) Gulf War. During this span it was modernized and upgraded: the seaplane replaced with helicopters; the machine guns replaced with gatling anti-air. A full complement of Tomahawk cruise missile launchers was installed. In case all of that should fail, though, the Mighty Mo’ kept her main armament, nine 16-inch cannon in three independent turrets.

For all of the intimidating bigness of the battleship, the most stirring part turned out to be the surrender documents. Both copies – American and Japanese – are displayed. I was struck by the contrast of grand and mundane. At one glance are all the grandiose phrases calling for the end of war and the dedication to new peace. But look a little closer and you see the mark of a very human moment, where the representative of Canada, in his nervousness, signed on the wrong line and necessitated a hurried penciled correction. MacArthur insisted that the proper titles be penciled in and each signatory initial next to his correct line. How bizarre – between them, these men had fought the most devastating war ever known, had overseen barbarities of a nature hard to contemplate, had rained down obliteration on entire cities and had sent thousands of men to their deaths to do it. Yet here they were, worried that somehow, a signature in the wrong place could render the document worthless and the exercise moot.

Yet that’s the way of it, isn’t it? Paper covers rock. We think it’s the things that matter, but somehow, it’s the pieces of paper that seem to actually change the course of history. World War I became World War I, in a sense, with the British treaty guaranteeing Belgian neutrality – dismissed as just a “scrap of paper” by the German High Command. World War II spread to the West and became a World War with the Allied treaty of defense with Poland, again dismissed as just words on a page. In both cases, the powers that derided the words went on to be humbled by them.

The Declaration of Independence. The Constitution of the United States. The Magna Carta and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The Emancipation Proclamation. The Fourteen Points and the Atlantic Charter. Words on a page. Scraps of paper. But nothing more feared by tyrants, more despised by despots. It’s no accident that the Soviet Union registered all typewriters and made private possession of a mimeograph a felony offense.

And here, under glass, on the gently rolling deck of the mightiest warship ever constructed, was a piece of paper that had ended a war because it said so. The history of the war was written in the blood of its combatants – but it was ended through ink. The document contains little in the way of soaring oratory or grand pronouncements. It is a legal thing, a dry thing, a weary thing yet resplendent. That piece of paper recognized a changed reality and so enabled it.

Scraps of paper.

Word on a page.

Paper covers rock.

May it always be so.

It’s a truism that’s become so trite it hardly rises to the level of a bumper sticker: Freedom isn’t free. You see it slapped across the back of SUVs, taped to the windows in Circle-K’s. Some days, it seems everyone can mouth the words but nobody understands them. Freedom isn’t free. It has always carried a cost, demanded a sacrifice. In any society that claims to be free, that liberty must be purchased.

Here I am not talking about, say, taxes. Taxes are not the price of liberty. I am not an anti-tax nut. I recognize, as Justice Holmes did, that “taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society”. Taxes pay for the police and the courts, the schools and the hospitals, for sanitation and water and roads. But that’s true for any civilization. Taxes make the modern American civilization possible. They do not make it free. One of the staggering lessons of history, quite unwelcome at the moment of triumph of global capitalism, is that the price of freedom is not set in dollars, or in yuan, or in barrels of petroleum, or in bullion.

The price of freedom is blood.

The price of empire is also blood. But they differ in character. An empire is measured by the blood it is willing to shed of others. A free society is compassed by the blood its citizens are willing to shed of themselves. Freedom must be a good so highly valued, so thoroughly prized, that one would give up everything else — even life itself — rather than see liberty denied. If you’re not willing to die for your freedom, then you haven’t got it anyway: Any scoundrel can enslave you merely by willing to risk a little bit more.

Thomas Jefferson said, “The tree of liberty must be watered periodically with the blood of tyrants and patriots alike.” Note that “and”. It is not enough that we shed the blood of tyrants. The vast scape of human history is littered with the tales of oppressed peoples who suffered indignity and chains until it could be endured no more, who then rose up and smashed the yoke of their oppressors… and then give in to their baser instinct and became oppressors themselves. The fall of tyrants is a necessary precursor to the flowering of liberty — but it is not liberty. Freedom cannot be secured until the common citizen is willing to risk death to see it secured.

And you can’t hire a substitute.

You can’t pick a small subset of the citizenry, hand them weapons and money, and say, “Be free for me.” You can’t pluck them from an economy designed to fail them, offer them training and a job and a career, then ship them off to foreign sands and say, “Keep me free.” The men and women of the American armed forces are perhaps the most professional fighting force ever assembled, wielding a military might unprecedented in human history and unthinkable even a century ago. For the most part they are upstanding and impeccable. They can safeguard the physical property of the United States and they can protect the lives of its citizens. They cannot make us free.

You can’t hire a substitute.

If you wish to be free, you must run the risk, you must pony up the ante, you must be willing to pay the price. Does that mean that everyone should enlist in the Army or the National Guard? Does it mean our only hope of freedom lies, perversely, in universal militarization? Of course not. It means that to protect the freedoms on which this country is built, you must accept risk. An open society welcomes everyone — including, potentially, its attackers. A free press must function without governmental restraint — even if that risks undermining sensitive operations. Free citizens must be willing to debate, to question, to probe, and to ponder — they must be encouraged to doubt the party line, to look under, through, and beyond the official story. In a free society, an open debate must be held sacrosanct without reckless resort to smears such as “traitor” and “sinner”.

Josh: What do you say about a government that goes out of its way to protect even citizens that try to destroy it?

Toby:God bless America.

The West Wing, “The Midterms” (Season Two, Episode 3)

In recent years, we have seen the rise of a number of programs that, in more normal times, would have appeared quite odious, even sinister: “extraordinary rendition” to lands of torture; indefinite extranational detainment without hearing or trial; extra-statutory data mining; warrantless domestic spying. In each instance, there has been a chorus of cacklers decrying — not the outrageous acts done in our name by a government recognizing no limits — but instead the free press that has, through tireless research, uncovered these programs. There have been calls for subpoenas, espionage trials, even execution for treason; a discordant cacophony whose clear purpose is to cow and intimidate the journalists of this nation while, at the same time, convincing ordinary citizens that a free press is a luxury that cannot be afforded in the twenty-first century. And the thin thread running through all of these attacks, the weak reed that is offered up, the whine and wheadle is, These articles make us less safe. Now we are more at risk. To which I say:

The price of freedom is blood.

It is riskier to live in a free, open society than a closed, regimented one. In the short term, you probably do face a greater likelihood of suffering a terrorist attack. If that’s the price of a free press, we should pay it — and gladly. If that’s the cost of being free, we should ante up and accept it. Because without the freedom, without the liberty, the whole exercise is pointless. What good is it to save the physical America, if the price is the destruction of the higher America? This is the price demanded by freedom of every citizen. This is the cost of being “the land of the free” — we must also be “the home of the brave”. To be free, you must face death.

Happy Birthday, America. As you turn 230, keep in mind this exchange at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention: A woman asked Benjamin Franklin, “What form of government have you given us?” To which the old wit replied, “A Republic, Madam — if you can keep it.”

(Incidentally, it seems to me that these elevated risks are in fact only short-term; that in the long run, victory over terrorism can only be won by a free and open society. But that’s a topic for a different day.)