The Sting of Freedom

Today is the 218th day of the year; 147 days remain in 2010. Tonight at 7 PM, the World’s Largest Gathering of Redheads will assemble at the Dublin Festival in Dublin, Ohio. Among other things, the Gathering will choose the “world’s reddest hair” and clump everyone together for the “world’s largest photo” of redheads. Thirty-five hundred of them are expected. It’s all part of Dublin Fest, the world’s “second largest” Irish festival, and will include chances to attend an Irish Wake, taste some medieval Irish mead, and sit at a 200 year-old loom and weave some Irish linen. Or, you can participate in the “Dubcrawl,” slowly making your way through the Irish pubs in the city (the Dubcrawl begins Friday night and ends “sometime Sunday”)—sure it is and this will be popular with the local constabulary. In Sitka, Alaska, the Sitka Seafood Festival opens tonight with a Giant Salmon Bake (no mention of how large the Giant Salmon is). Among the weekend’s activates will be tours of the local canneries and the opportunity to can your own tin of salmon as a souvenir. If salmon-canning or pub-crawling don’t quite move you, consider the “Technomony Conference.” Technomony? What’s that, you ask? Here’s from the conference brochure: “Techonomy is technology and economy. It is organized activities related to the invention, development, production, distribution and consumption of technology-enhanced goods and services that a society uses to address the problem of scarcity and to enhance the quality of life.” With that piece of descriptive techno-prose you won’t be surprised to hear the principal speaker is Bill Gates, nor that it’s meeting at the Ritz-Carlton in Lake Tahoe. All in all, I think I’d rather look over the redheads…

Today most Christians worldwide are celebrating the feast of the Transfiguration, when, on Mount Tabor, Jesus was “transfigured” before His disciples. “The fashion of His countenance was altered, and His raiment was white and glistering,” says the account in the King James Bible. Since I first heard the word “glistering” many, many years ago, I’ve loved it, almost as much as the old word “throughly” (latter changed to the more pedestrian “thoroughly” by the same sort of people who now write brochures on “technomony” conferences). The fifty-first psalm, the great Psalm of Lent, has the evocative line “wash me thoroughly from my wickedness and cleanse me from my sin.” Nowadays we hear in its place “let my wrongdoing be washed away, and make me clean from evil.” Similarly banal, one of the most popular Bible translations today changes “glistering” to “dazzling white,” which simply makes one wonder what detergent the Lord Jesus used at the laundromat. O tempora! O mores!

Since we’ve reverted to Latin, I should mention that, on the ancient Roman calendar, today is reckoned as ante diem VIII Idus Augusti; it’s the 26th of Av, 5770 on the Jewish calendar; and Coptic Christians keep today as the 30th of Abib, the feast of the Martyrdom of St Mercurius (the Copts celebrate the Transfiguration on August 19th). On Bourbon Street in New Orleans, today is “Nun Day.” On August 6, 1727, French Ursuline nuns first arrived at New Orleans, which is as good a reason for a party as any. People there will be observing the arrival of the pious Ursulines until the early hours of tomorrow.

If you happen to be the pope, today is a day you want to pass quietly. Five popes have entered eternity on August 6th, from Pope St Sixtus II, who was decapitated on this day in 258 by order of the Emperor Valerian, to Pope Paul VI, who died in his bed at Castel Gandolfo in 1978. In 523, Pope St Hormisdas died—the only pope who was father of a pope (at least, that we know of!), in 768, Pope Constantine II (well, actually, he was an anti-pope, but we’ll have to take that up another time) died in prison (many anti-popes came to a bad end), and on August 6th, 1458, Pope Callixtus III just died. We derive our word “nepotism” from his reign. Nepos is the Latin for “nephew,” and Callistus appointed several relatives, and two nephews, to high ecclesiastical positions. He was, after all, a Borgia! The old Catholic Encyclopedia tersely concludes its article about Callistus, “He left, at his death, a rather remarkable sum of money.”

Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway-Shakespeare (not really), died today in 1623. She out-lived the Bard by seven years. Their marriage—which lasted 34—is one of the favorite guessing-games of Shakespeare’s biographers. In his will, Shakespeare famously left his wife only one thing: his “second-best bed.” She was older than he; when they married, she was 26 and he 18—and they had to obtain a special church license to marry in a hurry. The reason is no mystery—six months later their daughter Susanna was baptized. Historians, poring over dusty church record books of the day, have uncovered another marriage license, also issued to William Shakespeare, the day before his hurriedly-obtained one. But this one doesn't mention Anne Hathaway. This license was issued to William Shakespeare and Anne Whateley in a village four miles distant from where Anne Hathaway and her young fiancé were soon to tie the nuptial knot. Books have been written on these few facts, full of guesses and speculations. Was the Bard enamored of another and forced into a loveless marriage because of a youthful indiscretion? Are “Hathaway” and “Whateley” close enough to be confused by an old clergyman, who mistakenly entered the wrong name into the register (I can testify old clergymen are easily confused) or did Shakespeare simply like girls named “Anne”? We’ll never know—but that “second-best bed” is a phrase as haunting (and, pardon me, pregnant) as any in the Bard’s plays.

Today is the birthday of “Old Sparky,” the electric chair. It was first used (or-uh-“mis-used” since it malfunctioned with quite gruesome results) to dispatch William Kemmler in New York's Auburn Prison on August 6, 1890. George Westinghouse (yes, that Westinghouse) later remarked “It would have been more humane had they used an axe!” The rivalry between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse and the production of the Electric Chair is detailed in a fascinating book, Edison and the Electric Chair: A Story of Light and Death. Today ends National Clown Week, first inaugurated in 1971 by President Richard M Nixon at the behest of Congress. Any remark on my part here would simply be supererogatory…

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The plans are made; the contractors have the blueprints and all the deeds and permits are in hand. A mosque is going to be built next to Ground Zero, as the site of the fallen Twin Towers in New York City has been called since that ghastly, horrible day nine years ago. It’s an outrage to the memory of the victims. It’s an insult to the firefighters and policemen who died so that others could live. Whatever the motivations of those who are doggedly pursuing this project, they can’t help but be aware of how many people, not just in New York City, but across the country, feel this is a collective slap in the face. That may very well be the intent. Whether it is or not, it stings.

I’m an old conservative—so old and outdated, they don’t even make conservatives like me anymore, and the political party to which I most relate never quite even formed; it died out with people like Patrick Henry. It was about one thing: freedom. Henry and his ilk opposed the new-fangled Constitution of Washington and Franklin and Adams, saying that it put the power of the State—the government—at the disposal of those who would use it to coerce others into political and financial servitude. They called themselves the “anti-federalists” and, like so many who are simply “anti” this or that (even “anti-popes”!), they eventually disappeared. A few crusty guys like me have read themselves into anti-federalism, but our day is past. The Brave New World we are creating will have less and less room for genuine freedom, even as we congratulate ourselves on how free we are.

One of the reasons, an old curmudgeon like me reasons anyway, that we so happily surrender our freedom is we have only a scant idea of what freedom is. The founders of the country, federalists and anti-federalists alike, believed in arguing. They believed that when people disagreed, they should argue out the question as best they could, trying to find an answer if there was one. That’s not an American trait, it’s a human one. It doesn’t go back to Jefferson and Adams (who were able practitioners of the art), but Socrates and Plato and Aristotle. It’s built into our civilization. Unfortunately, we don’t argue anymore—we shout instead. Slogans right and left have replaced discourse—and where discourse is lacking, so too are the fruits of freedom.

The mosque is an outrage, and it’s meet and right for people to say so. But more sacred to the slowly-vanishing American character than the memories of the dead should be the gift of freedom. The mosque should go up, not because we love the dead less, but because we love freedom more.

Freedom doesn’t trace its roots to the shaded groves of ancient Athens but to the Garden God planted east of Eden. We don’t get our notion of “inalienable rights” from the Declaration of Independence but (unpopular as the thought may be today) from the tattered old scrolls of the Bible. We’re free not because somebody says so but because God made us so.

The people who are opposed to the mosque are opposed because they love America and what they believe it is and can be. The people who want to build the mosque are building it (for whatever other reasons) because they love Islam. I don’t care what it means for Islam, but I care very much for what it means for freedom. It seems to say that we do cherish freedom—we recognize the freedom somebody has to insult us and the freedom we have to answer back, even-if you’ll pardon my burr-under-the saddle Christianity coming to the fore—if that answer is to turn the other cheek and invite further insult.

Regardless of the palaver on the so-called “right,” America is not a Christian nation. No government in the world can ever be, or, trappings aside, ever has been. Discourse breaks down; governments collide; wars happen. St Thomas and Christian tradition make allowance for the concept of “just war,” but everybody will admit that if people are killing each other, charity is not the chief operating principle. Jesus’ Kingdom is not of this world. “If it were,” He said to Pilate, “My servants would fight.” Whatever the intentions of those who crossed the Atlantic long ago to set up a New Zion, we have something different now: a country among all the other countries of the world, and so one with presidents and their tax-collectors and policemen with guns. But the glimmer of freedom cherished so long ago in Philadelphia and Boston and Williamsburg isn’t snuffed out. It can’t be. It’s was breathed into us in Eden.

They’ll build the mosque, not because it should be there, not because it’s in good taste, not even because they have the “right,” but because they have the freedom to do it. That freedom was bought yet once more by the men and women who died in that Terrible Place.


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