🎊 JULY IS FREEDOM SALE MONTH!
The comical music featured at the top of this post is Michael’s “New American Theme,” a satirical mashup of “America the Beautiful,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” orchestrated using kazoos; banjos; and other off-key, goofy instruments befitting the Clown World he produced it for in 2017. I had forgotten about it until I stumbled across this file in one of his folders. The background artwork is a meme he created that I shared in my Memes by Themes on politics.
Then, as I was preparing to draft this introduction, I remembered a term Michael coined over two decades ago: patrivist. He defined it as follows:
patrivist: n. Person who, from a sense of love of one’s land, actively resists all forms of oppression, corruption, and justice.
I designed the digital artwork below to illustrate it:
It feels suitable to observe my first Independence Day without Michael with his music, meme, and coinage, which together form an Apocaloptimistic formula of Confront the Brutal Facts + the Stockdale Paradox, reminding us of what was, what is, and what could be again.
Memes by Themes #19: Freedom
“Freedom had been hunted round the globe; reason was considered as rebellion; and the slavery of fear had made men afraid to think. But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, — and all it wants, — is the liberty of appearing. The sun needs no inscription to distinguish him from darkness; and no sooner did the American governments display themselves to the world, than despotism felt a shock and man began to contemplate redress.”
—Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man
Today in America, we celebrate the Fourth of July, the day on which a bunch of rabble-rousing rebels resisted the repressive reign of Great Britain by adopting the Declaration of Independence. The process and timing were a little more complicated than that, but that’s the idea, anyway.
It’s worth revisiting this electrifying document to see what motivated them to “dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.”
Below are a few key passages we may wish to contemplate today as we seek to renew, reaffirm, and resurrect our personal sovereignty in relation to the tyranny we face today. It is no longer about declaring our independence from a single nation but rather from the technocratic one-world government being erected around us by the cruelites, philanthropaths, tyrants, administrators, military forces, and colluders.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” [emphasis mine]
We think of the generation that produced the Founding Fathers as industrious, courageous, and defiant. But note the part I bolded:
“mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed”
That means it was really just a handful of Badass people who instigated and ultimately achieved the American Revolution. That’s something for the defeatists amongst us to contemplate.
As Margaret Mead said:
“Never underestimate the ability of a small group of committed individuals to change the world.”
It’s not like the majority of the population drifting along in a haze of lazy malaise was anything new.
In his 1552 masterpiece, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, Étienne de La Boétie bemoaned the masses’ indolent indifference to freedom. As I quoted in my second essay over four years ago:
“It is incredible how as soon as a people becomes subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and so willingly that one is led to say, on beholding such a situation, that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement.”
John Adams knew how fragile freedom is, writing to his wife, Abigail, on July 7, 1775—almost exactly a year before the Declaration of Independence would be adopted:
“But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.”
This is why we patrivists—however few of us there are—must commit to defending that liberty with all our creativity, bravery, and might. To borrow the epigraph from that same essay cited above:
“As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight. And it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air—however slight—lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.”
—Justice William O. Douglas
This may be the last twilight we ever have if we allow the planet to slide into technocratic tyranny. Time is ticking down. Don’t let liberty be lost forever.
And now, memeroll, please …
Listen to this episode with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Margaret Anna Alice Through the Looking Glass to listen to this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
