Escape From Freedom

In its March issue HARPER'S reports on the brutal murders of Salah Ahmed Al-Slami, Mani Shaman Al-Utaybe and Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani at our secret Camp No in Guantanamo. We should try to remember their names. None of them had been charged with a crime. All had been eligible for early release. The Bush regime hid the murders by calling them suicides. The Obama administration has declined to investigate.

I mention this to illustrate why Americans ranging from Teabaggers to Greens to unaffiliated citizens no longer trust what the government says. A recent poll found that 86% of Americans believe that their government no longer works. We do not expect our government to do the right thing. We expect to be lied to. This set of public expectations is relatively new in America, new in my lifetime, although similar beliefs were once common in 20th century dictatorships.

Who are these people who no longer believe in our government? We see oddballs on the fringes who are as paranoid as Dick Cheney on acid, but I'm not talking about them. I'm talking about myself. Ask yourself. Have you been lied to? Do you expect the governments of America and California to do the right thing? What about the governments of Sonoma County or of our towns? Will they demonstrate something approaching common sense?

The assumption that a body of elected American representatives might exhibit common sense makes me smile--it seems absurd. But I hope there are occasions when it happens.

Contemporary life is confusing and relativistic at best. Each of us has countless decisions to make based on incomplete information. We might begin as Catholics and end as Protestants. We know we can't trust our elected leaders or our cultural leaders, who often speak from ignorance--I'm thinking of Noam Chomsky chastising tribal people in Central America because they'd voted for candidates he hadn't approved.

There is a way out, of course. That's what the teabaggers and Stalinists are about. If you want to be free from anxiety, adopt a set of absolutes (of the right or of the left) that induce black-and-white thinking. Fanaticism soothes the fanatic . . . as long as she manages to squelch the relativism lurking somewhere inside, as Berger and Zijderveld point out in a recent book, IN PRAISE OF DOUBT.

We understand this much: we know why people become dogmatic. They choose not to be free.

--Gary Goss