The Selfishness of SOPA

   The public won a great victory this week, and it ironically needed business to lead the charge. SOPA’s defeat is a boon for freedoms of press and of speech, yet it tellingly exposes the disenchantment of the general public.

   SOPA was stripped of its “free enterprise” clothes. Internet users all around the country rallied against it, writing their congressional representatives and spreading the word through social media streams. Some 7,000 websites blacked-out to draw attention to the potential harm vague language allows. Perhaps providing this symbolic steroid to the apolitical masses, anti-SOPA groups succeeded in what may be recalled as the successful first battle to maintain our constitutional rights. The threat underlying SOPA was bullshit, to borrow Harry Frankfurt’s conceptualization of what is concerned with neither truth nor falsehood. We, the people, just needed to see it as such.

  

   What the amazingly rapid coalescence of public opinion against SOPA shows, at least to me, is that the American public has not yet matured beyond the selfishness so deeply ingrained in our popular mind—the perpetuated individualism from Poor Richard to the rugged frontiersman, from gun-slinging cowboy to the insanity of the covertly segregated exurb. SOPA directly threatened those sites we love and depend on to sedate our dissatisfaction with the state of the world. Extending corporate control into the information free-for-all under the guise of the virtual Queen’s navy, SOPA promised to blaze the legislative trail for bandwidth prioritization, as if we could escape the dominance of the faux news triumvirate. Freedom of press--which needs to be reinstated jurisprudentially as freedom of information--is one of our many inalienable rights. Yet, not three weeks prior, the federal government assaulted the Fourth and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution without much resistance.

   NDAA is probably the most significant piece of anti-rights legislation to cross the executive desk since the PATRIOT Act. As SOPA does, NDAA relies on vague language that opens the door to the interpretive largess of the executive and the intelligence communities. Fortunately in some cases, but unfortunately here, the court system takes a very long time to produce the differences in appellate court decisions that warrant a Supreme Court review. NDAA also poses difficulty to judicial interpretation because it suspends rights to trial. It is not invalid to suggest a slippery slope; the court can’t opinionate and set precedence in cases it can’t review.

   NDAA poses the greatest threat to American liberties we’ve ever faced. Denouncing communism publicly and ratting on your colleagues was enough to keep the McCarthyists off your back. Accepting second-class status was enough to keep the Klan home. In the emerging dystopia, we are all terrorists. Unless, of course, we swear allegiance to the corporatocracy and don’t try to organize our factory floors or start community gardens, or suggest that education should be a publicly-funded quest for greater social responsibility and enlightenment, or that imperialism is bankrupting the treasury. Justice may be color-blind, but injustice is not.

   

   The apolitical represents the vast spectra of a majority; only butt fucking, baby killing and Muslims can rally the right and left. A new world is dawning, where the real issues are finally breaking the bonds of the Washington consensus’ stranglehold on progressive vision. Yet SOPA reveals that Americans aren’t ready to rise to the challenges, because the 24-hour news cycle is too much and the numbness of humor sites is too little. We proved that it is only willing to engage the political system if it dare shut them off from new episodes of RvB or Dexter. When it really mattered, like the needed but scarcely-existent opposition to NDAA, we couldn’t give two shits.

   

   “The future is a long way away, away,” we can recite until we’re asleep. But it won’t dislodge us from being stuck in the mythology of the past, unwilling to see that the new age thought to be at dawn is actually the present age at dusk.     

     

Faith enterprises and the new political order

 Communities no longer boast the strength they once had. McCarthy and the Cold War can be blamed for our destructive suspicions of neighbor, friend, or congregation member. In exchanging our churches for a welfare state, we have designed a political system that is destined to fail. Not only is it important to criticize the religious right for its moral prophesy, it is also crucial to remember that we are just as guilty of denying the political pluralism.

"WalMart" box churches -- where we purchase salvation at wholesale prices -- are the worst perpetrators in the selective interpretation of the Bible. Those of us who have a cultural tie to religion but do not practice must remember that there is still a valuable ethic proposed by the Bible. In fact, every religion offers a moral code by definition. We must try to not scoff and dismiss those who speak of morals in secular government. But at the same time, we must be angry. We must overturn the tables in temple of the hypocrites and naysayers. Morality has a place... In reality, biblical morals (not those twisted to the agenda and profit goals of the evangelical leadership) have a beautiful place in this society.

Liberation philosophy is a small, and therefore usually overlooked, movement in the Catholic church. It takes the teachings of Jesus to heart. It aims to align political and social goals. It leaves faith to the individual, but demands social justice. For those at the megachurch rallies waving their pickets plastered with the false idols of aborted fetuses, they do not see the simple connection between the present and the two thousand year old message. According to the Christian doctrine, there are only two commands: to love your god and to love your neighbor.

Red Scare aside, it is time to seriously reflect on the latter. Religion in this sense has a very real place in the new political order. "Fags" and "baby killers," Muslims and the divorced; these are the enemies that Falwells and Robertsons erect to distract the religious masses from the true enemy of the pious. Poverty should be the church's enemy, abuse of the Lord's living temple should bring the holy to an angry chorus. Sure, churches have charities, but there is always some motive, whether to gain tax breaks or converts, there is always something in it for the religious leadership. But if you, the religious ones, believed in this conviction, you might find the rift between church and state might shrink. You might find that the nonobservant might be willing to discuss some of your political ideas, and we might begin to work together, because identifying a common goal is what  has been absent in the political dialogue between god fearing red states and 'hedonistic' blue states. Let's unite under the moral goal of ending suffering and let the church take the lead. Thus we solve two goals: we give a purpose to the religious in a secular political system and we eliminate the financially  burdensome and bureaucratic mess we call the welfare state.

 [28 JAN 08]