It’s been a discouraging and disconcerting few weeks on Planet Earth. What with the Melting Globe hysteria, and especially where our American foreign policy is concerned, our headlong plunge into the surreal has been checked only by the lack of a smiling pronouncement from Secretary Rice to the effect that , “Peace is at hand!”. It won’t be long now…..
So as an antidote, I’ve been reading Hafiz, my old friend, drunk, as always, on wine and God. (He was a Sufi master and poet, a contemporary of Chaucer.) And, curiously, by one of his usual zig zag paths, he extricated me from our current surreal nightmare. When he reflects, in one of his poems, on his eternal preoccupation with music, dancing, wine and the Beloved (God), he finds one reason in the poverty of spirit of his world:
“Because it is low tide,
A very low tide in this age
And around most hearts.

We are exquisite coral reefs,
Dying when exposed to strange
Elements.”

Hafiz says that the element his age yearned for and missed was the gnostic experience of a transcendent deity, “God is the wine-ocean we crave…..” Being also of the red hot gnostic variety (there are more of us now that burning at the stake has gone out of fashion), I, of course, agree with my old drinking buddy. Though cavorting in Hafiz’ “wine-ocean” is not everyone’s thing, one of the derivatives of the experience, a blissful sense of freedom, is an impulse and expression of the human spirit that is common to everyone. It is as basic to our survival and evolution as air is for our bodies. Yet, in much of the world, people must subsist without it’s overt expression in their lives.
Americans live in great good fortune: we have, at every moment of every day of our lives, the incalculable gift of living in freedom — to do, say, create, go, live, and become whatever or wherever we want. In our every public and private gesture we should be champions and exemplars of freedom — of the infinite possibilities of creativity and happiness that blossom when the individual dignity that freedom engenders gets a chance to stand up and become central to the life of a nation. Only a country whose lifeforce is rooted in freedom of the human spirit could ever even imagine “the pursuit of happiness” as a right and national goal.
Freedom, human rights, the pursuit of happiness are central to our life as a nation. Should they not also be the central tenants of our foreign policy?
I can hear the chortles and chuckles over the teacups at the State Department and the CFR from here. Both these overlapping organizations suffer from institutional Alzheimer’s. Not so long ago, America was not too shy, or embarrassed, or too steeped in self-loathing, or other therapeutic misadventures to boldly champion human rights, and freedom, and yes, even the pursuit of happiness — and the world was better for it. Ask anyone living in a former iron curtain country who now enjoys a free society in their homeland. Ask the million Jews who were able to leave the Soviet Union and emigrate to Israel. Ask the former guests of the Soviet gulag. The list goes on.
For those in our government who may need a refresher course in history and how this freedom and human rights thing is actually done in ernest and with real gusto, I recommend a trip over to the Commentary magazine website ( http://www.commentarymagazine.com/cm/main/mainHome.aip ), and a careful reading of the wonderful 1977 essay by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “The Politics of Human Rights”, or of virtually any utterance by Jeane Kirkpatrick (but try her 1979 essay, “Dictatorships and Double Standards”), or of the more recent acts and words of Ambassador John Bolton. It can be done, there just has to be the will to do it. For a start, it would have been good to have heard that our government had insisted upon, as a prerequisite to all other negotiations, an end to the forced labor camps so cherished by Dear Leader in North Korea. I, for one, am, frankly, tired beyond words of hearing about the depth of Vladimir Putin’s alleged soul. It would be a great encouragement, however, to see the institution of a comprehensive program wherein all representatives of our government heartily decried, at every opportunity and in every forum, the erosion of free speech, freedom of the press, and property rights in Russia. It would be refreshing to see such a démarche widely, positively, and loudly reported in the press. One would experience new hope and pride for the future of our own country were our government to stand up against the thuggery as government paradigm that Mr. Putin has imposed over the dead bodies of the heroic Russians who dared to act and speak out as though they were free men and women who had a voice in their country’s future.
Please forgive the distance I’ve rambled, but Hafiz wouldn’t leave off dancing…..