FREEDOM IS NOT ENOUGH

Here's one of the most potent and troubling images in Bush's speech:

we have lit a fire as well - a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress, and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world.

William Safire suggests a substitution:

A metaphorical nitpick: he said our liberation of millions lit "a fire in the minds of men ... and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world." I would have replaced "this untamed fire," which could be dangerous, with "the light from this fire," which would have illuminated the "darkest corner." (Once a speechwriter ...)

I prefer the metaphor as it stands, because it hints at the dark side of revolution. Freedom is like a fire: it can energize, it can warm, but it can also destroy. Against Bush's metaphor of freedom-as-fire, consider another metaphor: culture, which can describe both human civilization and plants, and which describes human civilization as a metaphor to the growth of plants, gradual, intricately structured, fragile. They are beautiful in a more enduring and wholesome way than fire is.

As fire burns plants, so the revolutionary embrace of freedom can destroy authority, tradition and culture. Sometimes fire is needed, to clear away overgrown growth, or to melt ice.

A post on an old blog of mine, "In Defense of Tradition," may be re-read as an answer to Bush's radical ideology.

Arguments in defense of tradition and culture against "untamed" freedom have been misapplied as arguments against the Iraq War. Saddam did not represent a culture or a tradition, but the rape thereof. His rule was based not on tradition but simply on systematic murder and pure fear. Iraq was a rare case of a country where even the worst-case scenarios of anarchy and misrule which were likely to follow a war of liberation were better than the status quo.

Unfortunately, when it comes to immigration, most Americans are on the wrong side:

Many adults in the United States want the government to implement tougher immigration controls, according to a poll by TNS released by ABC News and the Washington Post. 76 per cent of respondents believe the U.S. is not doing enough to keep illegal immigrants out.

Even now, my mother-in-law, who has a job, a husband, and an apartment in Russia, couldn't get a visa in order to attend her only daughter's wedding. Our immigration restrictions are already insanely tight, and are damaging our economy and our image in the world, and yet most people want to make the problem worse. It's important to remember that our democracy has never been absolute. The power of the people has always been constrained by the common-law tradition represented by the courts, as well as by civil disobedience on the part of conscientious individuals.

Like segregation in the past, immigration today is the issue on which the will of the people must be defied. I salute George W. Bush and the 7 million illegal immigrants on our soil for doing so.