Freedom Geezers And Gran Torino

Take a look at any photos from around the world, taking special care that you look at people demonstrating for freedom, particularly old people. Notice how young they seem. Even the gapped-tooth, wizened men, stooped over from age, seem to skip like young calves. The old women, sometimes covered, sometimes not, sometimes shaking their fists in defiance, sometimes standing up to the very forces which have been dispatched to destroy their voices...even the aged ones with the loose folds under their arms, the ones who have indulged in starches and cereals a bit too much, these are suddenly sturdy, stoic, and beauteous.

Clint Eastwood was a Gran Torino geezer, and he was magnetic, for he was a force of freedom from oppression.

What is there about freedom which that re-invigorates us; that makes it the fountain of youth? Is is the fact that it is the very basis of our dreams, our hopes, and our aspirations? Now look about you at the society which has been created in our country, the USA. Where is there freedom? Does freedom lie in the fact that every eight years or so we may now look forward to experiencing not just a recession, but something much worse, made worse by the insatiable greed of those who run the country? Does freedom lie in the fact that we have a faceless bureaucracy running our lives, taking our monies, feathering their own nests with top-of-the-shelf health care and pensions, while the rest of us have to scrounge around for a break? Does freedom lie screaming and yelling about freedom on cable TV? Our media - the place where we are supposed to get our information from - not only did not see the Great Economic Crisis coming, but now that it has arrived seem to think they actually can delineate it for us, and seem to know how to fix it ! Look at us. We are slaves. We are Mamlukes. The Mamlukes of Egypt were young men taken from Circassia and brought to Egypt by their Muslim masters to be slaves. They became Muslim and turned the tables by becoming the rulers of Egypt in the Middle Ages. We are Mamlukes: slaves who rule, a mighty state of slaves. We are enslaved to this corruption of a society which either does not believe in God, or believes in Super God: creating Idols of our unbeliefs or our credulous beliefs! But we will not take the time to make the approach to God - usually a long and time consuming process.

God is not the Alpha being, some sort of super-primate...only spirit! He does not rule by intimidation, nor did He create slaves to be despot over. He created so that there should be freedom from chaos. We are slaves to our lusts and desires. We are slaves to our fears. Look at the record number of guns and ammunition being bought and dare to look me in the face and deny that we are slaves to our fears and hatred. I defy you to do it. We hate and we call it freedom. Our love becomes pornography and we call it freedom. Our great industrial powerhouse destroyed itself by its own hand, and we called it entrepreneurial freedom. We have taken the stories of American Greatness and turned them into death-seeking dramas of horrible despair and great crime and overwhelming corruption. I will never forget the fall of 2008, watching Wall Street make even bigger fools of themselves, and remembering the story of the Tower of Babel, and how the arrogant were driven across the face of the Earth.

The face of America is not the face of youth. It is the face of the grifter and wise-acre, the cunning bucket shop boys and poor-box johnnies. The face of America is too, too old and wise in the ways of the corruption it calls the world. It is the boyish face of Bernie Madoff. There are only a few circumstances that need be changed for Bernie Madoff to become a celebrity idol, just as John Dillinger is celebrated in a new movie, Public Enemies.

Just a few changes and that old boy face would be seen as charming...a genius, another "boy wonder"!

We need a new face.

Clint Eastwood gives a charming face, but it is an old face set against the decay of the present, reinvoking the imaginary past, where everything is somehow impossibly golden.

Gran Torino is a metaphor for the destruction of America. The Gran Torino automobile is an artifact of the past. The roots of the film's plot are back in Vietnam, 40 plus years ago, yet still as in your face as the morning sun.

Freedom here is a car that don't drive.

Freedom here is a globalized sweat-shop.

Freedom here is a maquiladora, a factory free to escape...but for us, there is no escape, no exit...

...freedom here is Chevy in the Hole in Flint, Michigan, where there is nothing but memory...

and hell is living in the vestigial glories of the past with all the other prisoners.