Safety equipment from the ferry to Staten Island, New York

America can only be saved by what it’s trying to destroy

– Don DeLillo, Americana 1971

A secular society will regard a human life holy and immutable, because in the absence of Gods and Grand Narratives it used to be the only known source of purpose, greatness and the holy. (A Grand Narrative unto itself.) America has gone one step beyond that. The human life is no longer regarded holy. Any human life (even an American), any human right (even in America) can now be compromised for the sake of The Grand American Freedom. It is a core component of war: valuing some conception of freedom above human lives. By waging an eternal, unwinnable war on the general concept of terror, the rulers of USA has laid the rhetorical basis for permanently putting their void idea of of freedom in place of humanism.

'Freedom' – it is really 'happiness', that fat, dull nihilist god of the postmodern age thinly disguised in a cape of heroism: Happiness and Freedom, the two faces of the Millennial Joker. Together they form the vanishing point for all purpose, ethics and choice, the infinitesimal moment of axiomatic evanescence terminating all concerns, giving our lives perspective, imbuing it with beauty, purpose and greatness. It needs us to die for it, and unless we were willing our lives would mean nothing to us.

The war on terror is at its core an institution of perverted hedonsim with synthetic heroism-flavor added to drown out the bitter aftertaste. Freedonism. We need to get a grip: Freedom is a powerful companion, but it is a heartless god.

freedonism (n) the doctrine that freedom is the sole or chief good in life.