The Lord above made man to help his neighbor
No matter where, on land, or sea, or foam
The Lord above made man to help his neighbor but
With a little bit of luck
With a little bit of luck
When he comes around you won't be home
--With A Little Bit of Luck
My Fair Lady
Of course, democracy has always lived on the razor's edge of the divide between regard for the individual, his choices and prerogatives, and the community, its needs and demands.
Without government, it's every man for himself, but with communism, there is no individual, and we are all simply a flock of birds or a school of fish turning and twisting and darting as one, as a single organism.
This divide is contained in the very first amendment of Bill of Rights which says that government shall not establish any one church so the community organ, Congress, is forbidden to act to create a community church and then it says that government shall not interfere with an individual's practice of whatever religion he chooses. Both clauses (the establishment clause and the free exercise clause) guarantee the individual protection from the community. But the current Supreme Court has turned all this on its head by using the free exercise clause to insure that the establishment clause is eviscerated, when it ruled that the State of Maine had to pay religious schools to educate Maine students when the only school available to students living in remote areas is a religious school. Thus, the Court ensured that the state must establish religion under certain circumstances. Justice Sotomayor has said ironically, but seriously, this decision made separation of church and state unconstitutional.
So now, the Court forces on the State a religion, even when the state, as in New Hampshire, in its state constitution forbids requiring citizens' taxes from supporting any church. The Court forces individuals into supporting a church when the citizens explicitly refuse to do this.
Of course, there is nothing less rugged individualistic than membership in and loyalty to a church. Once you join a church you may find that your own ideas are over ruled by a supreme leader, whether a Pope or an Iman, and if you are a person of faith, your own ideas are quashed by dogma.
On occasion, this adherence to doctrine can make a person anti social--as when the faithful fly an airplane into a building or strap on a suicide vest. As Christopher Hitchens has observed: You can't get a person with a normal sense of decency to do either of these things; you need religion to do that.
There is that old image of the real American as the lone cowboy, the Marlboro man, riding the range alone, living in isolation, off the grid, dependent on no man. The rugged individual who is driving the herd of longhorns toward railheads, where the cattle will be loaded onto trains and shipped to the stockyards of Chicago, where they will enter the great maw of American capitalism and wind up, after many levels of social organization, from slaughterhouses, to local butchers, to restaurants, on the plates of American consumers as steaks or hamburgers.
But, oh, the cowboy, he exists alone, just him and his campfire, slave to no man, lord of the saddle, driving his herd across the plains. A man of the earth and sky.
The only human beings who ever lived more off the grid than the American cowboy, you will be told, were the Plains Indians. But, course, the Indians would be the first to tell you their life depended on a community.
Never mind that. We are talking about life in the saddle here.
The American cowboy needs no community, no one else. He lives off the grid, in his own bubble separated from others. That he is just one cog in a great machine of delivering hamburger meat to McDonalds in the inner city is something he never sees, never has to think about.
And if a farmer, living in glorious independence on his farm raises a herd of cattle infected with Mad Cow Disease, and the only thing standing between his 300 head of mad cows and the 20,000 people who will eat that mad cow meat and then 15 years later wind up drooling and shaking in their beds with the human version of mad cow (Creutzfield-Jacob disease) is the federal government's Food and Drug Administration and the US Dept of Agriculture's dedicated employees, well, that farmer and the cowboy and the live free and die crowd don't want to hear about it.
There was that wonderful scene in the Daniel Day Lewis film, "Last of the Mohicans" where Hawkeye, played by Lewis is asked by Cora Munro, daughter of the British army commander, about the slaughtered family she finds. Their bodies were strewn among the splinters and embers of the wreckage of their cabin, isolated on the frontier, the victims of a Huron war party.
"What were they doing out here, all alone?" Cora asks. "Unprotected, exposed!"
"They could live out here by their own will, owing no tithe or tax to any king or any man. Here they could be free," Hawkeye tells her.
And there is the choice in starkest relief: You can live free, off the grid, but then when the inevitable predator appears, you are free to die.
Small wonder, the appeal to the commonfolk of a king and his castle and army to protect them. They were happy enough to pay for protection with taxes.
Americans, we are told, preferred the frontier, preferred self reliance.
But more recently, we have that updated version of the cowboy, the Hell's Angel motorcycle man, who roars around the countryside, not exactly free from the gasoline pump, but, nevertheless, pumped up and when asked what he has to rebel against, he says, "Whaddaya got?"
The world of the pioneer, the homesteader, the cowboy, the self reliant farmer was hard and most people left it as soon as jobs and places in the cities became available. That America, mostly rural, mostly not electrified, where people got up and milked the cows no matter what was a world of individual responsibility and there was often nobody to help you.
But that was a different America, not the industrialized, internet connected America which thrives on world trade, where Amazon delivery trucks drop off shirts and linens and tableware and tools and guns at your door with just a click of the keyboard key.
The man who chants, "Make America Great Again" and appeals to all those who feel they have lost out in the great pulsating interconnected world which has become their nation.
They want to deny any dependence on anyone else. Community is that middle school which told you you were not college material, that factory that told you you no longer had a job or a paycheck, that policeman who pulled you over for doing 90 mph in a 65 mph zone or 50 mph in a 30 mph zone. Community is that family that fell apart and shipped you out to your grandmother to be raised. Community is that jailhouse where you got incarcerated for beating up your girlfriend. Or that trailer park where your neighbors stole your clothes out of the on site laundromat. Or that clinic where you got your very first dose of Oxycontin.
So the guy who wants to blow it all up, drain the swamp, destroy the government, he's singing your sociopathic song. He knows where you are coming from and going to.
He's your soulmate, your good buddy, and when he gathers a huge crowd around him and gets everyone chanting "Sieg! Heil!" you thrill to all that.
You owe nothing to anyone but that one charismatic guy up on the stage. Soldiers do not pledge to defend the Constitution. They have no conscience to trouble them. They pledge only one thing: To obey and defend the Fuhrer.
It's great to be an American again!
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