In a forced pairing when asked if the Woodstock Festival or the Statue of Liberty is more symbolic and representative of the best of our country: which would you choose? Be sure to give the reasons for your answer.
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Statue of Liberty. Liberty gave us the freedom to have a Woodstock, not the other way around.
There's no question that the statue--whose permanence as a mammoth sculpture with historical as well as monumental status--symbolizes much more than a rock concert which ended after a few days 40 years ago.
I really don't understand the obsession the Right has with the Sixties. Actually, its significance lies within the parameters of cultural theorists. The number of actual "participants" was relatively small, and 99% of those moved on decades ago to the rest of their lives. It's all a very old story. Why does it matter now?
Statute of Liberty. Heck, "Give me your tired, huddled masses, yearning to be free," is a liberal sentiment, especially as it seems like such an apt description of contemporary Mexican immigrants, legal or not, so I find it a bit surprising that a xenophobe you esteems it so.
I'd expect you to want to replace the lamp that guides such as these to our shores with a big, honking, STOP sign.
Uhh, the Statue of Liberty, since it's a gift from the French, and we love the French.
The poem was written separately, Stu, and isn't part of the original conception of the Statue. Lazarus hijacked the Statue. She drew a caption and made it say something that Bartholdi would never have imagined the Statue to say.
Brett, there have been ups and downs with the French. Their current leader is far more conservative than our current leader. I rather like Sarkozy.
But this hasn't of course always been the case that their leaders have been more conservative.
Kirby,
The poem was written separately, Stu, and isn't part of the original conception of the Statue. Lazarus hijacked the Statue.
I'm not so sure. To quote you back to you:
Her poem gave the statue a sense of a mother looking out for her longlost children.
Indeed.
The statue is patriarchal, the poem is matriarchal.
That is to say in Bachofen's sense. Wendy is right: patriarchy gives us freedom to be matriarchs, not the other way around.
Actually, to go back to Kirby's original idea - that somehow lady liberty is a Republican while Woodstock is a Democrat - I have a similar question...
Who do you think is more representative of America?
Martin Luther King?
or
Snooki?
My guess is that Democrats will choose MLK and Republicans will choose Snooki.
MLK's resonance had to do with his ability to understand that law begins in dreams, and in responsibilities that we consider common. He understood boundaries, and didn't override them.
Snooki of course doesn't understand any of that. Ethically, she is a dunce.
Someone like OBL is a different kind of person: he understood law, and decided that his law was higher, and that he could ride roughshod over international law in the name of Allah. Most Americans don't care that he was killed in a vigilante action that overrode Pakistan's borders because OBL needed killing.
But BO is a lot like OBL in that he doesn't understand boundaries and borders either. He should have pulled the plug on Fannie and Freddie, which continues to bleed the country of hundreds of billions of dollars (quietly, since the media looks the other way). BO doesn't care about the Arizona laws with regard to the Mexican border. So what if Arizonans are being murdered and kidnapped and forced to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in extra taxes to take care of the illegals and their copious infants? BO doesn't care.
His stealthcare law is widely considered an outlaw measure. Even top state judges have ruled against its constitutionality. BO doesn't care. He doesn't care about other people's boundaries or about the law itself. He just does whatever he wants to do.
As such, he's dangerous. He knows the law, but has decided -- like MLK and like OBL, that he knows better.
Unlike OBL, BO has some decency. Unlike MLK, BO hasn't got the kind of respect for Christian law and scripture that would permit him to find a good rationale within our common set of ethics that would allow him to resonate within the American sphere.
We're all glad he got OBL, but wish he had been able to follow the law, too. I fear that his administration can't follow the law. They can't understand why they even should. They just do whatever they think is right, and God help anybody who says my rights and my laws have been violated.
Snooki hasn't got this kind of power because she could never handle any kind of responsibility. She's not an elected official, and is just a moral dunce. No one would elect Snooki to county dog catcher, much less a higher office.
"But BO is a lot like OBL."
BO Is like OBL in much the same way that you are like Hitler.
Liberty itself or a symbol of liberty? Tough question.
I don't think liberty in Bartholdi's sense was ever meant to be permissiveness in sexual terms, of new levels of decibel creation. It meant the right to establish laws granted to the people, and that the leaders would execute those laws, and not establish their own at the expense of the citizenry, or at the express dissatisfaction of the citizenry.
Liberty in Bartholdi's sense (they were still dealing with Max III in France), meant democracy.
I don't think Woodstock was any kind of electoral breakthrough. Aside from the bans on the stage, there was no freedom of expression. And there was no voting.
I think these are different things we're talking about now, Craig, and we're losing the historical context when we don't remember the lack of rights the French suffered from, or what they wanted at the time, and what they saw in America that they wanted to see instituted in the hexagon.
If I have to choose between Woodstock and the Statue of Liberty, I'll run the Flea Flicker with Tocqueville at flanker.
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