These days it's easy to drown in all the financial news from Europe. I'm starting to admire the feistiness of the Irish. They have protested the bailout forced on them by foreign bankers and European bureaucrats. We will have to wait for Ireland's new government to find out how much spine the Irish actually have. I'm pleased with the blogosphere for refusing to go along with calling it a bailout "of Ireland"; rather, it is a bailout of the stupid banks in the UK and Germany who loaned money into the real estate bubble in Ireland.
Ahh dear, I'm probably willing to romanticize the people in any country who have the gumption to stand up to the political and financial elite. Yes, that sounds pitchfork populist. In Irrational Man, William Barrett wrote some relevant things in his chapter on Sartre:
The [World War II] Resistance came to Sartre and his generation as a release from disgust into heroism. It was a call to action, an action that brought men to the very limits of their being, and in hearing this call man himself was not found wanting. He could even rediscover his own irreducible liberty in saying NO to the overpowering might of the occupying forces.
The essential freedom, the ultimate and final freedom that cannot be taken from a man, is to say No.
Americans used to have that quality. It's still part of our mythology, but with each passing year the myth becomes more threadbare. Consider the latest depredations of the Federal Reserve, EPA, and TSA. In fact only about three generations of Americans -- say, 1770 to 1865 -- were proud and defiant.
Comments