tHE nEW wORLD oRDER

Matt Hong, NY

Letter to a Friend in Washington D.C.,

We are born free, but forever we are in chains. Rousseau had observed this truth which was to be immediately succeeded by a truism.... Forgive me for this repetition of the obvious. I am simply responding to your papers.

You begin by saying that we as individuals have obligated ourselves in a social contract of natural liberties. Our multitudes have gathered and in this united body, no one can assail any of its members without offending the body, nor can the body by assailed without the members feeling the effect.

Such is the theory of a social contract among a united people. And yet in America, the body persists in becoming assailed at the expense of certain underprivileged groups.

It is often ignored that the political order of democracy is fueled by its economic structure. I am concerned about your enthusiasm toward what is effectively called democracy in America.

You acknowledge at least that to sanction the right of occupancy on any piece of land outside of titles, it must be through labor and cultivation, not by vain ceremony. Rousseau had asked, when Nunez Balboa, standing on the shore, proclaimed possession of the South Seas and all of South America in the name of the crown of Castille, was that enough to dispossess all of the inhabitants? I will answer yes, it is enough, enough insofar as it has been, and still is, a social and historical fact.

Not many years before Balboa, Columbus himself, with no less audacity, set off that same wheel of conquest, colonization, and imperialism.

American Democracy has evolved into a terrible beauty, a Kafkaesque sublime, a gateway intended for us but closed by our own volition. I do not contest the right of the majority rule. I simply appeal from the sovereignty of the people to the sovereignty of humanity.

The system has so efficiently mechanized all of its shortcomings that the cycles of inequity have become the terrible engines of this democracy upon which a force was found so powerful as to be not unlike a perfect monarchy. Mechanisms to foster apathy among the people, while preserving a vague notion that they had a choice in this matter, are constantly in motion. And the media, succumbing to the most base desires of the public, delivers what will sell, not what is sound. This miserable semblance of self and political affirmation distorts the true process of self-government.

With stratifications of wealth and poverty and a quota of welfare and unemployment, the upward/downward mobility becomes the apparatus of this economic structure. Balancing a careful form of wrongness by the right measure, this prowess acclaims its essence in its inequity. This we call opportunity.

Between the glass ceiling and the trap door, and the many closets for the socially deviant, this architecture of dissolution has its archways engraved with the old dictum, Give unto Caesar. But where is the decency? Perhaps you believe I have relinquished my right to speak on this matter, having been ex-patriated. Still, it is about human decency. Let us not forget of our origins. Our history is too short.

Paris