Sweet Land of Tyranny
- sofiapbaker
- Jun 3, 2020
- 2 min read
If you had just arrived in America for the first time in early March of this year from, say, the steppes of central Asia, you could have been forgiven for wondering whether all the hype about America as the bastion of liberal democracy was a bit bogus. Let’s suppose our new immigrant, Sam, just off the last flight from Stanistan and yearning to breathe free, wanted to inform himself about the way our government worked from day to day. He begins to peruse the New York Times and watches CNN. He would surely be surprised, perhaps shocked. Expecting the sweet land of liberty, he might conclude that he had ended up instead in something like feudal Japan before the Meiji Restoration. The land, he sees, is ruled over by fifty shoguns who exercise absolute power over the smallest details of their subjects’ lives. Those who, in violation of the shoguns’ arbitrary commands, dare to have their hair cut, walk on dry sand rather than wet, take exercise in public parks, or visit religious shrines are ritually abused by the shogun’s courtiers and pursued by the police. Some are even fined or thrown in jail. Meanwhile the nominal ruler of the country, like the emperors of old Kyoto, issues toothless advisories from his deserted capital. He holds court every day before television cameras where he attacks his courtiers with impotent rage and is treated by them with equal contempt. Back in his former country, Sam from Stanistan had seen old Hollywood movies that boasted incessantly of America’s freedom and democracy, the rule of the people. Now he wonders, where is all that democracy? Was it all just hype and salesmanship? Do the people of America have no voice at all in their government…