Give Me Liberty!: Freeing Ourselves in the Twenty-First Century

by Gerry Spence

Overview

Here, in this landmark personal work, Gerry demonstrates how, despite the democratic rhetoric we hear and believe, we have become enslaved. All of us are trapped by a complex web of corporate and governmental behemoths he calls the "New Slave Master" that today controls our airways, educates our children, and manages every facet of our lives.

Yet, far from being a pronouncement of gloom, Give Me Liberty! is an inspiring and visionary work. In the spirit of his bestselling How to Argue and Win Every Time, Spence expounds on his philosophy, thus empowering us to:

Liberate the slave within, redefine success, unchain the spirit, escape the religions of work and beliefs that enslave us, free ourselves with what he calls our "magical weapon."

Like Thomas Paine's Common Sense, Give Me Liberty! captures the underlying malaise of a country, transforming it into a national dialogue that promises a groundswell for a meaningful democracy in America in the coming years.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781429908993
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/15/1999
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	389
File size:	660 KB

About the Author

Gerry Spence has spent a lifetime representing the poor, the injured, and the forgotten. He has tried many nationally known cases, including the murder defense of Randy Weaver, the Karen Silkwood case, the case against Penthouse magazine for Miss Wyoming, and hundreds of others, both criminal and civil. He is the founder of the Trial Lawyer's College and is a well-known television commentator. He continues to practice law in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

Spence is the author of nine books including How to Argue and Win Every Time, O.J.: The Last Word, The Making of a Country Lawyer, and From Freedom to Slavery.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

We, the People, the New American Slaves

To speak of atrocious crimes in mild language is treason to virtue.

— EDMUND BURKE, BRITISH STATESMAN

Man is born free, yet he is everywhere in chains.

— JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU, FRENCH PHILOSOPHER, OPENING SENTENCE OF THE SOCIAL CONTRACT, 1762

— THE PICNIC —

On the broad park lawn on the Fourth of July you can hear the people talking. The American dream is vanishing. They say it like this:

"Things ain't like they used to be." It's the old boy in the straw cowboy hat and the five-dollar sunglasses talking; Alabama, they call him. He was laid off when the company was downsized.

"Yeah," Mac, the guy in the Nike baseball cap, says. And then he says nothing more.

Sometimes a sense of helplessness oozes up from the under-mind, and we put it down in the same way we fight nausea. Although we should be in perpetual genuflection before the gods because we are the fortunate citizens of this blessed land, still, without the power to manage our lives and to alter the course of our nation, we are not free.

On the eve of this new century, we wonder what has happened to the glory and the dream. To be sure, we have come far. African-Americans no longer sit in the back of the bus. Women have realized their power and exhumed their rights. We change parties every four years or eight, and quit our jobs as we please, all of which argues for our freedom.

How can we be slaves if we can quit General Motors and go to work for General Dynamics, or General Foods, or General Electric? Still, when we lose our twenty-year middle-management employment, will we find a similar job elsewhere? Or will we end up where millions have — first on the unemployment rolls, and later working as a security guard or a salesclerk at the local shopping mall, or even at both jobs, for little more than minimum wage?

Alabama is talking to his friend. "I tol' the boss when he give me the pink slip, 'Listen, pal, I was looking for a job when I found this one. So shove it.'" Then Alabama pops another Bud.

But the right to come and go in and out of one's employment imposes upon the New American Slave the often impossible task of marketing himself. He has become the "loose slave," a slave without a master, one who, in this new-age servitude, faces the risk of perishing in the wilderness of unemployment.

Yet if we can exercise all of the amenities of freedom — if we can quit our jobs, holler at our bosses, and say what we wish if we have the nerve to say it; if Alabama can call the president "a dirty two-bag pile of shit"; if we can burn the flag and worship whatever god we please; if the brown shirts must knock politely with a warrant in their hands before they can drag us off to frightening places — are we not free?

That we can travel in the country wherever we please and sleep at night without extreme fear of the police at the door — does this not mean that we enjoy as much freedom as do any civilized people in a complex society? And if not, do we wish to know?

What favor do we provide the polar bear born in the zoo by returning him to the harsh frozen tundra of the northland? What service does some country lawyer, some late American heretic, perform in printing these impieties? LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT, the bumper stickers on the cars of patriots used to read during the Vietnam War. GET WITH IT OR GET OUT.

But I thought then, as I do now, that the true test of liberty is the right to test it, the right to question it, the right to speak to my neighbors, to grab them by the shoulders and look into their eyes and ask, "Are we free?" I have thought that if we are free, the answer cannot hurt us. And if we are not, must we not hear the answer?

What if we have never known freedom and have been taught to embrace our bondage, to fight for it, even to worship it?

What if we have been born in a cage like the polar bear at the San Diego Zoo, and having known nothing else, we accept the cage as freedom?

What if our minds have been captured and played with, our minds molded as a child molds clay, our minds formed from birth to fit within the skull of the New American Slave?

What if our minds have been soaked in the brine of television, the voice of the corporate state that speaks to us for an average of more than four hours every day from cradle to grave and converts us into that great amorphous glob called the American consumer?

What if we are taught in school the state religion called capitalism, a religion that condemns as heresy all that interferes with the monied class extracting yet more money from those least able to protect themselves? What if the state's religion is the religion of the dollar, a faith based on a sort of economic Darwinism?

What if a form of subtle slavery has been taught to us, made acceptable to us, made to appear even as freedom itself? What if we are not free, but instead are taught the faith of freedom, as Muslims and Christians and Buddists are taught their faiths?

— WHAT I MEAN BY "SLAVERY" —

By slavery — the old or the new — I mean that state in which the person has no effective control over the course of his or her life. Despite his freedom to jump from job to job or junket by jet from beach to beach, if no matter how he schemes or toils he cannot explore his boundless uniqueness, if he has lost his only power, the power of the self, he is enslaved.

In the same way, the people of a nation are enslaved when, together, they are helpless to institute effective change, when the people serve the government more than the government serves them.

When the course of government, like a descending glacier, cannot be altered by any action, by any petition, by any protest, by any desperate striking out, the nation is enslaved.

When the people have at last discovered that it makes no palpable difference to their well-being which party takes power and, in despair, display the pain of their impotence by shunning the polls on election day, the people are enslaved.

When the voice of the people has been silenced, and with straining ears they can hear only the shrieking of the New Master selling its trinkets over the people's airways, the people are enslaved.

At last, when the same smiling politicians plunder the nation, their hands in the pockets of the corporations, and the people cannot prevent it, the people are enslaved.

The slavery of which I speak lurks in the memories of unjust laws we call precedents. The slavery of which I speak reveals itself in our social values, in our apathetic, often unconscious acceptance of the way of things.

To be sure, there have been changes, but the changes have occurred within the same historical structure of servitude. The structure does not change. The sense of class does not change. The notion that the few of power are endowed with the right to dominate the many who are weak does not change. The right to use up human beings for profit, to toss them out when they grow old, the right to downsize, to take away their work, to belittle the poor, to see laboring men and women and, yes, even children as the mere cost of labor — as numbers — none of this changes.

Such are the remnants of the slave state that preceded us. We have been saturated with it under different labels, perhaps better labels: "the free market," we call it, or "free enterprise." Easy words. Words we accept at the Fourth of July picnic along with the fried chicken and apple pie while the band plays "America the Beautiful."

If we are to test our freedom, we must be willing to reexamine our birth as a nation, for from the seed comes the flower. Those who boast that their ancestors came over on the Mayflower or took part in the American Revolution must remember that the progenitors of black America arrived on slave ships, in spaces no larger than small coffins. Chained together by neck and leg, they lay in the dark, choking from the stench of their own excrement. An observer claimed that the deck of one slave ship was "so covered with blood and mucus that it resembled a slaughter house." Some killed others in desperate attempts to breathe. By 1800, 10 to 15 million Africans had been transported to America as slaves, and some have estimated that two out of three captured Africans died before they were successfully installed as slaves in "the land of the free."

— AS THE SAPLING, SO GROWS THE TREE —

Can we not see them — Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the others — waving the Declaration of Independence in the face of King George III, crying that, as a self-evident truth, "all men are created equal"? And in George Washington's slave quarters, when the light of liberty penetrated the fog of hypocrisy, three hundred African men and women huddled half naked and half starved, their backs bearing the scars of the overseer's whip.

Our failing memories serve our servitude. We have sorted out the ugly, and in only a few generations we have frilled them at the edges with such images as the benevolent master who loved his slaves in much the same way as the Park Avenue dowager loves her poodle. At school our children are provided but a romantic trot across the infamous centuries of slavery that lie at our foundation. But the stench of the old slave state has permeated every pore of the grand enterprise.

America was founded on slavery and prospered from the sweat and misery of black slaves for nearly two hundred years before the Civil War. In the four years of that slaughter, a war that produced as a by-product the emancipation of 4 million black slaves, 620,000 Americans died. In that terrible war, 360,000 Yankees were sacrificed, and at least 260,000 Rebels — in the end, over clashing notions of freedom. More Americans were lost in that infamous conflagration than the total casualties incurred in all of our country's other wars through Vietnam.

And now, less than a century and a half later, do we think that terrible war purified the nation? We have fought other wars for freedom, and masses of our young have died in them as well. We have marched. We have beseeched the courts. We have put our faces into the faces of the politicians, those unctuous devils of slick words. But white and black alike, whatever the color of the hide, when we test it, are we free?

The struggle between the opposing forces of liberty and slavery has always raged in America, even from the beginning. Perhaps that has been the defining energy of the nation. The Pilgrims, too, were at the feeding roots of the nation. One sees them in the mind's eye, all severely stated in their black and white, the tall Pilgrim's hat, the prim bonnets, the people stern and smile-less, devoted to the virtue of work, of prudence and brotherly love.

We see John Winthrop, a Puritan, standing in 1630 on the deck of the flagship Arbella as it lumbers in the middle of the stormy Atlantic. He is a founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and is addressing the simple, anxious flock who have come with him, these Puritans who have lately escaped the religious persecution of the English. Turning a profit, although an acceptable goal, was not the dominant theme. "Man," he proclaims, "is commanded to love his neighbour as himself. Upon this ground stands all the precepts of the moral law, which concerns our dealings with men."

He holds on to the mast in the rolling seas. "This law," he admonishes, "requires two things. First, that every man afford his help to another in every want or distress. Secondly, that he perform this out of the same affection which makes him careful of his own goods. ... We must be knit together, in this work, as one man," he warns. The Puritans stressed community. "We must entertain each other in brotherly affection," says Winthrop. "We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others' necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others' conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labour and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body."

At opposition to the forces of slavery was the man whose body would soon be moldering in the grave. Abolitionist John Brown, echoing the sermons of the Puritans of two centuries before, spoke of the Scriptures, saying that "it teaches me further to remember them that are in bonds as bound with them. Now if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel and unjust enactments, I say, let it be done."

And it was done, his body, sprung from the hangman's trap, hanging by the noose, swinging in soft, silent cadence to the marchers on each side who soon would clash in support of the opposing forces surrounding the issue of slavery.

A network of abolitionists — many of them black — known as the Underground Railroad proved once more that eternal paradox — that law and morality are often at irreconcilable odds. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 made it unlawful for any citizen to engage in the moral act of helping fugitive slaves escape. Yet the Underground Railroad, begun in the 1780s under Quaker auspices, had long since provided freedom for countless escaped slaves who traveled by night and who, during the day, were hidden by sympathetic whites and free blacks. At the borders, "conductors" met the fugitives and guided them safely into Canada. Harriet Tubman, sometimes called the Moses of the blacks, and Levi Coffin, a Cincinnati Quaker, were famous for their rescues. The great freedom fighters of the nineteenth century, among them William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, fought the mobs and endured the jails of petty politicians on behalf of the African slave. Indeed, the enmity created over the unlawful aid given runaway slaves and the heroic accounts of their escapes fueled the flames between North and South that would eventually excite the states into civil war.

But the underlying conflict of that great war has not been put to rest. The struggle between the opposing forces of freedom and slavery rages on; it has only gone once again underground, where it smolders and occasionally erupts into violence. But mostly we trudge on, unaware of its pernicious presence, accepting its grasp on us as the way of things.

That many of the Founding Fathers — including Washington, Madison, and Jefferson — were slave owners is seen as but a fascinating contradiction. We have grown used to contradictions and accept them. Democracy and the corporate ownership of our politicians is a contradiction. Free speech and the control of the airways by the corporate few is a contradiction. Free enterprise and vast numbers of the population who are so poor they cannot begin to rise up from the pit of poverty is a contradiction. That the Founders made their fervid entreaties for liberty while they laid their whips to the backs of their slaves was a contradiction explainable, we say, by the fact that slavery was an accepted institution, acceptable because that abomination had become the way of things.

Had these courageous writers of the Declaration of Independence, those humane Founding Fathers who built "that new refuge for humanity" upon the backs of black slaves, so cultured the virulent germ of slavery that, by the time of the Revolution, the germ had taken an irrevocable hold in America as the way of things? Indeed, has the germ of slavery, mutated to its present form, proven to be indestructible?

The first slave ship bearing twenty African slaves docked in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. And the curse spread. By the time of the American Revolution, the prevailing religion in America was profit, a religion demanding freedom for those with the power to pursue it and slavery for the helpless whose labor produced it. Slavery could be immensely profitable. James Madison told a visitor shortly after the American Revolution that he could make $257 a year on every Negro, and that the cost to him for the poor wretch's keep was in the neighborhood of but $12 or $13 annually.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Give Me Liberty!"
by .
Copyright © 1998 Gerry Spence.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Title Page,
PART I - We, the People, the New American Slaves,
ONE - We, the People, the New American Slaves,
TWO - Man, the Enslaving Mammal,
THREE - Recognizing the New American Slave,
FOUR - Women in Chains,
FIVE - Arguments for Slavery,
SIX - The Enslaving Myth of Prosperity,
SEVEN - The New Slave Master,
EIGHT - The Slaves Revolt,
PART II - Freeing the Self,
NINE - Empowering the Self,
TEN - The Slave Within,
ELEVEN - Freeing the Spirit, Releasing the Soul,
TWELVE - The Religion of Work,
THIRTEEN - The Power of Aloneness,
FOURTEEN - The Magical Weapon: Withholding Permission to Be Defeated,
FIFTEEN - Black and White Together,
SIXTEEN - Security, the One-Way Ticket to Slavery,
SEVENTEEN -Success Redefined,
PART III - Freeing the Nation,
EIGHTEEN - The Myth of Democracy,
NINETEEN - The Benevolent Dictator,
TWENTY - The Media: The Perpetual Voice of the Master, the Abiding Ear of the Slave,
TWENTY-ONE - The Theft of Our Voice,
TWENTY-TWO - The Death of a Constitution: Pancake Democracy,
TWENTY-THREE - Creating the Corporate Conscience,
TWENTY-FOUR - The Death of Our Warriors,
TWENTY-FIVE - Judges, the Master's Henchmen,
TWENTY-SIX - Free at Last,
OUR CRY FOR LIBERTY,
Also by Gerry Spence,
NOTES,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
INDEX,
ABOUT THE AUTHOR,
Copyright Page,