“The Libyan people cannot kneel, cannot surrender; we are not women,” –

–      –  Madcap Despot Muhammar Qaddafy in an audio recording broadcast on al-Rai, a
Syrian national public media outlet.

Muhammar Qaddafy is hanging on to his freedom, at the moment, anyway, and his thug buddies in the Assad Administration are continuing to provide an outlet for his rants. The latest was curious; granted he is a committed believer in the Patriarchy, but his casual disparagement of half of the citizens of his bedraggled country- not to mention the globe- seems curious for a guy who kept a footlocker of portrait pics of former National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice.

Maybe it is also the casual way he stripped his people- all of them- of the liberties that ought to be the birthright of humankind.

I was thinking about that as I sipped a stiff vodka with Adam-the-Polish-Lifeguard. The Rules have slipped away at the pool deck, just as they have in Tripoli. I got my swim in, a full hour, and felt the chill of the night air on my wet skin. I went back upstairs and got some clothes on and returned with a thermos of pre-mixed V&Ts.

I don’t know how many rule violations I was contravening, and did not care. Neither did Adam, as he sipped from the red plastic cup I brought down for him. His last swimmer of the evening- the Malaysian guy from the 7th floor- was paddling slowly up and down the length of the pool, his body a dark bulk silhouetted by the bright pool light in the blue water.

I was relaxing at the lifeguard station- another violation- and we recapped the memorable and existential moments of Adam’s summer in America, and his sadness at leaving our little family. He is headed for Miami today, and then back to eastern Poland to resume his life.

The end of he season means the rules are dead, too, to be re-created with passion again in the spring as the various factions and constituencies of the pool deck attempt to organize our aquatic society in the image they desire.

I smoked openly. There was no one around to care, and Adam did not. We talked about his country and ours, and embraced when it was time for the padlock to go on the gate, and for our time together to end.

We documented the Swimmers with whom Adam spent most of his time this season in group photos: me, the irritating little Creole, the son of a Ukrainian Nazi, the Argentine, the original Clandestine Service Officer, the Doc, the Restaurateur and the Professor.

None of us, except the Creole, had tried to enforce their will on anyone else. I padded up the 50 steps to the fourth floor and looked out at the darkness from the balcony as Adam peddled away into the wide world. Before we parted, he showed me a photo of himself from his laptop taken in front of a massive public Soviet-era building in Lublin.

“Kay Gee Bee,” he said, drawing out the consonants for the acronym of the Committee for State Security. “I stop only briefly for picture.”

Apparently the memory of oppression is a lasting one, even for young people who could not possibly remember a time when the state security apparatus ran roughshod over the freedom of the people.

Accordingly, I was struck this morning by Timothy Egan’s piece in the electronic pages of the NY Times.

You know by now I have an uneasy relationship with the Gray Lady of Manhattan, but despite its manifold failings and gaping blind-spots, it serves as the touchstone of the rightly maligned Mainstream Media.

What set Timothy off to search for two fingers of whiskey, neat, was the coming Ken Burns series on Prohibition that will air on the other mother lode of modern morality, National Public Television.”

I did not watch Mr. Burn’s series on Baseball, which is something I may or may not get around to on DVD or whatever media might exist when I get to it. His latest project is on the Great Experiment in social engineering that somehow nagged to jam an intrusive government into the most private of places.

It gave rise to both organized and disorganized crime, of course, and amended the Constitution to abrogate the basic liberties contained in the Bill of Rights. With the passing of the 18th Amendment, the prohibitionists took away the right to make on of the most fundamental choices: what a citizen might put in their own body.

How that all came to happen in the Land of the Free is quite a story, and it has a compelling echo in what is going on today.  In fact, I would offer that that it is difficult to even use that phrase without air quotes. I mean, we have been stripped of so much in the interest of security that they must call them the whirling Founders now.

Timothy has a certain progressive sensibility, and I acknowledge the legitimacy of his concerns about the militant right and the implacable Tea Party tyrants: the fight against gay marriage, women’s choice, even the end of direct election of the US Senate. These all appear to be clear violations of our liberty, impositions directly on our freedom.

Interestingly, he does not address the petty tyrants of the TSA, the DEA, the IRS, the FDA, the EPA and the litany of three-letter agencies that want to outlaw foods, take away guns or unilaterally reduce carbon footprints regardless of the impact on society.

In the case of the ATF, the Bureau is actually arming the Narco-terrorists with automatic weapons, and permitting them to import cocaine in exchange for information on other Cartels.

It is amazing. Purely amazing.

When we were getting ready for the big trip to Detroit we explored the impact of Prohibition on the wide-open rip-roaring Motor City. I will be interested to see what Mr. Burns does with his documentary of the times.

It is hard to believe what happened, but we have gone so much further than that now.  As Timothy notes, “…the urge to dictate the private actions of citizens is a character trait that has never left the American gene pool.”

That urge is rising, all around us. I think I need a drink.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com