City air under threat ©2005 UrbisMedia
In the Middle Ages the Germans had an adage, stadt luft macht frei , city air make one free. During an historical period when religious authorities and the manorial system were severe limitations on human freedom, cities were places of relative liberty. Since then cities have continued, not without period of interruption, to be engines of liberation. There are many reasons for this, but it is not the purpose of this essay to delve into them.
Yesterday, three days after The Boosh took the oath of office in chilly Washington, D.C., Vikor Yushchenko took his oath in Kiev. The temporal juxtaposition of these two events is not without some ironies. Mr. Yushchenko would not have been standing to take his oath (the assassins who laced his food with dioxin notwithstanding) were it not for the throngs of his supporters who occupied the streets of Kiev because they would not stand for the corrupted results of the election that putatively installed his opponent, Viktor Yanukovych. The city air of Kiev was full of the largely peaceful protest that these Ukranians wanted their democracy and weren’t going to have a Moscow-backed puppet shoved down their throats. It was the rural areas and parts of Ukraine aligned with Russia that supported. After two tension-filled months the proper Viktor was the victor.
[It is another level of irony that this was called “The Orange Revolution,” when Mr. Yushchenko was nearly killed with the dioxin, the “Agent Orange” of the Vietnam war.]
Yushchenko’s victory probably would not have been possible if Ukraine had a Supreme Court with Antonin Scalia sitting as a justice. The Ukraine court ruled, properly, to re-do the election, this time with much greater electoral scrutiny. Under such glare Mr. Yushchenko prevailed with an uncontestable plurality. Ukranians were not going to be denied a fair shot at democracy.
The U.S. administration applauds this result as well. And, there’s an irony. Where were the American people when their election was stolen from them in 2000 (and maybe even again in 2004)? Where were the throngs in the streets demanding that there be a full recount in Florida, or that there be a new election? They sat silently by as Antonin Scalia was allowed to select their president for them. Yushchenko fought his way through a poisoning; but where was Al Gore in leading the cause for a fair election? The Ukranians demanded, the Americans demurred.
And so, while George Bush laces his inaugural speech with numerous references to “freedom,” “liberty” and “democracy,” it is the Ukranians who are more deserving to be the exemplars of the democratic spirit, not the scarcely or un-elected Bush. Another irony: Bush’s inaugural speech (from the man who ran in 2000 against the notion of “nation-building) was a bellicose warning that he plans to re-make the world in his image of democracy. It was a tossing down of the gauntlet to selected (his Saudi buddies notably left off then list) undemocratic regimes that they are going to have to kneel to Bush’s questionable allegiance to free and fair democratic elections. Democracy out of the barrel of a gun.
Bush’s vision for America harkens back to the Middle Ages, when religious authority and the economic elites dominated the productive capital of the time, primarily agricultural, dominated society, and ruled it primarily in their own interests and maintenance of power. The Feudal superstructure aligned authority with those who controlled military power. Plagues, threats to the sovereignty of the fiefdoms and principality, or challenges to ecclesiastical authority, from within or without, were portrayed as threats to the entire ecology that was a rigid caste system of sovereigns and serfs. Small wonder that a whiff of city air made it hard to ‘keep ‘m down on the farm.’
It was for the most part the cities and urbanized areas of the country that supported Kerry in this election. A perusal of the red and blue states and other election demographics makes that clear. Their urban counterparts in Ukraine were the supporters of Mr. Yushchenko. Think of the wellsprings of democracy and you have to think of 5 th Century B.C. Athens, or revolutionary Paris, cities. Where are the Americans who breathe city air, but do not take to city streets? They sit quietly by and watch the monarchical pomp as their democracy crumbles. It takes balls to demand your democracy, and I look to the urbanites of Kiev, not Kanses, when it comes to exemplars of making city air free.
___________________________________
©2005, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 1.23.2005)