The Cost of Freedom

Fox News has a new financial show called "The Cost of Freedom". It's interesting that this ought to show up now when people are more seriously considering the cost of our involvement in Iraq. Here I'm assuming the usual WWII understanding of the phrase, and it fits right into the whole amnesiac rhetoric of casting Iraq as Nazi Germany. A new genre: talking points smuggled into show titles. But the phrase is being thrown around in some strange ways. First, it seems to be a rather dire name for a show about money and business. There is a sense in which the businessperson, rather than the soldier, is the martyr for freedom.

Second is the sense that freedom is only available to those who can afford it, that freedom is no longer priceless. Freedom costs money. Those who can afford to get out of New Orleans, for example, have it. Zygmunt Baumann identifies the ability to travel as the new class division in the globalist new millenium. This ethos is signified in a million shiny car ads.

Finally, there is perhaps the most bizarre, yet seemingly dominant meaning of the phrase, which is that freedom itself is bad for business. I say dominant because you can read it as a simple association of two words. Freedom costs, it hurts. That is, "the cost of freedom" is code for the value system of the advancing corporate-fascist state. The kind of freedom enshrined in the Bill of Rights, for example, must be stamped out. Freedom, if left to its idle hands, has a habit of questioning wartime profiteering, demanding all kinds of inefficiencies like public parks and Social Security and Freedom of Information Acts. The citizen of the corporate-fascist state does not have freedom (though it is said that one may acquire it for a price); this citizen rather has duties to The Economy, to suit up in a designer hairshirt of debt every year in a bizarre ritual mix of aceticism and hedonism to please the latest avatar-god, Santa. (And no, you do not have to wish for it because someday it will be Christmas all year long!) Now I think I truly understand the phrase "Freedom Isn't Free" when I see it on a car window next to a decal of a child peeing on Brand X. The hidden meaning is plain to those who do not understand irony. Freedom isn't free anymore.