Brooklyn & Give me Liberty or Give me Decadence?

[Terrance Flaherty]

The word decadence didn't mean what it means today either. 

http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/fall99/storyexcerpt.htm

Eric Foner
The Story of American Freedom
An excerpt The Birth of American Freedom 



       "Liberty," of course, did not suddenly enter
        the American vocabulary in 1776; indeed,
        few words were as ubiquitous in the
        trans-Atlantic political discourse of the
        eighteenth century. Colonial America was
        heir to many understandings of liberty, some
        as old as the city-states of ancient Greece,
        others as new as the Enlightenment. Some
        laid the foundations for modern conceptions
        of freedom; others are quite unfamiliar today.

        One common definition in British North
        America defined freedom less as a political
        or social status than as a spiritual condition.
        In the ancient world, lack of self-control was
        understood as a form of slavery, the
        antithesis of the free life. "Show me a man
        who isn't a slave," wrote Seneca. "One is a
        slave to sex, another to money, another to
        ambition." This understanding of freedom as
        submission to a moral code was central to
        the Christian cosmology that suffused the
        world view of the early colonists. Wherever
        it flourished, Christianity enshrined the idea
        of liberation, but as a spiritual condition
        rather than a worldly one. Since the Fall,
        man had been prone to succumb to his lusts
        and passions. Freedom meant abandoning
        this life of sin to embrace the teachings of
        Christ. "Where the Spirit of the Lord is,"
        declares the New Testament, "there is
        liberty." In this definition, servitude and
        freedom were mutually reinforcing, not
        contradictory states, since those who
        accepted the teachings of Christ
        simultaneously became "free from sin" and
        "servants to God."

        By the 1750s, the
        idea of New England's special place in
        God's plan for humanity had been subsumed
        in the more general celebration of the entire
        Anglo-American Protestant world as a
        bulwark against tyranny and popery. Yet the
        Christian understanding of liberty as spiritual
        salvation survived to the Revolution and,
        indeed, our own time. The religious revivals
        of the late colonial era, known to historians
        as the Great Awakening, reinforced this
        understanding of freedom. On the eve of
        independence, ministers like Jonathan
        Boucher were insisting that "true liberty"
        meant "a liberty to do every thing that is
        right, and being restrained from doing any
        thing that is wrong," not "a right to do every
        thing that we please." 

        This equation of liberty with moral action
        flourished as well in a secularized form in the
        Atlantic world of the eighteenth century. If
        religious liberty meant obedience to God,
        "civil liberty" rested on obedience to law. As
        far back as the ancient world, Aristotle had
        cautioned men not to "think it slavery to live
        according to the rule of the constitution." The
        law was liberty's "salvation," not its
        adversary. Modern philosophers of liberty
        also distinguished sharply between
        "unrestrained freedom" and "a life lived under
        the rule of law." Liberty, wrote John Locke,
        meant not leaving every person free to do as
        he desired, but "having a standing rule to live
        by, common to every one of that society,
        and made by the legislative power." As
        Locke's formulation suggests, liberty in its
        civil form depended on obedience to the
        law, so long as statutes were promulgated by
        elected representatives and did not operate
        in an arbitrary manner. Here lay the essence
        of the idea of British liberty, a central
        element of social and political thought on
        both sides of the Atlantic. Until the 1770s,
        most colonists believed themselves part of
        the freest political system mankind had ever
        known. 

Baby's in Black & I'm feeling Blue. 

She's got a great big army of friends since she lives near the navy
yard.
Can't remember the words but my Mom used to sing this one. 


No sleep 'til - Brooklyn

                     Black Beard's weak - Moby Dick's on the tick
                     'Cause I pull out my jammy and squeeze off six
                     My pistol is loaded - I shot Betty Crocker
                     Deliver Colonel Sanders down to Davey Jones' locker
                     Rhymin' and stealin' in a drunken state
                     And I'll be rockin' my rhymes all the way to Hell's
                                     

                            gate. 





Mason doesn't go to Hell's Gate. But he Imagines he does. Hell's Gate
was much more treacherous then. More than once they would blast it with
explosives to make it nava gate able, but I've seen ships as big as
office buildings turn 180 degrees in hell's gate. The Greeks, who
inhabit the lands to the east, call it Charybdis.