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mammon, the god, as our money ought to say, in whom we bank and trust.
    The symbol our enemies chose was an appropriate one, and our failure to own up, even now, to what we often fly our flags for—how we are likely to seek justice mainly through litigation, or how our generosity and concerns tend to exhibit themselves by the size of our monetary contributions—is our defenseless underbelly, our possibly incurable weakness, because the fireworks and the crowds are made of money, too; the funnel cake vendors will complain when our custom declines; we shall celebrate as much in shops as at potlucks; our spirits will rise with the markets; we shall win this war without losses, endangering mostly drones; and crab-voiced codgers like me can sweeten the sour taste in our mouths by eating patriotically packaged cookies, available in sacks from machines, born and baked, they say, in the USA, to be offered to the palate in the shape of Uncle Sam himself, or his hat, or Lady Liberty, or the letters USA, and even the Grand Old Flag itself, though I notice, as the cookie commences its crumble, that the flag boasts but nine stars … well … now six. I wonder which states they stood for.

WHAT FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION MEANS, ESPECIALLY IN TIMES LIKE THESE
    Winnie, the housewife of Samuel Beckett’s play
Happy Days
, appears, as the curtain rises and her day begins, to be buried nearly to her armpits in earth, in the monotonous routines of her English life. Winnie may be partly immobilized, but she still has her comforts: her parasol, for instance, which she can open against the glare of an incessant light, and her shopping bag, from which she can still remove her possessions: a toothbrush and a tube of paste, cosmetic mirror, small revolver, handkerchief, pair of specs. And, of course, she can still speak, still pray. “Begin, Winnie,” she says. “Begin your day.”
    When the curtain rises again for the second act, Winnie is imbedded (Beckett’s suggestive word) like a post in the ground to the precincts of her chin, so that she cannot move her head either from side to side or up and down, but can only wiggle her lips, wrinkle her nose, blink her lids, swivel her eyes; while in place of her parasol a hat sits on her head, and her bag lies out of her reach, out of her sight, and comfortless. “Hail, holy light,” she says, undeterred.
    Suppose we were to take Beckett’s symbolism a stage further. Imagine yourself to be without a body and thus incapable of any effect. Imagine yourself aware of the world without any part of yourself active in it, so that you saw without eyes, felt surfaces, heard sounds, identified scents, tasted sweets, without the use or need of a single sense; that you thought and felt and longed and hoped andloved and feared without a skin to sweat or pore to prickle, brow to crease or sex to tingle. You were a consciousness in a capsule, your dreams and desires like boats in a bottle, your ideas stuck where they were issued like collected stamps. Winnie has a smile that goes on and off as if it were a switch on a wall, but your laugh has no lips and shows no teeth and pleases no ear. As an image, you have everything, but in being denied a body, you have been denied expression. You are a lost life, a ghost who can never affright, or groan, or beg of a son that he remember you; you are a movie without a screen, a sound track which provides rails for silence to run on.
    There are so many types of tyranny. There is the tyranny of your own routines—your own habits—that rise around you like the sides of your grave. There is the castle where we keep the girl with the golden hair. Beauty set in stone becomes only a diamond. There are the cries of the crows and other customs of society. There are the demands of decorum. There is ideology lying over us like a smog that stings any eye that dares to stay open.
    Swaddle the woman like a baby then; squeeze her feet; bury her in confining conventions like Winnie is