I can picture my teen-aged father, on January 6, 1941, huddled around someone’s radio, probably his uncle Aren’s (I assume my father’s family was too poor to own an expensive piece of furniture like a radio) listening to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s State of the Union speech.   Radio broadcasts were new at the time, it undoubtedly still seemed like magic to hear a president’s voice, broadcast live over radio waves, somehow entering a receiver built into a large fancy box and emerging, alive, from a speaker, to be heard in its every nuance in millions of American living rooms, over speakers in the streets.  

I can imagine my young father drinking in the part of the speech about the four essential human freedoms that American democracy, indeed common decency, was built upon.   Irv would have been a senior in Peekskill High School, going on seventeen, and the president’s words about Freedom from Want would have stirred his impoverished young heart.  

“Well, you have to understand, here was a patrician, literally to the manor born, who fought against the inborn corruption of his own class to actively expand the unheard of concept of common decency for the masses, he was actually creating America’s social safety net during the New Deal,” said the skeleton. “I was aware, even then, that most of FDR’s speech was a politician’s rhetoric to help bring the skeptical nation to an acceptance of the need to fight fascism, to join the side of the European democracies against militant, hell-bent totalitarian regimes.”  

“Still, the reason FDR was so loved by so many was because he was willing to incur the hatred of those who regarded him as a class traitor.  He told them, the same merciless fucks whose adult children and grandchildren are robustly yet casually screwing us all today, he said it with that great smile of his, ‘I welcome their hatred!’*  I remember that ecstatic moment from a newsreel I saw when I was about twelve, and the crowd at that rally went absolutely wild, as many of us in that theater yelled when we saw him say it on the flickering movie screen.”

“He challenged basic assumptions held by the rich.   Why is private college still and forever the exclusive right of the children of the well-to-do?   Because we can price the children of the riff-raff out and keep it pure, pass on our ivy garlanded love of higher learning, and higher earning, to our own DNA.  It’s always been us against them, since earliest homo sapiens war parties, but FDR articulated something more.  That’s why he was elected four times, he was fighting for the basic freedoms of the common man.” 

Today one has to go to google to find out exactly what these then famous Four Freedoms even were.  Sure enough, there they are, immortalized in the famous Norman Rockwell paintings, those strikingly realistic evocations of a mythical American life.  The famous one where the fat, perfectly browned turkey is being served at a big table, with the beautifully rendered greedy faces of the children at the end, one smiling lustily almost directly at the viewer, is his depiction of Freedom from Want.  One picture = a thousand words.

“Yeah, FDR told us that the right not to go to bed hungry, in a world of abundance and super-wealth, was a basic human freedom.  Of course, any self-respecting billionaire will tell you exactly where to fuck yourself on that proposition.  Go down FDR’s list of the old enemies of peace, the first paragraph of your footnote below*,” said the skeleton. “It is now, what, eighty years later, and… hah! what do you know?!!  Same Dick Cheney types treating the government as their own piggy bank, the forces of selfishness and lust for power fucking away with insatiable, mechanized erections.  Ruthless, inhuman forces still in control of our great democracy, you say?  I don’t mean to single out Mr. Cheney, you understand, just because he’s such an unrepentantly evil motherfucker, and not even a born member of that social class FDR betrayed, still, you take my point.”

Preaching to the choir, dad.  I couldn’t have put it any better myself, self-evident as that is to say, of course.  The reality of this impossibly slippery slope of self-serving privilege and the constant rewriting of history to suit their purposes is no doubt part of what finally broke you.  

“Play the game the right way, take advantage of every bit of luck you get handed, work hard, work harder than everybody else, work as many jobs as you need to work, struggle, fight hard against ignorance and hatred, try to be a decent person and… oh, fuck, I was putting myself under so much pressure to live the American Dream that I fucked up both of my highly intelligent kids, oh, shit, and now, here comes Dick Cheney, oh, God, no…  look at that famous self-satisfied smirk…”

“And they’re not enforcing the Voting Rights Act anymore in the former Confederacy since we’re now so clearly post-racial and the f-ing ‘n-word’ is no longer tolerated, except in private among whites and among the n-words themselves, of course, and we don’t need to regulate Wall Street speculators any more, the Free Market will insure fairness, you dig, and there’s nothing wrong with a little pre-emptive ten year war on some anonymous brown bastards who hate our freedom, even with no actual causus belli, think of all the jobs we create in the lucrative war industries, and it’s so judgmental to call us ‘war profiteers’, you fucking glib, hateful class warriors, and oh, blah blah blah…  You want Hope and Change?  Vote for the charismatic black guy who will break your heart in more ways than you ever dreamed possible.  Yes, in the end, the seeming futility of it all broke me in half like a fucking dried out stick.”

*  “We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs.  And we know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today.  They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.

I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match.  I should like to have it said, (crowd cheers begin to drown him out) wait a minute, I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.”

Reading these lines is nothing next to listening to his powerful delivery of them, hear the actual 1936 speech here.