Mern Þonke

Yesterday I heard on NPR Jeremy Rifkin talking about differing European and American notions of freedom, as discussed in his book The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream. Today, I read at excerpt from Cornel West's forthcoming book Democracy Matters, in which he writes:

How ironic that in America we’ve moved so quickly from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Let Freedom Ring!” to “Bling! Bling!”—as if freedom were reducible to simply having material toys, as dictated by free-market fundamentalism.

Meanwhile, as I reach the conclusion of my work on "Frið and Fredom in La3amon's Brut," I find that notions of freedom are highly contested in the Middle Ages.

There is something going on here, a nice convergence between my research and a contemporary isssue. I'm going to pursue this more when I have time.