Maybe I do. You don't know what I love. You don't.

I hate this country. Nothing but a bunch of big ideas, stories, people dying and people like you.

The white planet of the National Anthem, Newton is doing his separate work for you to a note so high nobody could reach it.

That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds like freedom for me.

You come with me to room 1013 over at the hospital, Lewis. I'll show you America. Terminal crazy in me.

I live in America, Lewis. I don't have to love it. You do that. Everybody's gonna love something.

My God, what an extraordinary little bit of writing that is.

You're listening to Navara FM, here on Resonance 104.4 FM London's most spectacular and certainly the freest of its radio stations.

I am, of course, James Butler. And that clip there, some of you will recognize it, of course.

It is Jeffrey Wright playing Belize in a TV adaptation of Tony Kushner's set of two plays called Angels in America.

What it's about, that's a whole other story, really, from what we're going to talk about today.

But if you're interested, there's an old episode of Juliet Jakes' really excellent Suite 212 show,

where you can listen to me and the brilliant Sarah Schulman talk about it as part of the AIDS crisis act up and the political artistic response to the period.

Kushner's play is called A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, and one of those themes so beautifully expressed there is freedom.

And of course, everyone knows that freedom is a key part of the American political psyche.

Give me liberty or give me death, for instance, a line that also came from a piece of theatre for what that's worth.

But what's so extraordinary about that speech of Belize is that the way that the concept of freedom is turned around in the mouth of an American citizen, a black American citizen,

who insists on undermining all of the glorious rhetoric, who insists on showing just how often the glorious promise of freedom is just a lie,

just a big idea. And yet, there's something even more extraordinary in the insistence that this is a question that matters.

That the context over the meaning of freedom, what freedom would really mean if it were to be actually lived, actually grasped,

actually set a note not so high, but so common that we could all reach it.

That weaves together the question of freedom and democracy and arguments over their meaning and even into the lives and the discussions and the contestations and the arguments of the most marginalized and rejected of a country's inhabitants who in turn insist on their rights as citizens to make and reinterpret that freedom.

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