Do you have a question for The Watcher?
Email it to uatu616@shaftagents.com

 

Dear Uatu,

What the hell kind of name is "Four Freedoms Plaza"? Are the Fantastic Four obsessed with the number four, or what?

Dean Jackson
Houston, TX

Dear Dino,

After the Baxter Building (built by the Leland Baxter Paper Company in 1949 at the intersection of 42nd Street and Madison Avenue in New York City) was destroyed, the Fantastic Four built a new headquarters on the same site: Four Freedoms Plaza, a 100-story tower that rises 1500 feet above Manhattan Island. 

Back in 1941, when U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt desperately wanted to get into World War II but the Americans weren't having it, he gave a speech to Congress that outlined the Four Freedoms that the world would enjoy if it banded together to defeat the Axis:

1. Freedom of speech and expression
2. Freedom of every person to worship God in his own way
3. Freedom from want
4. Freedom from fear

A quick glance around your planet is all one needs to discern that the promises of these Four Freedoms have failed to come into fruition in the decades following World War II, but there are humans who still hold to that dream. The United Nations General Assembly has adapted the Four Freedoms into both the U.N. Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

While the Four Freedoms have been enshrined in U.N. documents, it is the Fifth Freedom, rarely mentioned in polite company, that governs the domestic and foreign policies of the United States and her allies:

5. The Freedom to rob, to exploit and to dominate, to undertake any course of action to ensure that existing privilege is protected and advanced.

In other words, the operatives of Earth's most powerful nations are empowered with the right to spy, steal, destroy and assassinate as needed in order to protect the political and economic interests of their homelands.  Of those denizens of the United States who are even aware of the concept, some have the cognizance to be disturbed by the inherent hypocrisy of the Fifth Freedom, but most seem to revel in it (I believe on your world they’re known as Tom Clancy Fans).