Better than America
I texted my friend to tell him that the Trumpies had overrun the Capitol and that the police were outmanned. He texted me back. It’s the start of a new civil war. My response: No, it’s the end of the last one.
Courage: Everyone has had a moment when they’ve looked at another human being and whispered to themselves, “Why couldn’t I have been that smart, that brave, that good?” When Bree Newsome scaled the spire of the South Carolina Capitol in 2015 to remove that detestable emblem of master-slave hierarchy, I stood at attention, not to honor their flag as it found its way into the so-called dustbin of history, but to honor this amazing young black woman and her fearlessness. How could she have known that the task was doable, that she would not fall or be deemed a terrorist threat and shot down?
Sun Ra knew the significance of the confederate battle flag’s stubborn endurance. He reminded us that when one side wins a war, pretty much the first capitulation by the losing side is the lowering of their flag. By Ra’s equation, that war rages on until the stars and bars fly no more.
Oxymoron: America is a secular theocracy. What?!? Perhaps no two ideas are harder to sandwich together than Secular and Theocratic — they are, of course, starkly antonymic. A theocratic order is one where society’s ultimate constraints are framed by religious doctrine. What, then, is the doctrine that binds several hundred million Americans of so many disparate faiths and more than a few atheists and agnostics together in a single social project?
American Exceptionalism: We tend to think of those two words as a property of the right. Reagan saddled us with the shining city on a hill as the poetic idealization of American Exceptionalism. In practice, this dogma of American Exceptionalism equates to over 800 US military outposts strategically positioned across every time zone in the world, poised to unilaterally enforce a body of International Law that it claims no obligation to obey.
American Exceptionalism: When the UN’s General Assembly convened a conference in 1998 to finalize the structures for a new body that would have jurisdiction over genocide, war crimes, and other crimes against humanity, the United States joined the sterling company of China, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Qatar, and Yemen as the only member states voting against the treaty. Three presidential administrations later, and the US has yet to recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.
Liberals, predictably, embrace the same patriotic dogma, although their poetics are less strident and might, at first glance, mask the darkly jingoistic core of Yankee catechism. “We’re better than this,” liberal observers lamented in response to one outrageous Trumpism after another (the last — perhaps — being that little revival meeting at the US Capitol). We’re better than this, implying that others are not, making this only a watered-down version of the central tenet of American orthodoxy: This is the best damned country in the world.
How could Hitler not compare Nazi expansion in Europe to the continental metastasis of the American project? Manifest Destiny is Lebensraum. Both offer rationalizations for imperial ambitions that were founded on notions of the special entitlements of special people. Look around the globe and you will find that settler colonialism is always predicated on a spurious claim of “specialness”.
But 45, if nothing else, has been one hell of a brand buster and what was special, well, let’s get this straight: Donald J. Trump organized an attack on his own government and then gloated as he watched his machinations unfold on TV. And because America’s vaunted constitutional process is as slow as it is special, a guy who by all rights should be sitting at DC Jail on suicide watch will pardon an, as of yet, unknown number of his rich friends before strolling out the front door of the White House.
My beautiful mother is 92 years old. Thankfully, her health has been free from any severe challenges, except, of course the affliction of time. Her talk, now, is the faithful rhetoric of perpetual recovery. She’s getting better, on the mend, she wants you to know. Her optimistic sheen is as convincing as Joe Biden’s.
America is finished. Its time is over. Trump and Covid had something to do with it, but, in truth, the survival of the American experiment was always contingent on how its Civil War would end and now, after watching the rebels’ flag marched through the halls of Congress, we know that rumors of a Union victory were premature.
We the people, of course, have a right to survive the political formations that rise and fall around us. They are houses, vessels, temporary things that should be built and abandoned as necessary. Anyone my age or older can remember how the hulking menace of Soviet Empire came apart like a tissue paper umbrella in a hard rain. Something will follow the collapse of the enterprise started in 1619. It will be different. It will have problems, but it will be better than America. This flag comes down, today.
