The Mythic America v. the Real America, and a Willfully Ignored Disconnect.
“And because he said it instead of her, I knew he meant kill. That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. You do that first, in your head, and then you make it real. So that’s how they do it, I thought. I seemed never to have known that before.” — Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, Chapter 30
It’s the Fourth of July! Start up the snare drum and piccolo. Wait, no. Country music. Fire up the cannons — rather, grill — rather, fireworks. For god’s sake, just light a match to something. This is America! And don’t let the door kick you on the way out if you haven’t dragged some sort of disposable red-white-and-blue decoration through the checkout line at Target. Also, Bud Light better be involved somewhere because freedom means being able to give your taste buds the day off so you can drink like a frat boy!
This is the day — the day that movies (read: propaganda) like 13 Hours and American Sniper have primed us for. The day of no nuance. The day of “if you’re not with me then you’re my enemy” types of absolutes (You know, like a Sith). The day of scaring the living shit out of your dogs and toddlers.
For merely insinuating a slight mockery of the sanctity of this day, I open myself up to accusations of not being a “real” American as if I somehow suddenly stopped occupying space in this country — ah, the solipsism of the American “patriot.”
I don’t hate America. In fact, I love it. I hate the concepts, the myths, the revisionist purity surrounding it — nationalism, exceptionalism, patriotism, a dubious “Judeo-Christian” moral code (like Judeo-Christian even makes sense), the imposition of our supposed way of life on everyone else, what have you. Oh, and also this little tidbit in the Declaration of Independence:
“[King George III of Great Britain] has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”
There you have it. The idea of the other — the it — is right in one of our founding documents, naked, unequivocal, for all to see — a document that still somehow stands above reproach, smug, privilege rendered in ink.
*Cue the eye-rolls from people who believe we have somehow escaped — have been absolved — of that past as if creating its isn’t in the very fabric of this nation.*
Slavery, reservations, internment camps, religions teaching that people are worthy of hellfire, any justification for a war of your choosing: how to perpetuate these things while being able to sleep at night without creating some kind of it?
Americans so easily forget that our country is not old. There is no way to be removed from the influences and effects of these atrocities even if you are unaware of what they are. The modern day slavery that is the prison system. A blatant unwillingness to give Black and Native American communities access to clean water due to greed. The stripping away of healthcare. Deportation of immigrants, the tearing apart of families. Just to name a few.
While we — white people — enjoy apple pie and sparklers, it is easy to ignore the places in which the “American Dream” is unrealized — is impossible to realize. We turn a blind eye and vehemently contest the existence of discrimination because we desperately cling to American “individualism”: that toxic, dangerous notion that bad things only befall those who make bad choices, that we are inherently good — legitimate Americans, bestowed this country by divinity— and are therefore worthy of the circumstances that exempt us from “bad things” despite our choices.
It is scary to think of how quickly one can lose grasp on individual security and safety no matter one’s choices. So we have to create a myth of the unworthy other. We might not say that — might not even realize it — but the belief is in our founding documents.
We exhibit it in the way we talk about our its. “Thugs,” “aliens,” “illegals,” “savages,” “primitive,” “‘learn to speak English,’” any number of slurs, “Islamists,” “threats to safety,” “collateral damage.” That is how we justify our willful ignorance of and how we sustain our self-image of exceptionalism despite the international and domestic atrocities we inflict based on lies, impulses, and superiority complexes.
The atrocities are the problem, but worse is the unwillingness to see them as atrocities. That unwillingness ensures they will continue. We set out to “destroy the other” even as we accuse the other of doing the same to us. Creating its isn’t justified no matter who does it, no matter the cause.
Beyond that, how can we send Americans to fight for freedoms that we are in more danger of losing because of our own leaders and homegrown enemies without somehow dehumanizing them? We do this by elevating them to the point of martyrdom when the cause isn’t even clear. We offer endless praise to them to assuage our guilt. If their deaths are honorable — are for a nebulous greater purpose, a purpose we get to define in whatever way brings us comfort — then they are justified. The other is a scapegoat, and at times, a distraction even.
The Black Mirror episode “Men Against Fire” comes to mind — how the military used technology to make soldiers literally see the other as an it, as something grotesque and subhuman in order to make the killing easier when the other actually did no wrong. The “honorable” cause was nonexistent. The deaths were for nothing, but who could stomach that without dehumanizing all whose lives were on the line?
We do this to some degree as we parade around in our stars and stripes and drink cheap beer on the lake, while thinking of ourselves as “patriots” and creating its out of Americans who are not in complete agreement with everything America does to perpetuate its domestic status quo and justify its global superiority complex. It is black and white.
In fact, the notion of status quos and superiority complexes is not even believed by those who enjoy the benefits. That’s how ingrained in us it is.
And to think this happens on a holiday that simply would not exist if it hadn’t been for violent protests and disloyalty to the powers that be. Somehow that notion of patriotism has been translated to preservation of institutional power when any resistance threatens to disrupt the benefits reaped from that power.
If anything, the resistance we’re seeing now is just a continued use of the tactics that founded America for the sake of including the people who were excluded from our founding father’s vision of America and who have been ever since. If anything, it’s an attempt to make America the country it promised to be. An attempt to make the real America and the mythic America overlap.
To make its out of people who simply want to be included is to be the modern day King George III. Somehow we have it backwards, and it’s something to honestly chew on when we think about Independence Day and whether the “freedom” we celebrate is applicable to as many people as we think it is.
