A City of Two Tales

The tyrant had gathered those suspected of opposing him to the great arena, and their families, too: men, women, children, old and young, strong and weak. They huddled together at one end of the arena, hundreds of them. At the other end, the soldiers waited, armed with the latest rifles, optimized for efficiency, all designed to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible.

In his raised box the tyrant rose, his eyes furious. Standing before an array of microphones, he announced to the silent crowd his sentence: The soldiers would fire their guns upon the traitors until they were empty, at which point the guns would be used as cudgels to finish off any survivors. Only when these enemies of the people had been eliminated, the tyrant proclaimed, could the land be truly safe, and so—as no endangered land could ever be considered truly free—this day would be remembered as a day of liberty and freedom for all the land to enjoy.

When the tyrant had finished, a lone spectator stood up out of the crowd, his eyes furious. He shouted to all within the sound of his voice that leaders who kill their countrymen are tyrants, that the bullets must be taken from all the guns, and each gun smashed against the ground until they bent and could never fire again.

In the stands nearby, a fool was flanked by two wise men. The three of them listened to the man's speech until soldiers arrived and the man was carried away.

"That man was very brave," the fool remarked to the wise men. "Would that more had joined his dissent."

The first wise man stroked his beard thoughtfully. "You will never know true wisdom until you learn that the dissident is no different than the tyrant," he said. "Mark their methods, and mark their goals. Both addressed the crowd in anger in the name of liberty. Both seek to empty the guns of their ammunition. And both intend to use the empty guns to smash and destroy. To my wisdom that man is exactly the same as the tyrant."

"Exactly the same to be sure," murmured the fool. "Provided we can tell no difference between loaded and unloaded, no difference between the barrel of a gun and a human face, no difference between living and dead. Perhaps we can choose the better over the worse."

"You will never know true wisdom until you learn that there is nothing better," the second wise man averred. "For there have always been tyrants, and they have always murdered their people, because this is what tyrants do. Thus it has always been, and thus it always will be. Until you have learned this truth, you will never know wisdom."

When the shooting began, the fool turned away and wept, though both weeping and looking away were deemed seditious acts. He was not as wise as the first prophet, and so had never gained the wisdom required to ignore distinctions, and make one story out of two. Nor had he attained the wisdom of the second, to recognize the deep and abiding reality that tyranny was the way of things, and that wishing for better represented a dangerous and foolish retreat from reality.

He was only a fool, and a fool has no choice but to mourn.

So the Nottoway Plantation in Louisiana burned down. Maybe you heard about this. In earlier centuries the Nottoway Plantation had been an agriculture business that ran on human chattel slavery, much like many other plantations in the American South. Until it burned down, this place was a historic marker, in much the same way as a concentration camp would be—a physical remembrance of a place that had seen almost unimaginable pain and suffering, of murder and rape and family separation and subjugation and oppression and the dehumanization of millions of human beings, Nottoway was a nightmare place that ran on unimaginable human cruelty, part of a legacy of centuries of subjugation enacted by a wicked and greedy culture, which was ended only by a failed traitorous bloody war waged by the slavers in order to preserve the institution of human slavery upon which they had built their diseased culture.

You would want such a place to be preserved as such a museum, anyway, as a record of wrongs done, as a grim reminder of yesterday's sins to today's generation, lest we forget and regress.

That's not what Nottoway was, though.

In recent decades, Nottoway had been used as a memorial to and a celebration of a sanitized version of that diseased and collapsed culture of enslavement. This version of the culture is extremely popular with many of that culture's genealogical and spiritual descendants, and is accepted by many others. It's a version that omits all of the horrors of that culture in favor of the pageantry. People have weddings there, for example. This made the Nottoway Plantation, which could have been a sobering and vital expression of truth, into a massive and toxic ongoing lie. Now it has burned, which is a more honest thing for a plantation to do than be than a wedding venue. A lot of plantations burned during the war the American South inflicted on itself in its failed attempt to keep its reign of horror alive and avoid paying for labor. When institutions are built on unsustainable supremacist lies, burning is inevitable, even if we would usually hope to avoid fires.

The discourse around the plantation fire was the sort of thing we see when these sorts of things happen. A lot of people who rely on this whitewashed version of plantation culture for fortune and/or identity lamented the loss of a landmark celebrating a false version of their history they insist is true. A lot of other people rather understandably celebrated the destruction of this massive lie, and it should be no surprise that the descendants of formerly enslaved people were a prominent demographic within that group.

Then there were others, who, understanding a fire is not usually a cause of celebration but not understanding much else, decried the celebrations as unseemly and inappropriate; mourned the destruction as a grave loss of a piece of American history; scolded the celebrants for celebrating the destruction of property.

This is all depressingly familiar. It's the same template used when a politician that spent their life ensuring that millions of people are immiserated and disenfranchised dies at a tragically old age, for example. Those who suffered the oppression tend to celebrate the end of an agent of their suffering, while those who did not suffer scold the celebrants for their unseemly joy.

We mustn't pick on Nottoway, I suppose; it was just one of many plantations, dozens or hundreds or thousands of them, put to such use. And there are statues and textbooks and so on honoring the leaders of the traitorous slavers who waged their war to preserve slavery. Some of those were taken down in recent years, because we have in recent years started telling a bit of the truth about ourselves, but these days in the United States we have a gang of authoritarian white nationalist thugs in office who are doing all they can to put lies like Nottoway back into all aspects of our public life. They're enforcing these lies in the name of truth, and freedom and liberty and equality, too, even though what it's creating is resegregation, immiseration, disenfranchisement, along with complacency and ignorance about the fact that these are the things being created.

This represents a regression from where we had been. As somebody who just polished off a fifth decade on the planet, I feel safe saying that we're seeing progress rolled back. Logically speaking, it follows, too: Why would regressive people be fighting so hard to effect a regression if there hadn't been progress? And yet, what I notice these days is a tendency for some, whenever somebody laments the regression, to inform the lamenter of their naïveté, to think that we had ever made any progress in the first place that we might lose, to think that one bit of progress or another could in any way have ended an oppression that continues from horizon to horizon without termination. As an example: A few paragraphs up there I mentioned that the institution of slavery was ended after a bloody war, and I reckon some may hasten to inform me that slavery never really ended, in case I didn't know.

This can be an appropriate thing to tell me. There's plenty of truth to that admonition. The spirit of slavery wasn't killed when the slavers lost their slavers' war, and there were plenty on the Unionist side who were quite willing to help keep it alive. Many of the founding institutions and arrangements of power that allowed chattel slavery to function and thrive—the electoral college, for example, or the Senate—were preserved and remain in place to this day. The popular belief in the right of white people to enact violence when and where they choose, with an exclusive license to the act of self defense, remains intact, as does the popular belief in the redeeming power of cruel and unusual human imprisonment and the popular belief that a militarized police force brutalizing marginalized people and marginalized communities brings us safety. It's very important to acknowledge and reinforce the uncomfortable and disturbing truth of ongoing American supremacy, especially in a culture so given to denying it.

And there's a mainstream effort to deny it. The line that's often trotted out when people who had been unaware suddenly are shocked into awareness is we're better than this. There's also this isn't who we are, with words like "us" and "we" left undefined. And there are people who say in response yes this is who we are, and it always has been us, open your eyes, which is an understandable thing to say. It's important, I think, to meet a lie with truth.

And yet I increasingly feel there's something in many instinctive reassertions of the ongoing prevalence of foundational American supremacy that works not to face reality but to deny it; an instinct to smother beneath a blanket of instinctively deployed cynicism the gain of real progress and value of the sacrifices made by the people who fought to achieve that progress. It's an instinct that meets any expression of outrage with are you surprised? that meets any expression of dismay at the latest horror with things have always been like this, that meets any suggestion for improvement with a reason that the attempt will fail.

There's a balancing act here between reality and aspiration that I'm thinking about today. This is part of a longer thread I've been pulling at, now that the fascist government I spent the previous years (it's been more than years, try centuries) warning about is finally here (it's always been here), and I pivot away from warning about the thing that was coming and start pondering what sort of people we need to be in order to oppose the thing that is already here (it was always here).

I want to unpack this balancing act by observing that there appear to be two stories embedded in the founding of the United States: We have a story of specific supremacy, and we have a story of universal equality, and they grow together like a parasitic vine wrapped around a tree.

The story of specific supremacy is about how wealthy white men should rule and own everything, not only because they deserve to own everything, but because they are people more than other people are, so their domination and ownership of everyone and everything is not only their right but an important component of the natural order, and necessary for justice and liberty and safety. This is a very popular notion in the U.S., and more and more these days, people will come right out and say it, because while it has always been a popular notion, it hasn't always been considered as acceptable to say in polite company (people have always said it).

The story of universal liberty and equality is about how all human beings are equal under the law, and all deserve life as much as any other, and all are entitled to the same freedom, and are entitled to the things that ensure the basic necessities of life, and even more than necessities, the things that ensure the ability to pursue happiness, not only because it is the right of every human to have these things, but as an important component of the natural order, and necessary for justice and liberty and safety.

At risk of stating the obvious, these stories are oppositional. Despite this, they are both foundational to my country, the United States, which I am told by all sorts of people is the greatest country in the history of the world, and a lot of people seem to believe both are true at the same time.

The question becomes: Which story is true?

This may seem like it should have an easy answer, but I've discovered it does not.

Then again, I'm only a fool.

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If we look at the current reality, it must be admitted that the supremacist story is the true one—in the sense that it is the one that is in operation. From the White House and Congress to our courts and statehouses, our hospitals, our banks, our corporations, our schools, and so on, our institutions advantage white people and men and Christians and able-bodied and healthy people and all the other intended beneficiaries of supremacy and disadvantage everyone else. Overcoming this unjust effect requires a deliberate, constant effort—an effort, it should be noted, that a lot of very brave and determined people engage in every day. Because of this unjust effect, the story of universal liberty and freedom and equality has never been true in my country, at least not true in the way of being fully in operation. Maybe if you live in a different country, it has never been true in yours, either. I doubt we're unique here in the old U.S. of A. So in this sense it would be correct to say that the supremacist story is the true one; all too frequently, and especially in the halls of power and the rooms of influence; if you look at the real world, it's the one that is actually happening.

If we look at actual output, on the other hand, the story of universal equality is the true one. The story of supremacy requires subjugation and oppression and corruption to enforce. It never creates justice and liberty and freedom; rather, it disrupts and demolishes and sabotages all of these things, introducing unsustainability that ensures that many will suffer before the entire edifice inevitably collapses. It dooms itself by eating its own body. All its plantations will inevitably burn. Supremacists insist that dominance is the story of the natural order, and point to nature, red of tooth and fang, as evidence on their behalf. But human society is a remarkable and inventive and generative thing, and humans have learned the great truth that, even within nature red of tooth or whatever, cooperation and diversity actually create more abundance and stability and safety and potential than monoculture; thus it is true to say that universal equality is a part of the natural order, and truly does secure human liberty, justice, freedom, and thriving, while the story of the specific domination of supremacy is an unsustainable lie that creates only destruction and corruption.

Summed up: The supremacist story is an unsustainable string of lies that have been made truly real at the level of state power and popular belief, while the story of universal liberty is a truth that has never been fully believed or actualized.

I think it's safe to say that people who believe in the supremacist story are supremacists. What they do with the story is the old narcissist's trick of telling both stories at once. (It's also the old narcissist's giveaway that they know what they are doing, and know the difference between right and wrong; they always have to hide their lies behind a scrim of truth, they always have to paint a virtuous mask onto their abusive face.) Supremacists insist not only that they deserve to dominate all others; they insist that it is only to the degree that they do dominate all others that universal human liberty can ever exist. In the supremacist framing, liberty and justice and human thriving are a result of their supremacist domination, which means that they and only they can create these things, and anyone else who has them has them only to the degree that they are allowed to have them, and only as a benevolent gift bestowed by them, the supreme ones.

This is the framing of exceptionalism. We are the greatest country in the history of the world is the line. We are the shining city on the hill. I'm sure you've heard these things from Americans, whatever country you're from. We are the example to the world how things can be. The world envies us, it wants to be us, and it had better say so or else pay the price for insufficient gratitude. Our military ensures not subjugation but peace. Our bombs bring not devastation but stability. Our guns bring not death but safety. Our invasions bring not occupation but democracy.

The exceptionalist frame gives supremacists two slyly powerful tools.

First, it allows supremacists to frame their evil intent as virtue, and if you need examples of this, those waters are positively boiling with fishes, just reach out your paw into the information stream and swat at literally anything any Republican is doing or saying; you'll be well-fed. Second, it allows supremacists to position the story of liberty as something already accomplished and perfected. This is the premise from which all supremacist rollbacks of real progress are justified: Any attempt to swim against supremacy's main current, any work done to establish universal equality and diversity and inclusion, are framed by supremacists as unjust and hostile aggression. It is under this premise that our government is resegregating the nation. It is under this premise that our high courts have gutted civil rights legislation. Why should we need structures that protect those targeted by supremacy for disadvantage, the reasoning goes, if those disadvantages have already been solved? Why safeguard equality in a land that is already uniquely and exceptionally equal, as a natural state of its being?

The exceptionalist framing also introduces massive traps for those who might otherwise oppose supremacy.

The first trap is to accept the exceptionalist framing. I don't know how much I need to expound on this, but the idea that America is the greatest country in the world is a massively popular one, particularly with comfortable people who would rather not pay the costs of repair and maintenance. People who have accepted the exceptionalist framing still believe that our institutions ensure our liberty: that our militarized brutality forces we call "police" make us safe, that our military creates global stability. People who have accepted the exceptionalist framing believe that any act of massive structural change would be radical, believe that maintaining the existing order, which has brought us to disaster on multiple fronts, is realistic. It's a belief that the work has been done already and the price already paid, which—for people who would rather avoid work and cost—is convenient.

(For a great example of this, think of the popular conservative¹ writer Aaron Sorkin and his most famous creation, the TV walk-and-talk hit drama The West Wing. This is a show I've enjoyed in the past, to be clear, just so you don't think I'm taking a superior pose. TWW has become a sort of liberal dream of a functioning government, but go back and watch and see if you can't detect the way it is absolutely drenched in the notion that America is unique in the world, a pure exemplar of liberty and goodness, first among countries as a part of the natural order of things. Look at the necessity of its military, the probity of its generals, the heroism of its police forces. Listen to the music swell and rise. In this world, freedom and liberty and equality are secure already, not despite our institutions but as a result of them, not because we have done the work but because the work is already done; what's left are the details, a mess here, a mess there, cleanup on aisle seven. In this world, America leads because it has the right to, and it does the right thing because what it does is right. Whether or not you liked this show or never watched it, I use it as an example, not because it is exceptional, but because it is so standard in its rarely examined embrace of the rarely challenged idea of American exceptionalism.)

The second trap is that we would stop believing that the story of universal equality is true. This is most insidious trap, and a mirror of the first. The danger is that we would begin to consider the truth of the story of universal equality to be a lie in the same way as the lie of supremacy, precisely because it has been co-opted by supremacists, precisely because it has not yet been accomplished.

This can be a tricky trap to avoid for people of awareness, because the true story of universal equality has been co-opted, and it hasn't yet been accomplished. There are many people who keep their eye on the ball, and do the necessary work of reminding us that we have a long way to go. Slavery really never has left, you know, in a way. It's not like it was in the heyday of Nottoway Plantation, and we may be thankful of that, but when a comfortable person tries to re-establish their own complacency by looking at our for-profit prison industry or the latest example of a cop murdering a civilian and saying that's not who we are, it can be instructive and even important to point out that, in fact, there are no exceptions for America, and yes, in fact, that is us.

Yet those who fall into the second trap will tell you that slavery never ended in a way that makes it clear that the suggestion that we should expect it to end is dangerously naive. They'll respond to expressions of alarm about newly empowered white supremacy or instances of corruption that would have been unimaginable at an earlier time by scolding you that this country has always been white supremacist, always corrupt—not to return our awareness to an unpleasant but vital truth in order to dream about a better alternative, but to enter the lie that better alternatives are unrealistic and impossible. It's a framing that says the problem is not the problem itself, but the notion that the problem could ever be solved. You will be able to identify a person who has fallen into this trap through their instinctive opposition to any suggestion that something should get better or has gotten worse. The terrible thing that just happened shouldn't shock you—things have always been this bad. The good thing that we might try? It will fail because supremacy always wins. It all seems designed to establish one's own awareness, while absolve the aware person from the duty to work to change anything. Which, for people who don't want to do anything, but would like to be perceived as aware, is convenient.

This is what I mean by the balancing act. It is good to reject the lie of a country that is uniquely exceptionally good to such an extent that it can never do wrong. But it is a trap to decide in response to believe in a country that is exceptionally evil, to such an extent that it can never be thought to have progressed and improved, to such an extent that even the desire for improvement is taken as a foolish distraction.

This trap doesn't allow us to let go of exceptionalism; it simply inverts it. It believes that supremacy is an unchangeable reality destined to win—which is what supremacists believe. It rejects the supremacist lie that human equality is already accomplished, but in place of this lie, it maintains that the aspiration for human equality is dangerous and impossibly foolishness—which is what supremacists also believe.

I know that this inverted exceptionalism is false; the evidence is clear. We know that very brave and determined people really have progressed society toward universal human equality—not just in our country, but around the world. Imperfectly, to be sure. Partially, without question. Yet things that were worse became better. Women seized their own enfranchisement in the sufferage movement; Black people seized theirs during a series of ongoing and overlapping civil rights movements; and so did gay people, and trans people and so on. These were battles, and the cost was high, and the struggle intense, and even as things changed, many of the undergirding power structures and institutions remained unchanged, which means that this progress is not secure, but rather an inheritance requiring vigilance and work and sacrifice from each generation that receives it—at least until the generation arrives that finally changes the undergirding structures. But the progress did happen, and losing ground that has already been won is a tragedy, and acknowledging all this is not a naive flight from reality; rather it is an engagement with reality, the kind we will need to grapple with if we are to make progress upon what we have inherited.

These people who believed in the truth of the second story and drew us closer to the story of universal human equality—how did they do it? They rejected a framework of exceptionalism. They embraced a framework of aspiration instead. They insisted upon facing the truth of the supremacist reality—that this is what our country is and has been, that this is who have been and who we are. They demanded that the true story of universal equality be made real at last, and insisted that it could be, and believed it would be.

Which of the two stories is true? This strikes me as the wrong question. Both have a truth that needs to be faced within a framework of aspiration, and both contain a lie that needs to be rejected by rejecting the frame of exceptionalism.

If we stay in exceptionalism, we choose to engage only with the false parts of both. But if we burn exceptionalism from our minds, we can build a new framework that aspires to something true, and in so doing we engage in the truth of both stories—the one we would dismantle, and the one with which we would replace it.

We can face the supremacist nature of our institutions and laws and founding assumptions, and we can name the lies underpinning them for what they are. And at the same time we can insist on the truth of the story toward which we aspire, and insist that not only should universal equality be the way things are, but it can, and will, because it must.

The new true story of human equality must become the way things are organized, because human equality is based on truth, and our current supremacist reality is not. It's a must because a nation built on unsustainable lies will not sustain, because every plantation built on unsustainable lies of human oppression will burn eventually, and the tinder feels pretty dry these days.

This is where I'll land us for now.

Instead of saying this isn't us let's say this isn't who we should be.

Instead of saying we are better than this, let's say we should be better than this—not only should but can, not only can but will—because we must.

And once we have done what we must, and have become better than we are now, then we will resolve to become better still.

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A.R. Moxon is the author of the novel The Revisionaries, which is available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places, and the essay collection Very Fine People. You can get his books right here for example. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. He remembers when he was young, he and Susie had so much fun.

¹ I probably should clarify this one, since Sorkin identifies as a liberal last I checked and is generally understood to be a prominant progressive. When I encounter his work, I encounter a conservative mindset conveyed through liberal protagonists—he's more than a little on the side of Colonel Jessup, in my opinion, and West Wing's liberal staffers and president mostly tend to conclude that the most intelligent thing a liberal can do is agree with a conservative, usually about the fact that lefties are annoying or the fact that America is exceptionally good and moral. This may represent an unexamined set of priorities and assumptions from somebody who sincerely believes themselves progressive, or it may be some real crafty business from a conservative who understands how persuasion works. Either way, I think it's an excellent example of how people accept supremacy in often unconsious ways by accepting an exceptionalist framework.