Patriots of a Land Yet to Come

Well, it's my country's 250th birthday today, and the old girl looks pretty rough. Today's the day we're meant to celebrate, and I find myself asking what exactly we would celebrate about a country that seems to have narcissistic personality disorder, or at least seems to be governed by it.

The gang currently at the national helm are white Christian supremacists, by which I mean that they believe this is a country that exists only for white Christian men, and they'll say so, too, and then they'll tell you that it's because white Christian men are exceptionally good and moral and brave and true, while enacting the most horrific and cowardly brutality and corruption to create their white christofascist ethnostate.

"White" is a made-up term, which effectively means "the people who deserve to live." Christianity is a religion, founded by this fellow named Jesus who was murdered by the dominant military and economic superpower of his own day, and one whose adherents today in my country use as a unifying energizing coalition for the control and celebration of today's dominant military and economic superpower.

"Superpower" might be a little much these days. The fascist gang at the helm are throwing an America party, giving us a good look at just how super, how exceptional, how supreme, whiteness really is.

The national mall, decked out for celebration, is all but deserted. I presume you've seen the pictures and video of the eerie liminal spectacle. Bands perform for half-interested audiences who they frequently outnumber; people stand sway-hipped here and there in the brutal global warming like the last five daisies in a lawn that seems to stretch away into infinity. Food courts, staffed by bored attendants, ring the yard, awaiting a single customer. Somewhere in all this empty space, a Nazi podcaster debates a child about the Salem witch trials; the Nazi appears to be arguing the witches deserved it. In a healthy country this sort of thing would be deemed offensive, but we're way past that now, and anyway there's nobody around for the Nazi to offend. Above it all towers a halfheartedly constructed white arch, a chintz plywood replica of the fascist monstrosity our wannabe dictator intends to install someday, part of a twinned set with the ghoulish ballroom he intends to construct to dwarf the White House to which he intends to attach it. The arch that was actually constructed is a devastating critique of both the man who commissioned it and the country he leads. It's a nothing, just a hasty throw-together, no detail, no art, nothing of craft, just a gesture toward greatness by a man who never did any of the work it would take to truly be great.

Here we are: a quarter millennia into our life as a country. We look like a failed casino. It's what we should have expected. A failed casino is what we are. We even hired a guy who makes casinos fail as our leader in order to make the picture complete. The guy is all facade, just like the country he leads, like a white power avatar molded out of 100% pure bullshit and brought to life by chanting the 14 words of white supremacy over his lumpish form. His name is even "Trump." It's perfect. Before the word became inseparable from this cheap huckster of a rodeo clown, "trump" meant "to dominate," but "trumpery" still means "worthless nonsense," and always did. And our own President Trumpery has remade much of the rest of our national space in the same image, the same form. It's all pasted-up plastic gold frippery made to mimic quality, but all it does in the end is mock quality; it looks sad and wrong, as does an elderly racist doddering under a pound of pancake makeup, play-acting as a cartoon tough guy for all the other scared little Christian white boys to worship. Meanwhile, beneath the pancake facade, the once-healthy body crumbles, while the mind, never healthy, disintegrates. Soon both will resemble the spirit: dead and rotting.

No wonder nobody came to the party. What exactly are we celebrating?

There's a temptation to mourn how far we've fallen. I understand. There's a lot of ways in which we have fallen, and mightily. There was a time when all of this at least seemed impossible, even if the reality of the last ten years puts a lie to that impression. It sure is possible. It's possible as hell. It's here, and there were no checks against it, no balance. Last week I told of the story I learned growing up, a story of a self-perfecting land of freedom that is self-evidently good, a shining city on a hill. It's a story we told, and one many of us believed, including me. It's also, I can't escape realizing these days, exactly the sort of story a narcissist tells about themselves, and then dares anybody to contradict them.

There are a lot of ways in which we were always here, in this degraded state. We were founded as a slave plantation and that appears to be what we are returning to, if indeed we ever left. All the wonderful people who live here generate so much value, and increasingly they are left to die while all the value they create goes to increasingly few, with most of the wealth coagulating in the coffers of a handful of the worst people in the world, where they use the malign gravity of it to further bend reality toward themselves, to their domination and ownership over our bodies and lives, which they want to make subject to their strange whims. We incarcerate more people than any other country, and per capita 5th most in the world, and the prisons are run by corporations which profit from the enslavement that this imprisonment permits. We bomb countries overseas and pay others to do it for us, murdering civilian populations because we, who spend more on our military than any other by a truly bizarre margin, who bring more death to more places than any other, claim that we are threatened and frightened. We do this while demanding to be understood as the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Some might ask "who do you mean by we?" It's a fair question.

By "we" I mean those who have operated under the dominant cultural and spiritual belief system of this beautiful degraded land of mine, this United States, a belief system known as supremacy.

We have believed that we bear no relation to our fellow humans.

Therefore, we have believed that life is something that must be earned, and profit is how you earn it.

Therefore, we have believed that the ongoing life of any who fail to earn that life is a crime and a theft, committed against those who have earned it.

Therefore, we have believed that wealth is proof of the right to own and dominate others.

Therefore, we have believed that those who have not earned life not only can be used badly by those who have, but that they must be as a moral necessity.

Therefore, we have believed that violence is redemptive and good.

And that, I observe, is why we operate the way we do. The tree is known by its fruit.

This is the real story of us—we who have believed the narcissist's myth that even still governs us, which returns, persistent as the tide, to try to wash away any progress we make when it retreats in disgrace from the calamity it creates. For proof I will gesture broadly and expansively in all directions, before pointing my finger at the priorities encoded in our budgets and the outcomes of our systems, and casting my eyes once more upon the deserted failed casino on the national mall, where white supremacist hobgoblins tried and failed to get us to celebrate their ongoing shambolic failure.

What are we celebrating, then?

I'll tell you what I'm celebrating. I'm celebrating all the people. The human beings of my country, particularly those who have been bold enough to believe a different story, and to try their hand at telling it, to put their hands to the work of making it happen, and who have paid with their their sweat and their blood and their lives for the advances we have enjoyed, and which we are in danger of losing now. I don't dare not honor them by celebrating their sacrifice and by answering their invitation to join with them in the spirit they left for us to continue. There's been a different story told all along, and there have been people to tell it—imperfect in the way of all people, but aligned with a different story of shared humanity. There's a beautiful story of reclamation, of a people who tell the truth about themselves and what they have inherited, who look squarely at what has needed to be improved, and do not fail to see the dangers and challenges, but neither do they let it dissuade them, neither do they fail to issue a challenge of their own in turn, to persuade those toxic bullies who would bring high costs of theft and terror to human decency that their bullying will carry a high cost, as well.

I celebrate Frederick Douglass. I celebrate Harriet Tubman. I celebrate John Brown. I celebrate Ida B. Wells, and Eugene Debs. and Medgar Evers, and Fred Hampton and Harvey Milk. Yes, and James Baldwin too, and Ralph Ellison, and and W.E.B. DeBois, and bell hooks, and Toni Morrison, and even that silly wry little whiteboy Kurt Vonnegut, and thousands of others we've heard of, millions of others we haven't, who created beautiful things despite the carnivorous systems lined up against them, who walked a path made harder than it ought to have been, who cleared it so we might walk it and then clear it a little farther.

This is a heritage. All too often, we colonize this heritage, claiming it casually, cheaply, as if it is something we possess rather than something that we give ourselves to. We could claim it honestly, though, by working at transformation, at being the kinds of people who align with the same vision as those who came before us, who didn't fall to cynicism or despair in the face of the dominant spirit of supremacist degradation. Who are willing to pay the costs of being such people.

One in this tradition was a preacher by the name of Martin Luther King, Jr., who you have heard of. He's become an icon, and deservedly so. Because he was such an effective teller of the alternative story, he's also been one who has seen his legacy subjected to the most brutal colonization by supremacists. I wrote this about him, at the end of my book Very Fine People, and it's how I want to close today.

King gave a famous speech about a prophetic dream he had, of a country where the great claims of freedom and justice and equality for all had been made true—which is the popular and much-repeated part of the speech, repeated by those who would colonize its meaning as part of the exceptionalism story, as something already accomplished by the world's great bastion of freedom. However, the main theme of King's speech was of all the ways the dream had not yet been made true, and the unsustainability of the injustice that held sway in the country, and the inevitability of strife and unrest until justice arrived, and the need to do the work of repair—which is the less popular, and less-often repeated, part of the speech. King’s speech ended like this:

And this will be the day – this will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning:

My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim’s pride, From every mountainside, let freedom ring!

And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.

 Wow. Coming from somebody who most of “white” America considered at the time to be a lawbreaking rabble-rousing anti-American socialist, that sounds downright patriotic.

Wait. Am I suggesting that we are to become patriots? Not exactly.

But . . . maybe?

Maybe let’s be patriots of a country that doesn’t exist yet; a country still to come, where all those fine aspirations have been cultivated until they are, at last, and for the first time, actually true, in a way that is undeniable because the fruit of it is all around, sustaining everyone without any question of deserve. Where prisons and police are abolished, where borders are open, where the value that our beautiful diversity of humanity generates is shared by all of our human family. Where old debts from our inheritances of theft and murder are paid, because a truly free people can't afford not to pay its debts. And then let’s enter a spirit that is willing to do the work to make it so, and not finish until that country is the country we see all around us. Maybe we can redeem our broken institutions and our broken nation, on behalf of everyone—even those blameless very fine people who are violently aligned against redemption and repair.

You know what that would be? That would be taking patriotism away from the white supremacists, and giving it to the people who will produce its fruit. (That's Jesus talk, so if you'd like to take Jesus away from the Christians who still abuse and murder him today, and keep it for yourself, I would invite you to do so.)

A lot of very fine people would have it that King only gave one popular part of one well-known speech, but he gave many others. The last of them is known as the Mountaintop Speech, and it was delivered in Memphis in solidarity with striking workers there. In it, King spoke of the work of repair that was needed and the unsustainability of any land that refused to do that work, and he spoke of the inevitable strife that would attend that unsustainability. He talked about going to the mountaintop, which drew imagery from what Christians call the Old Testament and Jewish people call the Torah, of Moses, the leader of a nation of freed slaves, watching from the mountain at the end of his life as the people he had led entered their land.

I like that: ending a speech about necessary work with a picture of arriving at the top of a mountain. Climbing a mountain certainly takes a lot of intentional work, and provides an amazing view that would be unavailable to anyone who didn’t do that work.

Yes, I like that picture very much.

Less than 24 hours later, King was dead; as dead as the dominant economic and military superpower of his age had hoped he would become. That is how opposing the dominant economic and military superpower of your age tends to go.

And many very fine people rejoiced on that day of mourning.

King may have climbed to the mountaintop, but “white” America hadn’t.

Those deemed “white” in America had been offered the realigning work of redemption, and they had, by and large, declined.

They still do.

They? We.

We? I.

What’s being said here isn’t that “white” America is irredeemably bad. What’s being stated is an old truth, which is that “white” America has proved remarkably unwilling to do any of the work of redemption, because it would cost them not only their money, but their exceptionalism, their blamelessness, their position as the chosen elect. The reaction of “white” America whenever this truth is spoken aloud suggests it is an ongoing unwillingness.

Or, let’s put it this way: "White" America seems very happy to claim they have accomplished Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream. It seems totally unwilling to climb his mountain.

 But I think we can begin to enter that spirit, if we set our compass for the mountaintop, and if we start to climb.

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A.R. Moxon's upcoming essay collection is Fighting in the Dark. He is also the author of the novel The Revisionaries and the essay collection Very Fine People, which are available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places. You can get his books right here for example. In his time, in his time, he will roll, roll, roll.