Every nation has an origin story, be it born out of blood or drawn on a map. America was born with two ideals in its genesis story, security and liberty.
The forbidden entrance into liberty, that is to say, the entrance into modernity, did not come without consequences: the acquisition of money, the anticipation of buying new things, the banality of consumerism, and the spectacle of the media, among others that plague the country.
The origin story of America shows the bizarre nature of the American, and illuminates what it means to have emerged from history as the monstrosity known as the American. Americans passed over the forgotten ideal of security and instead embraced the curse of liberty.
Even the very first Americans felt a certain malaise, which prompted the founding fathers to follow the siren song of liberty. For some reason it resonated more than the wisdom of the ancients. Our country’s roots were never pure, but were already poisoned with the powerful sap of malaise. Moreover, once liberty had been crowned as the only true ideal, the idea of choice as a personal choice changed everything.
This poison was already in us from the beginning, indistinct at first, but increasingly distinct until it stained everything, and rotted out America: the ancient curse of slavery that every nation struggled with throughout history, and the horror of slavery as something implicitly within us, but as something we must deny, something we insist is no longer part of us.
Once Americans, freed of tradition and bewitched by the siren song, became a nation, and once they founded their republic in provocation, their pride swelled, no less their confusion. Americans are marked specifically by their sociopathy and lust for dominance. They recognize these traits with both pride and feelings of humiliation. The American, conflicted, aware of the clash between liberty and security, and inflicted with the primordial malaise, needed to compensate for his sociopathy by means of White Supremacy. Other nations should have priority, not America, in the scale of history. It is never the wise, but the twisted, who crave and gain dominion by allying its ideals to its sociopathy.
Today the American is rived with racism, a virtual fear. The American has no problem expressing himself through racism, despite not being discriminated against. The capacity to hate the other, the non-white, is a unique faculty of the American.
White supremacy drove the American to consume, to create spectacles, to exploit others, for the purpose of distracting himself from the presence of racism. Racism defines the American to such a degree that the American no longer notices its stain, except when he catches an accidental glimpse of himself in a mirror. Those moments are only temporary, transient, and the American immediately recontextualizes and reduces those moments of self-awareness to a bland and frozen museum exhibit. That is, racism is so much a part of the American that he can sense it only when it is turned against him, and only then does the American get a brief glimpse into the courtroom of history, observing it from the mists of the future.
Double-downing into the roots of the American — who has whitewashed his nation’s origin story, traded security for liberty, and mistreated the environment by projecting his sociopathy upon it — he emerges as the product of a series of denials that make him the great hypocrite of civilization. The completely naked American is proud and humiliated in the face of white supremacy, not humble. He is proud to uphold himself as the bastion of civilization but he is humiliated that he has to resort to the false narrative of white supremacy. Reliant on this false narrative and skilled in the spreading of spectacle, the American is nothing other than the monstrous supervillain of the 21st century.
To me the following is the key passage: “Racism defines the American to such a degree that the American no longer notices its stain, except when he catches an accidental glimpse of himself in a mirror. Those moments are only temporary, transient, and the American immediately recontextualizes and reduces those moments of self-awareness to a bland and frozen museum exhibit. That is, racism is so much a part of the American that he can sense it only when it is turned against him, and only then does the American get a brief glimpse into the courtroom of history, observing it from the mists of the future.”
For me, this recontextualization is how we make plaster saints out of all our American icons, derive lemonade from lemons, and, as you say, turn our greatest trials and most heinous sins into bland and frozen museum exhibits. The Civil War, the emancipation of the slaves, the civil rights acts of the 1960s, are all dutifully presented as part of the great American epic, how we, in our supposed innate goodness and the superiority of our institutions, righted society’s racial wrongs so that we might live happily ever after in peace and brotherhood and racial harmony. In reality, the war, the emancipation, and the legislation, were little better than band-aids on tumors. They just disguised the cancer underneath, which never stopped spreading.
The failure to recognize and deal with this fact must be laid as much at the feet of white liberals as it is at the feet of reactionary racist conservatives. No one gets off the hook from our national nightmare. After all, it is the liberals who like to crow about the Civil War, emancipation, the civil rights movement, etc. For decades they, mostly white liberals, having been telling fairy tales about civil rights progress.
The initial aim of the Civil War, of course, was not to emancipate slaves, but to stitch together the union with bayonets, as Horace Greeley put it. Lincoln had no intention of interfering with slavery in the South, not just because he had no constitutional right to do so, but because, as he himself said, he had no personal inclination to do so. Emancipation was a military tactic, not a crusade for justice.
But Lincoln was prescient. In a famous speech, he stated that if given all the power in the world, he himself did not know what to do about slavery. He wondered whether we might free the slaves “but keep them as underlings,” and asked whether doing so would significantly better their lot.
Of course, that is exactly what happened, but this story gets short shrift in our national memory, which is always very selective, and often amnesiac — “History is bunk,” as the anti-semite Henry Ford put it.
During the brief era of Reconstruction, and under bayonet-point by occupying Union forces, blacks in the South gained the right to vote, to own property, to run for office, to sit on juries, and more. In other words, for a brief moment, they were no longer slaves or even underlings.
But that brief moment ended in 1876 when Rutherford (Rutherfraud) B. Hayes, the Republican candidate for president, lost the election to the Democrat, Samuel J. Tilden. He lost the popular and the electoral vote, but some electors were in dispute, and so Rutherfraud made a dirty deal with the newly reconstructed south to end Reconstruction in exchange for the votes of those disputed electors. In short order, Jim Crow was ushered in, all the gains of the blacks in the South were overturned, and black people, north and south, became exactly what Lincoln foresaw: underlings. Basically, they continued to be slaves, but by another name.
Then we have to flash forward all the way to the 1960s for significant civil rights legislation that tried to do over again what Reconstruction almost did. It has helped to some extent, but again, it’s a band-aid on a tumor.
First enslaved, then freed but made underlings; lynched, deprived of constitutional rights, redlined out of decent housing, kept out of superior white schools, not even allowed to drink at the same water fountain as whites — and much of this happened North as well as South — black people saw not just their own lives, but the lives of their children and their children, impoverished, economically, morally, and physically. The civil rights push of the 60s rectified some of this, but here is the thing: Just as white supremacy adopted the guise of Jim Crow after the Civil War and Reconstruction, so too it has adopted a different guise, or guises, since the 1960s. Black are kept down by other means; widespread police repression and terror, including actual murders; discrimination practiced subtly rather than overtly, and mass incarceration of black men, often for minor drug offenses. Imprisonment is itself a form of slavery; this is even acknowledged in the constitutional amendment that ended slavery in 1865, which stated that slavery and involuntary servitude were prohibited except as a punishment for a crime.
I should like to say that slavery never really ended in America. What we have today is slavery by other means; as war is said to be diplomacy by others means, so too is white supremacy slavery by other means.
I see no way to fix this. Neither did Lincoln, whose preferred solution was for the newly freed slaves to self-deport overseas, to Central America and Africa. Toward the end of his life, however, he seems to have recognized the hopelessness and cruelty of this project.
Lincoln said that Americans would live as free men forever or die by suicide. But no political institutions last forever, and indeed, perhaps we are committing national suicide this very year, 2020, which is shaping up to be the worst year in American history, outstripping even 1968, 1932 and 1861. The American president has ripped from his face the mask of self-deception and pretty illusions, and has shown for all to see the ugly face that the mask hid. Ironically, in some ways, this makes him — a man known for his unending string of lies — the most honest American president in history. Why? Because his face is our face. Trump is our mirror reflection, but in this case the mask never goes back on. Showing the true face of America is real honesty.