"I find it so difficult to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant, that I hesitate to burden my attention with those which are insignificant."
- Henry David Thoreau
Flashback 15 months: a dozen dues-paying members and a dozen curious almost-supporters of the Atlanta branch of the Green Party sit around a large seminar table in the basement of a suburban library. We’re talking about our role in the upcoming anti-war demonstration--the Big One that will ultimately draw in some 15 million people around the world. In spite of all contrary evidence, some still cling to the hope that this massive demonstration will thwart the adventurism of Bush-Cheney & Company: the machinations of the Neocon-Neoliberal dreamers here and abroad refashioning the world.
I suggest that we carry American flags.
Reaction: blank stares; incredulity; outrage; malaise; cognitive dissonance. Motion tabled, as they say.
"I am but mad north, northwest," I might have protested, but, alas, a childhood stutterer, I’ve always found myself more articulate in retrospect, more measured on the page than in the hurly-burly of debate.
Notwithstanding, my reasoning was not complex. Americans love symbols. They love them more than an educated and "civilized" people ought to love them, knowing, or theoretically knowing, to what awful use the symbolism of the Swastika was put in their fathers’ or grandsires’ generation. If they knew the history of their country the way citizens of other countries know their own history, they would know how the symbols of the cross and the white hood terrified Black fellow citizens for a century after the Civil War. If the colleges and junior colleges did their jobs, if we still had "liberal arts education," we’d understand how the cross itself, once a symbol of God’s love and sacrifice, was perverted into a symbol of Roman Empire, Crusade, and genocide in the Americas.
But we do not know, and we are stuck with Vengeful God, flag and country; mom and apple pie: a maudlin sentimentalism that brings teary eyes to those hearing our national anthem, but incapable of remembering the words or of making its impossible chordal leaps.
We are two countries in one; or, better yet, we are a people and we are a nation-state. Not half blue and half red states. It would be far easier if we could neatly divide ourselves into partisan simplicities: educated, sophisticated Clinton-Kerryesque Dems and boorish, grammatically-challenged stumblebums like Bush file. It’s not a question of either-or, but both. We are the United States and we are America—two ideas, often in conflict, in one. As individuals we may gravitate more towards one pole than the other. But until we realize how these two lungs make this body politic-social-and-economic whole, we will divide ourselves and our efforts to improve the whole; we will never succeed in integrating ourselves into the greater world community, now more than ever seeking a healing, integrative vision.
Our division is an old story: Long before we conceived the United States, we thought of ourselves as America; or, more accurately, American colonies or English colonies in America. The Declaration of Independence—John Locke’s ideas, polished to brilliance by Jefferson’s prose—asserted the claim to make the colonies "free and independent states," to assume "among the Powers of the Earth the separate but equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them." Those same Natural Laws empower the people to "alter or abolish" any form of government destructive of their rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Heady stuff! This is America’s salutatorian address to a world of empires, divine rights of monarchs and widespread mayhem and corruption.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t last. Ideals emerge brightly minted as copper pennies, but are soon tarnished by everyday handling. The long, Revolutionary struggle killed and maimed a generation of young men dreaming of promised "free" land beyond the Appalachians. (The French and Indian Wars, or Seven Years’ War, of the previous generation had opened up those new lands by driving out the French and their allied "savages". The dozen years of relative peace preceding the battle on Lexington Green had brought about one million new immigrants to the colonies, to this date the most extraordinary percentage increase in America’s population.)
The Revolution exhausted the spirit and ruined the treasury. Some former heroes, most notably Daniel Shays, take Jefferson’s words to heart and stage their own rebellions. The Articles of Confederation, mostly frayed trade agreements between the independent states, can’t settle interstate boundary disputes, let alone international affairs.
Enter Hamilton and Madison, the great progenitors of the Constitution of the United States. Their stated aim is "to establish a more perfect union." Unstated: to protect property rights; to balance the commercial interests of New England and the mid-Atlantic with the agrarian-slave-holding interests of the South; to ensure fiscal soundness through the establishment of a National Bank (Hamilton is laying the groundwork). An Electoral College ensures that this Republic will not fall prey to the democratic rabble (so recently a lauded "rabble in arms," but of late more feared than honored by the privileged speculators in government bonds—and now new Congressmen). Almost as an afterthought, George Mason rallies some remaining true believers in the principles of Locke and Paine, and a Bill of Rights is amended!
The word "democracy" never appears in the Constitution. Not surprising, perhaps, since the now godlike framers were looking back to the pre-Caesarian Roman Republic, not the demos-legislated city-states of Cleisthenes, et.al. They were more interested in establishing order, even a New World Order ("Novus Ordo Seclorum," our dollar bill proclaims), than they were in enfranchising the masses. Hamilton himself, beloved ersatz son of General Washington, would soon be double-timing as an agent for the Brits, keeping a close eye on his political and ersatz-sibling rival, the Francophiliac, Jacobin-loving Jefferson.
But this is gravy. The point is that the US "framers" whom the pundits love to love, and academics never cease to adulate, really did "frame" America--the naked babe so recently delivered of Revolution, inspired and fought for by Paine and Ethan Allen, a septaugenerian Ben Franklin and Roger Williams, and many others before them. Indeed, the Mayflower Compact, and the Iroquoian-led Confederacy of Six Nations had more to do with democracy and America than that Constitutional document which Justice Antonin Scalia, capo di tutti capi, has recently reminded us—lest we forget—nowhere guarantees that Americans have a right to elect their president!
In his recent prime-time news conference, our latest incarnation of King George spoke about the "democratic hopes of the Iraqi people," mentioned "democracy" or "democratic" once or twice more, and "independence" at least twice. I lost count of these noble words in the fusillade of the words "freedom" (19 times) and "free" (29 times). Indeed, so often did George the Unglib resort to the "f" word, I began to wonder if he were suffering from some new strain of Tourette’s Syndrome, and simply couldn’t help himself. To any but the most undiscerning, there must come a time when the overuse of a word drains it of meaning. Alas, none of the pundits or representatives of our putatively "free" media thought to ask Hapless George just what he meant by "free." What an array of emotions might have played across that Alfred E. Neumanish face if its purported owner had been asked, Socratically, to define his terms.
One of my favorite definitions of freedom is attributed to Whitman. Freedom being such a tricky wrestler to pin, perhaps it’s best the bard came at it roundabout: "One man’s freedom to swing his arms ends where another man’s nose begins."
Those who constructed the United States—and let us never forget that it is a construct, something fashioned by men in periwigs and silk stockings—were empire-builders and empire-dreamers from the beginning. Read McCullough on Adams, or better yet, read the primary sources—Jefferson, Hamilton, Burr, et. al. Those who controlled the Slave Empire of the South, and those in control of the Commercial-Mercantile Empire of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic conspired to move Westward, always Westward, into the newly released lands of the Treaty of Paris, and later, into Napoleon’s recently acquired Spanish territory, our Louisiana Purchase. Jefferson himself, mixed-up "democrat" that he was, signed the death warrants for "the civilized tribes," which the Enforcer and wealthy land-speculator "Old Hickory" Jackson would later execute, killing thousands along one of myriad, genocidal Trails of Tears. Our generations-long war against "Native Americans" (I prefer the term "tribal peoples") may be the most compelling indictment of the United States in its war against America.
By the time Thoreau came along, our blood-lust for Empire, and the gathering threat of Civil War—which I prefer to call the first of our Railroad Wars, to determine how to dispense with the land conquered from the Republic of Mexico—the rising stench of it all, led Thoreau to stand at Cape Cod, gaze over the Atlantic and proclaim his relief in putting the continent behind him! (And this was the author of "Civil Disobedience"; the man who had met John Brown and nearly joined his fateful insurrection at Harper’s Ferry; the man who, witnessing US officers enforce the newly adopted, sop-to-the-South Fugitive Slave Law felt such disgust for his country he declared himself its enemy.
It was the United States he hated; not America. He loved the Maine woods; Cape Cod and his own little Eden at Walden. He was, perhaps, the most brilliant examplar of the intelligentsia that engendered and nurtured the American Renaissance at Concord—Emerson’s self-reliant, transcendent idealism transmuted into a politico-literary-social movement.
Thoreau hated the crass commercialism of the expanding Empire. "The mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality," he avers in Life Without Principle. In our ad-addled times, when the bottom line is all, when our scientists tell us watching television for more than an hour a day can permanently re-wire the brains of toddlers, what shall we do with our Attention-Deficit-Disordered adults who have been watching television for several hours a day since childhood?
One of our media misrepresentatives might have asked George the Unglib Thoreau’s poignant question, "What is it to be born free and not to live free? What is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom?"
Moral freedom? Aye, there’s the rub. Could any of those re-wired brains have thought to ask that popinjay poppet to interpret so pregnant a conundrum?
Here, then, is our weighty crux. Those who frame the debate have debased the language of debate: both commonsensical and higher discourse. The enforcers and beneficiaries of the ever-expanding US Empire have purloined the language of the freedom-dwelling "Native Americans" and poisoned the sacred wells of those tens of millions who came from abroad seeking freedom here from oppression there. In the mouth of our President Pitchman "free" becomes a four-letter word!
The water has been so muddied, the air so polluted with electromagnetic currents of mass deception, our academic institutions so undermined by Pentagon and CIA funding, our natural integrity so sullied, it is hard to see how we shall ever work our way through this nightmare of tin-star heroes and shadow enemies. Those who still bother to read may recall octogenarian Franklin’s prescient warning to posterity: "I agree to this Constitution with all its faults," he wrote. "There is no Form of Government but what may be a Blessing to the People if well-administered; and I believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a Course of Years and can only end in Despotism, as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other."
If we are to pass successfully through this Time of Trial, if we are to have a New World Vision--a Vision that embraces the millennia-long hopes of the world which has nurtured us--then we must see distinctly the battle lines that separate the United States from this yearning, steady heartbeat called America. We must take back the sacred language of America and permit no fools to gibber it away. We must seize the culture of America and reject and boycott the shoddy, ceaseless bombardment of violent, meretricious images issuing from the Mammon/Moloch-children-eating mealy-mouthed Mass Media and their politician shills.
"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty," Jefferson wrote on a migraine-free day when his contradictions did not disable him. If we are ever to succeed, we must anticipate a long battle, an "eternal" battle. And we must be clear: This is not a battle between good and evil, as our present day US cheerleaders pretend. Americans reject simplistic Manicheanism. Our challenge is bigger.
It is the quest for wholeness: for healing, understanding and justice. Truth--the eternal striving for it--and common decency. Are these not our real American values?
© Copyright 2004 by AxisofLogic.com
*Gary Corseri has published two books of poetry and two novels. His work has appeared in Axis of Logic, The New York Times, Village Voice, Common Dreams, Redbook, Georgia Review and over 100 other publications. His plays have been produced on PBS-Atlanta and in five states. He recently edited the anthology, Manifestations. He can be reached at corseri@comcast.net.
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