WERE WE RIGHT?

WERE WE RIGHT?

In 1880 Henry Adams published a novel, entitled Democracy, intended to be a satire on American politics. One of his characters, Mrs. Madeleine Lightfoot Lee, goes to Washington after her husband and son die to restart her life in a world of high literacy and intrigue. She finds Washington enervating and dull, a bucket of corruption, cynicism, and patterned hypocrisy. After some time she becomes reflective and shares, what I believe is, the one question we all share most everyday:

“Who then is right? How can we all be right? Half of our wise men declare that the world is going to perdition; the other half that is is fast becoming perfect…. There is only one thing in life … that I must and will have before I die. I must know whether America is right or wrong.”

Isn’t this what we all ask as we participate in this still young “American experiment?” It feels like we barely hold on by a thread, and what seems to confirm this are the reminders from our own wise men of letters – that we basically let everything go to hell until the very last second. Then crisis inexplicably pulls us together – and thus far that derelict strategy has worked. We seem to shine best only when things get so bad we have no option but to then address the matter fully. It’s playing craps with destiny, but we don’t care. Some would have it that we have a death wish, at least a sadomasochistic streak. Still others would simply say we’re wishing to know the answer to Mrs. Lee’s eternal question – finality.

It’s easy to have faith in a program invented by “heroes” two-hundred forty-three years ago, who we’ve deified as super-human, indestructible, god-like marbled faces neatly aligned in the Capital Building. Our sandstone Parnassus in South Dakota makes them bigger than life. Their words are the lapidary phrasing of giants among men. Words mattered then, and they matter now, though in abbreviated forms. Today, words matter but they’re prone to redaction, low-shelf psychodrama, cryptic semaphore (street RAP), tabloid gossip, and pulp fiction.

Two centuries ago our Founders were even more worried about whether the new experiment would work than we are now. But we ignore that, preferring to remember them as stalwart, strong, level-headed, and supremely confident “fugitives from England” inspired by a new vision. Any confusion about this blurs the official narrative. Our hired hagiographers did their jobs: “They were led by faith and perseverance.” Transpose that same “presentism” onto current times and we’re left without that All-Seeing Eye. “Faith and perseverance” simply don’t work. It’s not enough. We’re on the brink and neurotically unsettled with the term “experiment.” It lords over us like a dark cloud. We want finality to things, decrees to be proven, history reassured and confirmed once and for all.

Gore Vidal thought it was the other way around: “[D]espite their long historic record of bad guesses … they are not we, and did not know; we know.” – In my view they knew; we do not. If it were Vidal’s way we’d have a dreadful absence of heroes and role-models. We put on a brave face, but we see our Founders with braver faces.

Is it through war and battles that we look for Mrs. Lee’s answer, and for our worthiness? Or is it simply about a matter of years of surviving which confirms our “rightness?” And there lies a deeper and more vexing question: If, perchance, America was “wrong,” does it mean that everything we’ve done as a nation was wrong? Our sense of righteousness, our duty to God and country, our treatment of the vanquished, manifest destiny? Would we then be forced to face our actions and the most horrible shame imaginable?

History shows that those who have conquered don’t wait around for redemption, reflection, or second-guessing their actions. They plunder, kill, take, and claim the spoils of war in the quickest and most expedient way possible. Honor, fairness, decency, and morality have nothing to do with it. Those are abstract concepts woven into the historical narrative later on by the “winners.” But still, the truth eventually catches up with the perpetrator. Time and distance clear the way for objective honesty, and we’re doomed to see things “unclouded by longing.”

There are two governments: the first is the “provisional” government: It’s the one we all learn about and are supposed to trust – freedom and justice for all, democracy, checks & balances, and so forth. Then there’s the “permanent” government, the one we’re not supposed to see – the one-corporate party (split in two haves), the elite 1 percent controlling everything, including all the information we learn. The second one cares nothing about democracy. The first one waves democracy like a flag, reminding us every day that we’re “worth it,” that we have the best of everything, that we are the best.

The first one convinces us that we enjoy a democracy, and democracy informs us that plundering is absolutely necessary (called “democratizing”). Plundering after all is God’s plan and it’s what got us here. It’s also God’s plan to spread “democracy” to all corners of the earth – to “save” them of course from themselves. Democracy is the one trigger-word that exonerates us, rescues us, from any doubts about our past. And that means if democracy goes away, we go away. Even if to “democratize” a foreign land really means to “Americanize” it (American banks, American currency, American factories, American sweatshops, American tariffs, America’s national religion which is Christianity, and American military bases). No wonder the third-world has hated us so much for so long.

But again, like the days of our Founders who grappled with a nation’s very meaning and purpose, even democracy is an uncomfortably elusive concept. It’s full of potentially abstract loopholes and high interpretability. It’s susceptible to “compromise.” – “Are we willing to forgo some liberties to preserve and protect our freedom?” – the penultimate oxymoron. Yet a disturbing number of Americans say yes. In fact, they go even further: They contend that their own liberties/freedoms are more important than those of others, hence more important to protect and preserve. White Supremicist, native-born Christian Americans seem to think so.

Gray areas in the American argument, for me, brings up the many campaigns of World War One. It brings up Flanders Field, Gallipoli, America’s “lost battalion” in the Argonne Forest, and so many other horrible events where thousands died. In nearly every one the question surfaced, “Was it worth it?” Or were most of those campaigns the decisions made by arrogant, self-serving, and ignorant commanders, safely distant from the battlefields, who only wanted to be remembered for their “valor and honor?” Many field officers (rarely discussed) committed suicide with horrible “survivor’s guilt.” Again, time and distance return us to our inner demons.

In the end, yes, “we won” the Revolution and the big wars. But we weren’t there. Nor were we in Philadelphia 243 years ago. We simply have no choice but to cover up our shame with redacted versions of history. The white (Christian) guys won again. God was in our corner. Errol Flynn and Ronald Reagan fly off into the sunset. John Wayne fights heathens at Fort Apache to this very day. Forget all the PTSD and failed veterans needs and benefits now plaguing us with the truth. “Reality” isn’t needed anymore. The victors of war rewrite history and fictionalize everything. We’re God’s favorite people once again. Just look forward, never backwards.

So, if the one link – American democracy – in a rusting chain which holds us together is eternally fluid and susceptible to change, will we end up answering Mrs. Lee sooner than later? The enigma grows when we look at the nature of democracy itself. If it fails then we’ll know. If it doesn’t fail then, hopefully, we will never know.

Hindsight is an interesting concept. It’s supposed to give us clarity and enough wisdom not to commit the same mistakes twice. But hindsight in the service of promoting a national lie takes on an entirely different purpose. It’s about selective attention and cheery-picking details which best serve the needs of mythology and propaganda. It’s about replaying mistakes in order to improve future impostures, fraud, and strategic deception – not unlike orthodox religion. Both rely heavily on superstition, hermeneutics, and third- and fourth-hand accounts.

At the end of this day, the verdict is still out on our national virtue. Even after all this time. So many alarums and excursions, noise and saber-rattling, storm and stress, still leave us in serious doubt. It’s almost become taboo to reflect this deeply and lend scrutiny to our national purpose. And yet because of that we seem to suffer from what the psychiatric profession calls “agitated depression.” We never slow down lest old haunting memories might catch up with us. Best to simply keep looking forward and move faster and faster. Count on even more illiteracy, more anxiety, and impatience to discourage too much fact-checking. Who cares anyway?! Americans want entertainment NOW! – escapism NOW! Just give them what they want. Meanwhile, keep the marching bands playing and the flags waving!

Hopefully Mrs. Lee will never get her answer. By its very design democracy is first of all a temperament or state of mind instead of a code of laws, something eternally susceptible to change. In fact, it allies itself with change. Nothing is ever final, and nobody ever knows enough. Secondly, it requires a kind of governing which is supposed to change according to the needs of each generation. This is what makes it a living contract. Government, said Jefferson, belongs to the living. – In short, democracy is always unpredictable, mercurial, and without a final verdict. It is an “eternal civil debate” which isn’t always civil. Anything short of this amounts to oppression and despotism in varying degrees.

As for America itself, Lewis Lapham said it best: “I can no longer identify myself simply as an American. The noun apparently means nothing unless it is dressed up with at least one modifying adjective [white American, Afro-American, Native-American, liberal American, gay American] …. The subordination of the noun to the adjective makes a mockery of both the American premise and the democratic spirit.”

America is also less about the rhetoric of democracy than it is about economics and markets – that is, advertising. It “concerns itself not so much with what is true as with what people believe to be true – with the image or the perception rather than the fact…. [It] relies on a vocabulary meant to persuade and seduce rather than to teach and inform.” (Lapham). – Again, like democracy, it makes America a turnstile of identities, claims, and presentations fitted to the markets of perception and style. Its mythology is constantly refitted to the shifting needs of each generation.

In the end, Mrs. Lee needs to know that democracy and America are never easy, never neatly packaged. Despite all the allusions to tradition and stability, both are a mess most of the time. If America were a human being (Uncle Sam), psychiatrists would diagnose him as neurotic, bi-polar, and borderline. It’s the exact opposite of the kind of Edwardian world to which Mrs. Lee is accustomed. For her to get an answer would be the day she gets the answer she doesn’t want – the day democracy dies. Which does not mean it’s the day America dies (her second unwanted answer).

© 2019 Richard Hiatt