United States
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The American Question
It's a long piece, so I'm only posting excerpts, but RTWT.
https://jacobitemag.com/2018/05/03/t...ican-question/
But of course America, being as big as it is and being possessed by so quixotic an ideal, is bound to contain deep divides, fractures in the actual which are both concealed and exacerbated by the fervidity of the ideal. It’s become something of a commonplace in the past decade or so — since the Bush-Obama transition, really — that there are at least two Americas, and perhaps that one is better than the other. There are stubborn, anti-intellectual, self-reliant Red America on the one hand and inclusive, creative, self-righteous Blue America on the other, seemingly bound forever to rehash the dialectic of the English and American Civil Wars. There is an obvious reality to this account, but I want to accentuate something different about the disunity, or rather multiplicity, of American culture. I want to peel back not only the desperate optimism — or rather the “Blue American” provincialism — that would present America as “essentially, as opposed to aspirationally, a tolerant, pluralist place, full of enlightened citizens who settle their differences via ‘principled disagreement,’” but even the layer beneath that. What if we were to put aside for a moment even the aspirational quality of the American self-concept and take a good hard look at what results the experiment is actually churning out, no matter how uncomfortable it might be?
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In order to really examine this sense of impermanence and confusion, let’s look to someone who, by all accounts, ought to be very well-adjusted. Let’s imagine the most conventional, unassuming Middle American — imagine him as whitebread, as suburban, as middle-class, as possible. Some of his ancestors were colonial settlers; others came much later. He isn’t a WASP, but he isn’t a “white ethnic” either. He’s not heir to some vast family fortune, but he’s doing very well by global standards. He’s aware of how blessed he is, too—but he feels a sort of disconnect between himself and the circumstances his blessings have put him in. Who is he? What is he? What can he identify with, beyond this or that subculture, that isn’t hopelessly political? How can he ground his sense of self in anything abiding and ancient?
He can’t pine for Prague or Dublin like his ancestors might have; he’s not a Czech American or an Irish American. He’s just “white” — and what sort of identity is that? If he takes his “whiteness,” within an American context, too seriously, he gets the sense that he then has two options: either he must identify with the discredited white supremacist ideology of the 19th century; or, as per today’s received opinion, he must identify with it in reverse, and make his every conscious minute on this earth an effort to deconstruct, dismantle, and redistribute every last vestige of the world that ideology was a part of. Either way, he must remain simultaneously self-obsessed and self-denying; he is prevented from seeing himself as a member of one among many peoples, all of whom are different, all of whom have distinct concerns, but none of whom is objectively superior to the rest. Whether he chauvinistically lords it over others or “sits down and shuts up” in order to counteract it, he is in either case wedded to a sense of his own indestructibility, to a sense that only his own group can exercise agency in the world — a kind of collective narcissism.
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Well, is it? Puritans and Cavaliers and Dutchmen and Frenchmen; West Africans and Ulster Scots; Germans and Irishmen and Jews; Chinese and Japanese and Italians and Poles; Mexicans and Indians and Persians and Filipinos — all of us coming in droves to the shores of forgetfulness. Making better lives for ourselves, striving upward out of stifling ancestral worries and into a New World, yes! — but also assembling, brick by brick, the infrastructure of the moral entanglement of hundreds of nations. Of course there is the massive tally of tragedies and injustices: the deaths among the indigenous peoples of the continent from disease, let alone from massacres, wars, and innumerable skirmishes; the enslavement of millions of Africans and the indenture of millions of Europeans; the Civil War; two centuries of foreign military interventions, so many of them beyond even the Western Hemisphere; the unprecedented concentration of wealth; the reduction of culture to ephemeral movements of aesthetic taste. One recalls the final words of William S. Burroughs’s “Thanksgiving Prayer”: “Thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.”
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To put it simply, people come here and are deindigenized. That’s the great experiment — liberating people from the very sense of peoplehood. Our American starts to think America is like the La Brea Tar Pits, taking us in — all of us, the whole world — like so many animals, ready to reduce us to fossils, remains no longer capable of generating new life but perhaps appreciable from the sterile remove of a museum. Yes, this is a prosperous place; yes, this is a refuge for so many people from so many dangers; but what would bind them together in the absence of wealth and entertainment? That’s how you know you’re a member of a people, a nation in the true sense of the word: when you know that shared stories, shared loyalties, shared notions of purpose, will abide like a rock beneath the waves of poverty and prosperity.
Our American is charitable and open-minded, but he isn’t stupid. He knows full well that if the power went out, if the money stopped flowing, if the hegemony of Washington were seriously in question, the level of social trust would not be high enough to hold things together. As it is, hardly anybody hitchhikes anymore; people flake on their friends as if they were strangers; our American can hardly name any of his own neighbors. He considers how short-sighted it is — how cruel, even — to subject people to a comfort so seductive and yet so tenuous, a comfort which has already begun to slip away on the psychological level if not the material. If there’s a god, our American thinks, he (or she!) probably isn’t very happy with us.
This begins to seriously haunt our American. And who are we to blame him if this unease begins to affect his feelings about policy, about identity, about his own past and future? What if he comes to suspect it might be best to limit if not halt immigration, not out of some small-minded intolerance but out of fear, a real and abiding fear of divine judgment, at the thought of subjecting even more people to the experiment? What if he secretly begins to wish that his own ancestors had never come here at all? Shall he go back to Europe? Would they even want him, having given up the dream of progress for the dream of homecoming, taking his big comical American aspirations with him even as he tries to escape them, like a child running away from the animal balloons tied around his finger? What would “going back” even entail for someone whose ancestors came from all over the continent? Shall he send his head to England, one arm to the Czech Republic and the other to Ireland?
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Originally Posted by Smeagol
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