By Sheria
With all of the things in the news from oil spills to bombs in Times Square, I really thought that I was done writing about those tea party folks. However, it's like when you're a kid and can't help but pick at that scab on your knee. A friend posted this March video from a tea party protest of the health care reform bill, which prompted another friend to comment, "I'm so over America." This in turn prompted me to think about my own feelings about this country.
I've never been one for love of country. I know that this upsets a lot of people, heaven knows Michelle Obama got all kinds of flack for suggesting that she hadn't always been proud of this country. I just find it somewhat absurd to love things. I love my friends and my family, but I don't love my car or my table lamps. Besides, love of country leads to patriotism which segues into nationalism, which I think of as akin to patriotism on PCP.
I don't think that we are the worst country in the world but neither do I think that we are as great as we have deluded ourselves into believing. This is a country founded in blood, built on taking over the land and forcing the native population off of their land. We made laws to justify this usurpation of property (the Discovery Doctrine), declaring that the Indians had never owned the land but merely occupied it until it was discovered by Europeans. It was the Europeans,who cultivated the land and fenced it in, that created ownership. The Supreme Court case, Johnson v. M'Intosh, 21 U.S. 543, L. Ed 681, 8 Wheat. 543 (1823), espousing this view is standard reading in every first year property law class. Then there's the whole slavery thing, building a country on the backs of a kidnapped and enslaved people. Emancipation of those slaves was followed by 100 years of Jim Crow--legalized, government sanctioned discrimination based on skin color that denied basic rights of citizenship to Americans having or perceived as having "one drop of black blood." There's the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, robbing people of their property and their dignity. Reparations finally were paid for the property but how do you provide reparations for stripping people of their dignity? Another question to ponder is why there was no such internment for German Americans, also our enemy in WWII? Then there is the new Arizona state law, that legalizes racial profiling. Arizona is a single state but at least seven other states have already announced that they are considering following Arizona's lead.
The tea partiers are the culmination of generations of Americans reinforcing a belief in the superiority of America simply by virtue of its existence. There is really nothing surprising about the birth and growth of the tea party; it is the expected progeny of a country that feeds ignorance to its youth and revises history to fit our notions of who we think we are with no regard for the truth of the past.
I think that the biggest problem with the tea partiers is that they reflect the pervasive ignorance and arrogance that characterizes this country. As a whole, we can be a pretty narrow minded and provincial lot. We have no sense of history, we view ourselves as morally superior to all other nations. Because we choose not to remember the past, we don't understand our present. In our minds we have always been great, always on the side of right, always behaved in a noble fashion. Every other nation pales in comparison. America is a legend in its own mind. Like most legends, there is some truth in ours but our delusions of grandeur are mostly the result of smoke and mirrors. Nonetheless, we cling to the legend and meet any attempt to disavow us of that legend with anger and self-righteous indignation.
What can I say... Amen, Sheria. My (and not only, of course) thoughts exactly.
ReplyDeleteExcellent post.
Sheria,
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed your excellent post. Welcome to the ZONE!
I remember an old literature prof. of mine from Kenya saying that America is one of the most diverse places in the world, but the trouble is, he lamented, most Americans don't seem to be aware of it. I would add that our cultural, political, and historical narratives don't even come close to who we really are, and that some of them are built around depraved obliviousness or outright lies peddled by the cynical and the self-interested.
Anyhow, I've always been interested in European perspectives on the USA -- one of my profs, a German, said he liked most what he called our "healthy non-intellectualism," as opposed to anti-intellectualism. He was alluding to the frequent European complaint from de Tocqueville's day onwards about the "tiredness" of Europe and its overindebtedness to certain notions of intellectual and social rank. Wish I could agree altogether with him about the non/anti distinction, but there sure is a lot of nasty, malignant anti-intellectualism on the loose today, isn't there?
Which brings us to the 'baggery -- I heard some commentator say recently that statistically, these people are indistinguishable from that old shadow of ourselves, "the reactionary fifth." They are the people who have a violent allergic reaction whenever ANYTHING changes, even if it's for the better. In my view, these people are reactionaries, pure and simple -- I don't buy their talk about their alleged concern over the deficit and the size of government -- few of them had much to say about Bush 43's big spending or overreaching.
Once again, my wise friend, you have said what I've been thinking but have held back. There was something about the Bush years that made me conscious of how other countries must see us--which led to stepping outside my narrower views to get another glimpse of our entire history from a perspective that was freer of propaganda.
ReplyDeleteI first had that glimpse in the late sixties and early seventies, back in my Vietnam War protest days. I got caught up in marriage, child-rearing, and career-building and tried to let the country improve its global image without my help. You remind me that any improvement was largely short-lived and, I fear, another "pygmy of my infatuation" and hope.
If we can't see ourselves as others see us, we're doomed to commit errors in national judgment repeatedly. If we can't see our country as both our beloved home and as just another nation subject to the verdict of history, we are doomed to commit errors in our personal judgment as citizens. Repeatedly.
Way to go, Swash Zone: you've found Sheria!
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteIgnorance and arrogance -- it has a certain rhythm to it; a complimentary symmetry, each accumulating, justifying the other.
ReplyDeleteI just quit a local Amateur Radio group that meant a lot to me. It was becoming impossible to discuss solar flux or sporadic e-skip or radio navigation without enduring an explosion of ObamaHate. It seems like the most important and perhaps the only cohesive social glue in South Florida and of course if you dispassionately explain that no, it was Bush who did this and Obama who cut your taxes and Obama who isn't taking away your AK and provide unequivocal supporting data, you're a pariah and your mailbox will jam with hate mail.
I'm not over America yet, just the people who live in it.
First, let me add my rather belated but very warm welcome to a fellow North Carolinian.
ReplyDeleteExcellent post and a pretty accurate summation of America's sometimes shameful past. The deluded who have looked no further than their skewed textbooks are now become the ignorant and arrogant indeed.
Having grown up in a very diverse community,America for me is more about all the different colors and languages, foods and traditions that came with the Irish, the Italians, the Eastern Europeans, the Cubans and Africans and Middle Easterners as each group, suffering in their own land, rode the wave of immigration to America.
I find the hate and intolerance painful to witness. I do not understand how people can have such animosity toward another human being.
I am glad you are here and look forward to your insights.
Thanks to all for the warm welcome. I'm working my way around to read posts from each of you.
ReplyDeleteWelcome Sheria. Today, I feel especially blessed knowing you and Nance have joined us.
ReplyDeleteI share your views exactly and feel no special sense of fondness for a country that would violate its own laws and turn itself into a perversion of its founding principles. I fear über patriots and nationalists more than I fear common criminals because my ancestors were among the victims.
There is no doubt in my mind that hardcore fundamentalists and extreme right-wingers would try to convert me at the point of a gun. Lacking the means of coercion, they wield revisionist history as a weapon, which offends me on multiple levels. Revisionist history attempts to alter reality, cover up atrocities with lies and omissions, imposes an authoritarian worldview upon us, and punishes us with innuendo and suspicion ... turning us into outcasts and refugees.
During the 1980s and 90s, I was an American expat living in Europe. In many ways, I felt freer in Europe because there was no political or social pressure to conform. If the extreme rightwing ever takes over Washington, I intend to liquidate my assets and return.
Don’t worry. I intend to take all my fellow Swash Zoners with me where we will all live happily ever after.