693 Words: 250 Years

In this bizarrely polarized nation, most of us either think of its history as the greatest feel-good story ever told or the direst nightmare ever experienced.

Of course, it’s neither. Or, more accurately, it’s both.

My friend George Bull, as voracious a reader as I know, pointed out to me a neat little piece that ran in The Observer this weekend, a reflection on the USA’s 250 years, penned by a passel of noted scribes. They are:

That’s quite an all-star cast, including a bunch of Pulitzer Prize winners, a screenwriter, an Ivy League professor, both a National Book Award winner and a nominee, a New York Times Notable Book honoree, and a satirist. Their essays do well to prove a point that I’ve long held — that the United States of America, being the most diverse nation on the planet and, throughout its 250 years, a destination for immigrants from every corner of the world, represents both the best and worst, the full range of thought, feeling and behavior, that humanity has to offer.

Our current president and his MAGA worshippers would love for us to see this place as a holy land, bestowed upon us special people by our gracious god (well, they’d capitalize the word, but I never do), and a beacon on a hill that too many of the Earth’s bad guys would like nothing more than to be destroyed from without and within.

The purists who form the religious wing of the “woke” crowd view the US as a cesspool of greed, violence, slavery, rape, hatred, toxic masculinity, cutthroat competition, and crushing conformity.

Again, like any stew, this nation is a mix of all those ingredients. And, again and again throughout our history, we’ve swung back and forth between one extreme and the other.

BTW: My reference to woke’s “religious wing” means just this: my sisteren and brethren of the Left, the progressives, the liberals, or whatever you wish to call us, too often slip all too easily into a priestly orthodoxy. At worst, they excommunicate erstwhile allies who split hairs in a taboo manner and wind up always and forever paring down our numbers. All those strategically unified Right Wing, free market, authoritarian, Christian nationalist Republicans, maintaining their maximum numerical advantage, of late have been able to wrest control of the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court, most statehouses, and too many other levers of power hereabouts.

They know how to keep the tent big; we don’t.

Purity’s nice when it comes to drinking water, It sucks in a democratic-republic political system.

Anyway, I figured why don’t I have a go at this exercise? Why don’t I cherry pick the highs and lows of this country’s story? So I’ll start, appropriately, at the beginning.

Of course, both historic landmarks I begin with represent contradictions. I mean, what are we if not a nation of contradictions?

Contradiction No. 1: The White proto-Americans who came to this “New World” from the British Isles between, oh, 1600 and the mid 18th century, came here primarily, to escape religious intolerance in their homeland. Upon arrival here, they promptly imposed their own religious intolerance.

Contradiction No. 2: Those White, erstwhile Brits decided to form their own country, issuing a Declaration of Independence, and then writing themselves a Constitution. They preached, “All men are created equal.” Beautiful words. Gorgeous words. No society had ever before advanced the notion that people could govern themselves, without relying on a god-given noble class, without submitting to a powerful priesthood, without acknowledging that one group of people were superior to another. Except, women weren’t included under the rubric “people.” Nor were non-landowners. Black’s were fractions of people, 3/5 to be precise. It took fully 188 years before the United States got around to ensuring that every human being, no matter their sex, gender, skin color, wealth or lack thereof, was equal under the law. And to this day, forces within this nation continue to chafe against those guarantees.

Good and bad. There’s more, Oh, there’s more. I’ll get to more over the next few days as we approach the Fourth of July.

The Electron Pencil