Instead of making America great why don’t we make her decent?
“Oh the shepherd is asleep
Where the willows weep
And the mountains are filled
With lost sheep”
Bob Dylan, “Ring Them Bells”
I grew up on the myths, swallowed them whole, without questioning. No one ever told me I could question them. It wasn’t until I joined the Air Force and went to Japan that I was far enough away from America to see it more clearly, though still imperfectly, as if through a dirty window. I served with many young men from the Rust Belt — Ohio, Michigan, Indiana — who enlisted because assembly line jobs were leaving their towns. 1977. Jimmy Carter was in the White House. Two years earlier, the US had made an ignominious departure from Vietnam. Ronald Reagan waited in the wings to make us feel better about ourselves.
In this 250th year of the American republic I’m searching for anything that can restore my flagging faith. We’ve stumbled to this anniversary, stripped of our swagger and Camelot bravado, like a drunk on a short pier. What kind of country elects a man with no redeeming qualities not once, but twice? I can forgive those who looked at Trump in 2016 and thought, what do I have to lose? Neither party has done a damn thing for people like me in fifty years. Why not roll the dice? I even understand people who are apathetic about politics, who want nothing to do with it and believe voting makes no difference either way. Hell, I’ve felt that way more often than I care to admit. The wealthy and their political allies and enablers have paid lip service to working Americans for decades, and together they’ve waged a vicious class war on us, and they’re still not satisfied or sated. Like the American buffalo hunters on the Great Plains, who strolled into the saloon with blood and guts in their beards and all over their clothing after a day of shooting and killing, thirsty yet unsatisfied because more buffalo remained to be slaughtered. Come the morning, they’d return to their grisly labor.
What are we fighting over in our 250th year? Is it right versus left, red versus blue, urban versus rural — or top versus bottom? For me the depressing fact is that even if working people had a viable political vehicle, which we don’t, we lack the language and discipline to challenge the status quo, even to state the obvious: too few have too much and too many have too little. Money. Power. Resources. Influence. By design and intent and decades of bipartisan policy. We need a method of critique and plain language to articulate how we arrived at a point where myths, magical thinking and fairy tales hold us in their grip. But is it any wonder that we’ve totally lost our way? Dumbed-down corporate news, algorithms, ubiquitous screens. Fifty-two percent of Americans read at a 6th grade level, an individual and collective tragedy. No wonder ours is a democracy in name only.
As I’ve often said, we’re living in an Age of Stupidity, an unabashed celebration of ignorance, but attendant with stupidity is cruelty, outrageous taxpayer funded spectacles of violence like we saw in Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago, Minneapolis and as we see today at Delaney Hall in New Jersey. Masked agents beating on bystanders, observers, journalists, even pepper-spraying a sitting US Senator. That’s us, make no mistake, we bought the ticket.
Myths, fairy tales and magical thinking. Instead of making America great why don’t we make her decent? We need another period of Reconstruction and it should start with a recognition of our sins and failures: genocide and slavery, wars of conquest, Jim Crow, internment of Japanese-Americans, two atomic bombings, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, the War on Terror, Afghanistan, Iraq, Venezuela, Iran. Who do we think we are, and why does a nation that twice elected a criminal conman to the land’s highest office deserve the authority to decide what will be for others? Let’s bury our ideas of greatness and exceptionalism at Wounded Knee, Antietam, Black Wall Street, Three Mile Island, Dealey Plaza, Selma, the Lorraine Motel; let’s acknowledge our imperfect, contradictory, racist, intolerant, violent and misogynistic history along with the astounding stupidity of our present, and vow to do better by people; let’s stop placing our faith in greedy billionaires and religious charlatans and techno fascists. America needs a dose of humility; we’re one nation among many, all imperfect, flawed in their own peculiar ways.
Ring them bells, call the people, saints and sinners alike, summon from on high our better angels. We’ve got a long way to go. The odds are against us, we may never arrive, but it’s time to get started.
