Is America hoisted on its own petard?

Although I have written about the need for all Americans to come to the aid of their imperiled nation, especially in a time when one of the two political parties has been suckered into total emasculation by the former president, and in the process exploded the concept of truth and a body of agreed facts upon which public debate can be based, there are deeper underlying and still pulsating cacophonies in the American culture that make such “aid” by moderates of both parties as well as those who consider themselves ‘independent’.

What are those pulsating cacophonies that refuse to permit anyone or any group to hit “mute”?

Born in a revolution, nurtured on a manifest destiny mythology that pitted rough-hewn individuals against both nature in the form of taming the land, the beasts and those forces that sought peace and order and social stability, American is a place where the gun, the anti-hero, the outcast, the rebel, the robber, the scoundrel and the most devious are, paradoxically, honoured, at the expense of the ‘establishment’. This is not only a contemporary theme. It is a fundamental tenet in the American psyche. Given the avowedly unconscious national unctuous dedication (deification?) to the dark side of the “law and order” archetype, and the many entertainment agencies dedicated to the proliferation and propagation of the theme, even though whether or not the “good guy” wins at the conclusion of the half-hour or series of dramas pitting uniformed, armed and highly skilled and even more highly intelligent officers, there is an insatiable appetite for violence, as well as for illicit sexuality, and also for the perversion of the legal pathways through which money ought to travel.

Ironically, however, given the “American” outlaw archetype as proverbial anti-hero, the American government(s) ship boat-loads of public cash in the direction of those forces designed to surveillance, detection, charging and convicting those who cross that publicly declared line of either civil or criminal evil. The American fetish about security, both personal and national, is a black hole which both sucks the political culture into its vacuum, and provides those tidal waves of cash, profit and political leverage that attend sustain and inflate the insurance, the pharmaceutical, the weapons, and the military and the quasi-military agencies that abound across the land. Under the deceptive guise of “the protection of individual freedom” and the “right to individual choice” two phrases that comprise the cornerstone of the capitalist economy, government openly or secretly injects billions (through the manipulation of the populace, whose innocence and ignorance are the trusted Achilles’-heels of the voters) into those sectors, and their political districts represented by the most shrewd politicians Earmarks, and various other now deeply entrenched expectations like the expansion of military bases, the refurbishment of military equipment, the research and design of the next generation of military, pharma while limiting the need for clinical trials of new and potentially dangerous compounds, and also private protective insurances, all of which sectors, in an obvious and seemingly tolerable incestuous symbiosis that has taken hold of the political and economic systems in the country.

Muscle, deviousness, chicanery, resourcefulness, fearlessness, the capacity to “dance to one’s own drum”…..these are all innate traits of the wild west, where a mere veneer of modest, decency, dialogue, compromise, collaboration are all obviously second, third or fourth behind the ‘gun’ the ‘greeting from the elbow’ (not the hand), the deep-seated contempt for the rich (coal-driven power-station workers have killed themselves in the vortex of that hatred of the California rich), deep tolerance of alcohol, the adulation of the ‘trophy wife’, contempt for those ‘tree-huggers’ who champion environmental protections, and proud trumpeting of anything and everything associated with the ‘wild west’.

One observer, commenting on the 2016 election of trump, noted that both coasts (liberal) had forgotten all of the people living in the “middle of the country”….ordinary people, farmers, industrial worker, miners, mechanics, and labourers. While the observation has some validity, it misses the depth of the divide. Those clinging to the past, the traditional working with the hands, mostly white, the capacity to grow food for one’s own family, regular church attendance on Sundays, regardless of the ethic and/or moral values practices between services, and the denigration of the velocity and the depth of change founded on the discovery of science, technology, chemistry (except those directed to enhanced animal health and crop development) look to the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts where glass towers, and executive mansions, cars, wardrobes, and wealth have coagulated into a cancerous tumour of power.

Lost in the superficial analysis about the coasts versus the hinterland, too, is the sizeable demographic of black and Latino populations in the large cities on both coasts. The long-ago forgotten and neglected indigenous peoples on the plains have been alienated from the power structure for centuries. However, deeply embedded in the core of how America works is a bi-poplar view of the human individual: capable of great evil, and/or unworthy unless rich and acclaimed by the majority.

How then, under such dark and troubling clouds of cultural perception, signatory to what can only be described by this outsider, as a permanent divide, analogous to but far deeper and wider than the Continental Divide that separates the middle of the country from the far west coast, can the cultural divide be bridged? Having designed and built multiple bridges of iron and steel, to cross canyons, rivers, gorges, and through the creativity and ingenuity of their engineers, Americans are in danger of a national perception, conviction, belief and cornerstone, that by and through the human efforts of design and build, the deepest divides can be neutralized. Human effort, ingenuity, creativity, all of it based on hope and courage of conviction, even rebellious and at first Quixotic visioning, lie at the heart of the American psyche.

However, the human divide between races, between have’s and have-not’s, between religions, between educated and under-educated, between employed and un-and-under-employed, between those attuned to the future and those fixated on the past….these are all replicas of the original power differential between the American colonies and the British imperial government. It was violent rebellion that broke those original deadening ties to the monarchy, and yet, history has shown that American politicians are deeply imbued and steeped in a lust for personal power that merely infects those who are elected (regardless of the manipulation, the propaganda, the lying and the purchasing of the voter with his/her own money). It is and can be summarized that the gulf that ensnares the American culture is the gulf between those whose need for, dependence on, and even addiction to the acquisition of wealth for its own sake, and those who regard wealth as a means to leaven the inequities, to raise all boats, (as JFK used to say), to spread access to opportunity and not merely to ‘paint over’ the disparities and the decrepities of ramshackle neighbourhood in hundreds of cities, (although the beautify Cleveland project begins to restore some community pride through creative graffiti on barren city walls).

Extrinsic human agency, through those street artists’ brushes, and palates, and protracted periods of disciplined hours, while laudable, in the effort to rebuild this broken nation, will never take the place of a shared vision of all of the opportunities, resources, peoples and potential contributions to the nation’s well-being. Intrinsic, history-based, hope-inspired, truth-led, and creativity spawned attitudes that recognize the darkness that casts long and deep shadows over the whole nation, not only over its capital, or its many sparkling cities will begin to enable all Americans to see a common past, some of it worthy of retention and celebration, some deep and shared common lies, denial, avoidances, and inescapable hubris that like negative ions embedded in those clouds, continue to infest the cultural and political space with diseased attitudes, impure air and too much toxic national gas to permit deep breathing.

There is a process inherent to the full development of each of us humans, regardless of our ethnicity, religion, economic, academic, professional or political status: that process is internal reflection, time out to think and to remember, and to embrace those horrid feelings of loss, defeat, abuse (both suffered and imparted), and to open oneself to a full airing of those dark clouds, in the safety of trusted company.

Of course, such a process on a national level in the United States in not merely inconceivable. It is actually considered verboten, dangerous, illicit and counter-intuitive and counter-productive. Having asked church congregations to engage in a process as benign as “recovering their own time line” as a window on their past good and bad times, and met also incontrovertible resistance, I am fully aware of how difficult is the process of reflection, review, and the requisite opening up of deeply buried national (congregational, familial) pain.

As a beginning to the resistance, just look at the national resistance to any credible, sustainable, universal, and universally accepted and accessed, system of mental health in the United States. The national consciousness that police and law enforcement are not only ill-equipped, but actually negatively-trained even to enter a situation in which mental health issues are at play, is only surfacing over the last year or so. And the binary de-fund versus steroid-fund law enforcement debate, illustrates how mired in a futile, superficial, reductionistic and thereby ultimately frustrating and likely to incite even further divisions, public discussion is the nation, including the media, the political class, the activists, and both victims and victimizers in the system.

How does the nation build those channels of authentic relationships between those of different views, vastly different social and political status and class, different geography and regional culture, and move out of the rawhide culture of individualism, (based on and perpetuating division) parochialism, (another iteration of individualism), class superiority/inferiority (another iteration of individualism), ethnic superiority/inferiority (another face of individualism), pro/anti restrictive gun legislation (another protection of the frontier of individualism), free/hate speech (another deeply seeded vestige of raw and rugged individualism), and national/international politics (another attempt to preserve and sustain that old rugged cross of individualism on which the nation itself will hang itself).

American stands, in archetypal and Christian terms, on the hill to Golgotha, burdened by the weight of its own Cross of unbearable consciousness, ill-gotten mythology of idolized heroes and anti-heroes (another bi-polarity) while, waiting at the top of this hill, is the super-ego Magistrate, another of the essential American archetypes, ready, willing and eager to assign a death warrant to the unsustainable myth of American “exceptionalism” a form of national egoism that, in both a personal and private life, or a corporation, or a university, or an ecclesial entity, is unsupportable, given the natural limits of human agency.

That old film, based on the Congress of Nuremberg in 1933, entitled The Triumph of the Will, bears a title which is running very close to being applicable to the American political and social culture.

The world still needs the American altruism, the American generosity, compassion and collaboration. We do not need the only feature of the current menu: inexhaustible division, interminable disputes over what is true and verifiable, the despicable cult-and-adolescent addiction and infatuation with a single man’s vacuous narcissism, and the moderation of a decent, politically truncated, if not completely eunuched, president and a populous dangerous poised on internal revolt, almost in a desperate effort to prove it is still capable of national rebellion and the “questionable” freedom that they believe will ensue.

How misguided! How tragic! How pitiable! And How epic! Hoisted on their own petard!