4th of July Special: What America Means to Me

--   By Tom Phillips 

"Flag"  Jasper Johns, 1954

Huddled at home, trying to focus on something other than the din of illicit fireworks, I meditate on my high-school essay question:  What does America mean to me?  

I used to think it stood for Freedom.  Americans do enjoy an individual freedom of speech, thought, and worship that is nearly absolute. This is what keeps me here in my native land.  But Freedom is a tricky term, understood in many ways.  

For white supremacists, it has meant freedom to practice slavery, then segregation and discrimination, unequal justice enforced by racial terror.  For African-Americans it means the hope of freedom from white supremacy: Freedom to vote, to walk or drive through any neighborhood, to run for exercise rather than for your life. 

For Franklin D. Roosevelt, it meant freedom from want, freedom from fear.  For conservatives in the 21st Century, it means freedom from taxes, from caring for the poor, even freedom to endanger others' lives by not covering your face. 

So Freedom's just another word to fight about.   

Think of US as an acronym for Ultimate Struggle.  Ever since the English set foot in Virginia and Massachusetts, the country has been torn between two irreconcilable world-views.  Let's call them the System and the Movement.  S & M. 

The System is a hierarchy of power and wealth that from the beginning, has seen nothing wrong with gross inequality – racial, social and economic. Its roots go back to the lords of Virginia who arrived, with slaves and indentured servants, in the early 1600s. 

The Movement is a constantly expanding vision of an egalitarian society – the impetus for one uprising after another, a never-ending campaign for full inclusion of the marginalized.  Its roots go back to the utopian visions of the New England Puritans and the Quakers of Pennsylvania.

Think of American politics as an immovable object faced with an irresistible force, the System versus the Movement. This year we are seeing its sado-masochistic extremes: Police enforcing the System with lethal brutality, a president having to be restrained by his own military from a Tiananmen Square-style assault on protesters.  On the Movement side, protesters egging on the cops, and hand-wringing by fragile whites finally seeing their part in a racist history.  

Both the System and the Movement see themselves as anointed to lead the nation out of perdition.  The System sees itself as God-given, threatened by a secular mob that would substitute its own teachings for heaven’s ways.  The Movement sees itself as divinely inspired by a moral imperative for justice. 

The Ultimate Struggle never goes away, though it rises and falls from view.  The present era goes back to the Great Depression of the 1930s, when FDR introduced social welfare programs – with the idea that people are entitled to basic necessities of life, even when they can’t provide for themselves.  For this he was denounced as a “traitor to his class.”

After World War Two, a bipartisan elite tried to cobble a compromise system, leaving Roosevelt’s New Deal intact.  But neither the System nor the Movement was happy with the stilted, conformist society that emerged.  M launched campaigns for civil rights and women's rights, while S laid the intellectual groundwork for a conservative backlash. 

With Vietnam as the spark, cultural warfare erupted in the 1960s.  M thought it was on the verge of final victory – the “Greening of America.”   But S had other ideas.  As the Sixties soured into the Seventies, a conservative movement honed its message and groomed its leading man.  Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 and set about restoring the rich to power and glory.  Since the Eighties the System has been chipping away at entitlements and workers' rights, sculpting a new gilded age of gross inequality. 

It took a police atrocity in the midst of a Pandemic to lay bare the negligence and corruption
of the present regime. The result has been a powerful, probably irresistible revival of the Movement.  

                                                   ____________________

America's original poet was Walt Whitman, a strange man who spoke in paradoxes:

One’s-Self I sing, a simple separate person,

Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.

These opening lines of Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” unite the two world-views that divide the country.  He says the individual freedom enshrined by the System is not incompatible with the communal peace envisioned by the Movement.  Imagine.

Whitman was a contemporary of Lincoln, whose Gettysburg Address invokes the same paradox – a nation “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”  It  concludes with a resolution, from the heart:  “...that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

 And the beat goes on.  

-- Copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips