...when I read
this:
Via Ivo Daadler at TPM Cafe, text from Barack Obama's recent commencement address at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois (full text of speech here):[America is a] place where destiny was not a destination, but a journey to be shared and shaped and remade by people who had the gall, the temerity to believe that, against all odds, they could form "a more perfect union" on this new frontier. And as people around the world began to hear the tale of the lowly colonists who overthrew an empire for the sake of an idea, they started to come. Across oceans and the ages, they settled in Boston and Charleston, Chicago and St. Louis, Kalamazoo and Galesburg, to try and build their own American Dream. This collective dream moved forward imperfectly--it was scarred by our treatment of native peoples, betrayed by slavery, clouded by the subjugation of women, shaken by war and depression. And yet, brick by brick, rail by rail, calloused hand by calloused hand, people kept dreaming, and building, and working, and marching, and petitioning their government, until they made America a land where the question of our place in history is not answered for us. It's answered by us.
What Obama suggests is truly something that moves me. In short, he tells a narrative of American greatness in profoundly liberal terms. This is not the kind of patriotism that has been in vogue in recent years, certainly not the kind of national greatness propogated by folks on the right. Indeed, in the liberal narrative, America is great, or is special, or is an example to the rest of the world because being American is a process, it is never fixed. On the one hand, this is why America deals better with immigrants than virtually any other industrialized society I can think of, but also why the culture wars here rage so fiercely, and why liberals constantly have to hear that they are "unAmerican" or "don't love America enough." Because what being American means is fundamentally never a settled question. Much of American literature and autobiography gets to the heart of this idea: from Crevecouer's Letters from an American Farmer and Ben Franklin's Autobiography forward.
For a liberal to believe in America's exceptionalism, it can't be "America right or wrong," as conservatives were wont to say during the Vietnam era and are essentially saying again today. Hence, the divide over Abu Ghraib and Gitmo, where conservatives can't comprehend - and think even borderline traitorous - shining a light on and condemning the practices perpertrated by Americas here. For them, American exceptionalism is inherent. In this sense, the conservative version of patriotism/exceptionalism is much more like - ironically - European nationalisms. And thus, something like Abu Ghraib is essentially irrelevent.
For liberals, however, greatness is something that must constantly be created and reconfirmed. It is never a settled a matter. And indeed, it is this various unique process through which America is always/constantly defining and redefining itself that makes America exceptional, not the simply the existence of America and Americans.
I'm not sure whether the tears that formed in my eyes were at the beauty of this vision...or at how close we are to losing it completely as a significant force in America. Perhaps both.
To me, to speak of "the American Dream" is a redundancy. America
is a Dream, a beautiful and glorious dream every bit the equal of Atlantis or Camelot or Shangri-La. This land we live on, the laws we live by, the flag we wave...those are the mere trappings of a mortal nation. The Dream will live forever, for it is rich and complex, yet exquisitely simple: liberty and justice for all. For
all.This means that a KKK fanatic can rant on his own time all he wants, true. It also means that the government has to leave Paul Krugman alone, and that Randi Rhodes is as inviolate as Dennis Miller. All things flow from those two basic principles. Liberty means the right to write what you want, play what you want and believe what you want, as long as you respect others' freedom in the process. And that is where justice comes in. Even though liberty is threatened now, it is justice that has come the farthest, and has the farthest to go. Slavery was a vast, horrific injustice -- but it has been undone. Equality for women and minorities is as yet unrealized, but so much has been accomplished since the revolution. We keep most of our seniors from starving, but children still die needlessly from preventable illness and treatable injury.
For all Bush's mad, idiotic hubris, for all Cheney's greed and evil, for all Rumsfeld's treachery and betrayal of our military, even they have tread lightly on this Dream. As deeply as the American people have been hypnotized, the power of the Dream that is America is enough to shake the world, and it lies within the vast, great majority of our people. It is merely quiescent in most, sleeping, waiting to be awakened and realized. Even as insane, arrogant and incompetent as these fools have proven, even
they have had enough survival instinct to avoid truly waking it. And yet it stirs. The Dream sleeps uneasily, knowing it has been deeply and fundamentally betrayed.
"Ben P" strikes brilliantly on a primal aspect -- perhaps
the primal aspect -- of the Dream when he says that America is the process of redefining (and in an almost alchemical sense, purifying) our nation. Ironically, what I call purification (here meant in a moral, almost spiritual sense) the most radical of our enemies call dilution or defiling. To them, allowing differing, "alien" elements weakens America, not realizing that this constant recreation is what the Dream is fundamentally about: the process of continual rebirth. Heh. Perhaps our national bird should be the Phoenix instead of the Eagle.
Hopefully, this Dream will one day encompass the world. When it does, however, it should not --
must not -- be represented by one nation's flag or people or military. Indeed, that would be to betray it at the deepest level -- which in many ways is what the Bush Administration is doing. That may be the most tragic result of the deep alienation the world is developing regarding the nation of America, as it rejects the Dream along with crude military efforts and selfish corporate gluttony. And yet, if we are ever to transcend politics of division and bigotry, foolishly pitting one ideology against another, we
must embrace that Dream. To surrender it is to surrender the future, giving it to the power brokers and fanatics until they finally get us all killed.
Tomorrow can be better than that. Our legacy can be one of tolerance, freedom, opportunity and plenty. That is the very substance and promise of the Dream that is America, which is why the greedy and hateful fear it so much. No matter how badly under siege it may seem, no matter how deeply corporate machines and theocrats and Faux news outlets try to bury it, as long as one person remembers, we keep the flame alive. Even now, when I despair on a regular basis, I still believe that one day, it will light our way to a better world, and then to the stars.
--
(/) Roland X
Hope is a phoenix
