For centuries most Americans have believed that the shot heard round the world in 1775 from Concord, Massachusetts, heralded the Enlightenments entry into history. Early observers of America such as G.W.F. Hegel, Edward Gibbon and Edmund Burke believed that, too. A new kind of republican citizen was rising, amid and against adherents of theocracy, divine-right monarchy, aristocracy and mercantilism. Republican citizens were quickening humanitys stride toward horizons radiant with promises never before held and shared as widely as they were in America.
The creation of the United States really was a Novus ordo seclorum, a New Order of the Ages, a society's first self-aware, if fumbling and compromised, effort to live by the liberal expectation that autonomous individuals could govern themselves together without having to impose religious doctrines or mystical narratives of tribal blood or soil. With barely a decorous nod to The Creator, the founders of the American republic conferred on one another the right to have rights, a distinguished group of them constituting the others as We, the people.
That revolutionary effort is not just in trouble now, or endangered, or under attack, or reinventing itself. Its in prison, with no prospect of parole, and many Americans, including me, who wring our hands or wave our arms about this are actually among the jailers, or weve sleepwalked ourselves and others into the cage and have locked ourselves in. We havent yet understood the shots fired and heard round the world from 74 American schools, colleges and military bases since the Sandy Hook School massacre of December 2012.
These shots havent been fired by embattled farmers at invading armies. They havent been fired by terrorists who've penetrated our surveillance and security systems. With few exceptions, they havent been fired by aggrieved non-white Americans. Theyve been fired mostly by young, white American citizens at other white citizens, and by American soldiers at other American soldiers, inside the very institutions where republican virtues and beliefs are nurtured and defended.
Theyve been fired from within a body politic so drained of candor and trust that, beneath our continuing lip-service to republican premises and practices, weve let a court conflate the free speech of flesh-and-blood citizens with the disembodied wealth of anonymous shareholders. And weve let lawmakers, bought or intimidated by zealots, render us helpless against torrents of marketed fear and vengeance that are dissolving a distinctively American democratic ethos the literary historian Daniel Aaron characterized as ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free.
Many Americans are adapting to living with variants of force and fraud that erupt in road rage; lethal stampedes by shoppers on sale days; security precautions in their homes against the prospect of armed invasion; gladiatorialization and corruption in sports; nihilism in entertainment that fetishizes violence without context and sex without attachment ; the casino-like financing of utterly unproductive economic activities such as the entertainment Ive just mentioned and the predatory lending that has tricked millions out of their homes; the commercial groping and goosing of private lives and public spaces, even in the marketing of ordinary consumer goods; and the huge, new prison industry that Americans have created to deter or punish broken, violent men, most of them non-white, only to find schools in even the whitest, safest neighborhoods imprisoned by fear of white gunmen whove often been students themselves.
Abroad, meanwhile, thousands more shots, fiendish and celebratory, are being fired into the corpses of American national-security and nation-building projects by terrorists and fanatics we were told had been decimated. These projects cost trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives, limbs, homes and hopes, including those of American soldiers, contractors and idealists. Their sacrifices cant justify retroactively what shouldnt have been undertaken in the first place.....now endeth mine rant
-- Edited by john nail on Saturday 5th of July 2014 06:24:58 PM
-- Edited by john nail on Saturday 5th of July 2014 06:25:23 PM
-- Edited by john nail on Saturday 5th of July 2014 06:31:03 PM
