Without country

Last night at around 3 AM I was looking at a photo of an Iraqi man holding up to the camera eye a dead baby in diapers. I always wake up a couple of hours after I go to sleep and I get up and drink some water and read a little or work a little and then try to go to sleep again and am up again in an hour or two, so I found myself looking at this picture and reading another article on Iraqi man accidentally killed by the troops and his body looted. I sat for a while staring at this and then went back to bed and was up in another couple of hours. And tonight I get up after a couple of hours and read the personal account of Ali Fadhil, how an American special task force busted up his home, took his recorded news dispatches, they hooded him and ferried him elsewhere and when in their elsewhere he was asked why he thought he was there. He said he thought it was to be interrogated and they replied, with a smile, that no it was all a mistake, mistaken address and released him from elsewhere to return to his home that had been in the supposed wrong place.

I looked up again the new sort-of no-torture bill that Bush signed and declared null and void with his “signing statement” that “The executive branch shall construe [the law] in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President…as Commander in Chief.”

And no I have nothing to write about any of this.

The road to where we are now started a long time ago. Emerson writing of the American Indian Removal of 1838 said, it was a “crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country; for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our Government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country, any more?”

That vision of the removal began with Thomas Jefferson.

A supposed free and compassionate society built on the extermination and removal of hundreds of indigenous nations? Well, that’s a queer sort of building of a supposed inclusive free society. Nor is it unknown that American opportunity and wealth was stolen, not a single treaty with American Indian nations honored, that pillaging transformed into some mythic story of the entrepreneurial frontier where anyone with will and a vision could build their fortune. People know it. People also also tend to talk about historical revisionism and that we can’t judge the past on today’s ethics.

Frederick Jackson Turner, a Wisconsin historian, wrote in his 1893 essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” that the continual confrontation of American (European) settlers with “savage” Indians, gave them,

that coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic, but powerful to effect great ends; that restless nervous energy, that dominant individualism and withal that buoyance and exuberance which comes with freedom…
Source: Margaret Walsh, “The American West, Visions and Revisions”

Walsh’s book notes that Turner’s views, profoundly popular, echoed by Theodore Roosevelt’s “The Winning of the West”, did eventually fall out of favor but were picked back up post WWII.

Though Turner’s western vision lost its pre-eminence among historians looking for explanations of the American past, it did not die. The thesis was resurrected or revised for another generation, not only of Americans, but also of industrial westernised societies. Following the Second World War the Americans again enjoyed another period of confidence, optimism and material wealth. They had triumphed during the war and their economy had not only recovered, but had surged to high levels of productivity. Once again exceptionalism became the flavour of the day. This time an historian with better professional credentials than Turner carried the frontier experience to both the academic world and the American people. Ray Allen Billington produced the textbook that Turner never wrote. “Westward Expansion”, first published in 1949, was a massive tome which grew larger with each edition until its latest abridged version in 2001 (Billington, R. A., 1949). This volume literally saw hundreds of thousands of readers and educated many hundreds of academics. Billington did not stop here. He was a prolific researcher and writer, producing at least fifteen ‘western’ books and/or pamphlets as well as numerous articles, which all helped to reinstate Turner’s reputation in the historical profession.

Regardless of modern skepticism that gives a nod to what isn’t just an appetizer of American history but the meat of it, those fuzzy ideas of American frontier virtues and American ethical, moral and intellectual superiority, tied up with Thomas Jefferson’s notions of grand frontiers swept clean of indigenous peoples, continue strong and proud and are the resounding qualifier at the end of, “yeah, it really was too bad, wasn’t it, but…”

But.

It does get tiresome reading and hearing about how far the mighty hath fallen. And I know it gets tiresome for those who write, “how far we have fallen”, to read the rejoiners of, “Not so far.” Like, what’s the purpose of someone pointing out, “Not so far” as in that’s past history, done with, we’re dealing with the now. Right?

And we are. But the “Yeah, it really was too bad, wasn’t it, but…” needs to go. As long as we keep talking how far we’ve fallen, there’s no clear emotional and intellectual acceptance of who we are, the fall being predicated with a golden past. “Ok, maybe not golden for all, but…”

No, there goes the “but” again. Not doing it for me. What’s happening now is not some new curve in the road. Now is not just built upon the past but built into it, emanating naturally from it.

Which is all I have to say on it tonight in my every so often “not so far” post. Except to return to Emerson’s question as to crimes that leave peoples without a country.

I think that is a pretty big question to pose, actually. That Americans possess no country.

I think too it was strongly on the minds of forebears. I remember the fear of the 60s, white America facing civil rights, fearing what African Americans would do if they got too much power. The fear of those with a slippery grip on country, worried that their fortunes and place would be claimed by those who did the break back slave labor.

I remember too Pine Ridge in the early 70s. I remember reading snippets of Pine Ridge in the papers. Remember hearing talk of it. And the fear. I remember the white American fear. Again, such a slippery grasp on “country”, to be so terrified of the idea of American Indian rights. But the fear in the 70s not going so far as to question what American Indian nations would do to the white Americans if they got too much power. No one was worrying about American Indian numbers, they’d been so confidently reduced. Just worried about the rage. And if that rage escaped the reservation.

For years I’ve wondered and thought about the substitution of free capital goods for culture in America. Which I think was really first officially acknowledged when post 9-11 Bush said to get back out to the malls immediately. Get back out and shop, he said. On the European side of my heritage I’ve thought in terms of people uprooted from foreign homes, who kept leaving community and family and pressing west, west. On the American Indian side of my heritage I’ve thought in terms of people deprived of home and forced to abandon culture.

It was a huge question that Emerson posed in 1838, the idea that Americans had deprived themselves of country, through the Great Removal.

It’s something to meditate upon. The myth of golden America being instead a land of countryless people. Were without country. Still are without country.

Deprived themselves of country with every broken treaty.