Harper's Mag and the American Character

I dont subscribe, but what article are you looking for?

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I personally would temper that with stuff that has a more positive side to it. Like America is also the place that led to Frederick Douglass. I would even teach his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself. Douglass of course taught himself to read and write even though it was forbidden and he had no teachers. In the end he became a great advocate of abolitiion and made a living giving lectures in Britain, where he was revered.

What’s also fun in that context is to tell the real story of Rosa Parks, which undermines the popular, widely circulated version.

To me, the way out of a crisis is to highlight the positive too. Because, what is it you’re striving for (as a country) if not to be your best self? That’s a conflict of course between the best and worst self, but to me there has to be an other side of that story for there to be a story.

….

…just an aside, fwiw — Harper’s January 1992, Vol 284, #1700, has a Lewis Lapham essay titled “Who and What is American.” I happened to read the essay the other day in an anthology book called “Changing Community” (graywolf annual ten).

Zn always points out there is resistance. Always, there is resistance. To the nightmare. And he’s right to point it out. Its always there.

My ‘own’ dark thing though, is, the resistance is indeed there, and it has actually grown, i think. Thanks to the internet. But…the other side has grown MORE. And i think we are past the tipping point. I dont think its possible to turn things around. Just my opinion.

And yes, i still think it makes sense to ‘bash on relentlessly…regardless.’

I’ve been thinkin some about the shooting thing. I dont think its all that complicated. But it is multi-layered. Several factors.
1) Guns. Americans have a long history of gun-love for both logical and fear-based reasons. So, there’s all that access to all those various kinds of guns. Duh.
2) Racism. America has that deadly history of Capitalist constructed-Racism. Modern-Corporate-Capitalism no longer ‘needs’ racism or slaves, but racism was constructed long ago and now its difficult to un-construct it. The Racism has all those nefarious and subtle and not so subtle effects. It contributes to white privilege, and inequality which contributes to all kinds of resentment, anger, stress, anxiety, etc. All kinds of domino effects. Racism leads to young people joining the Nationalist hate brigades, etc etc etc.
3) Corporate-Capitalism (CC). CC leads to millions and millions and millions of poor people and people without health care and people stressed out and fearful. Opioids, “mental health” issues, depression, loneliness, anxiety, lack-of-meaning, consumerism.
It also leads to escapism, Nationalism, jingoism, and various kinds of infantilism(religion), infantilism(emotional-stunting) etc etc etc.
Corporate-Capitalism leads to Imperialism which requires a War Machine, and a CIA, and an NSA and Weapons Manufacturers, etc. That leads to a lot of Americans getting a lot of training with guns, and PTSD experiences, and depleted Uranium experiences, and disillusionment experiences etc, etc, etc.
CC leads to a Fake-News-Media. Which then leads to citizens inundated with jingoistic Propaganda. The Media/Elite creates ‘enemies’. (Commies, Muslims, Immigrants, Russians, whatever) CC creates a toxic, toxic, toxic mix of conditions. Too many to list.

I could go on about the effect CC has on Media, Education, but the bottom line is,
Corporate-Capitalism is a virulent, toxic, poisonous over-arching system, that mixes with
Systemic, constructed-Racism, coupled with
Red White and Blue Gun-topia.

Themz the three factors that account for the bloody chickens coming home to roost, I would think.

But what do i know.

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Review by The Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jul/31/the-end-of-the-myth-by-greg-grandin-review

Excerpt:

Is it all just a glitch, as centrist pundits would have it, an inexplicable freak-out in our grand but uneven evolution towards an ever more perfect democracy? Or is it a foreseeable extension of centuries of racist violence, Malcolm X’s chickens finally knocking at the roost?

Greg Grandin’s The End of the Myth leans towards the latter explanation, but he provides a more complicated answer than those two simple options allow. The myth to which his title refers is that of the frontier. Other countries have borders, Grandin writes, but “only the United States has had a frontier”, always shifting, and making itself – and its people – anew. For most of American history it was an ever-expanding boundary, a terrain less geographic than metaphorical and messianic. It referred at first to the landmass west of the Allegheny Mountains, then to lands west of the Mississippi River, then west of the Rocky Mountains. The frontier would cover most of the planet before it took an abstract turn and came to mean endless economic growth, the cosmos conceived as an ever-expanding market – overseen, of course, by US banks and a few fleets of aircraft carriers.

But before it was anything else, Grandin makes clear, the frontier was a zone of genocidal violence. For the earliest settlers, America was a spiritual aspiration as much as an actual locale. The land’s apparent boundlessness offered a chance at rebirth and redemption. If people lived there already, they would have to go elsewhere, or be exterminated. And so they were, from the Massachusetts Bay Colony to, eventually, the Pacific. For the men who would later be mythologised as the “Founding Fathers”, conquest – the right of white settlers to seize whatever land they wanted – was from the start inseparable from liberty. Freedom, in the American sense of the word, was unimaginable without the frontier, limitless land for the taking just beyond the boundaries of the known.

Class conflict, again and again, would be evaded by deflecting violence outward to the frontier, and by projecting class resentments on to race

This proved convenient in many ways. Social contradictions – between the rich and the landless, between those who believed human beings could be owned and those who disagreed – did not have to be addressed when they could be pushed ever outwards, to the west. If the young nation began to feel too crowded or tense, it could always, in the words of James Madison, “expand the sphere”. Class conflict, again and again, would be evaded by deflecting violence outward to the frontier, and by projecting class resentments on to race.