America 250: A Reckoning
Mythologizing ourselves to cover atrocities
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There was such a great reaction to this recent piece by Josh Caress that I brought him back again to take a look at [this thing of ours voice] the United States of America at 250 years old.
Luke O’Neil
"There has never been a time in American history when our country was not mythologizing itself to cover atrocities," he writes today.
"More than any other nation, America is an idea. And that idea is a phantasm, a collective dream, or—more plainly—a fantasy."
"At every turn, embracing American identity has meant choosing a false reality over a true one. This is how the nation was conceived, how it has operated, and what it continues to do. This is what settler colonialism is: the forced replacement of reality with fantasy. This is also why the fantasy is indispensable. To question it is to unravel the whole thing. And so every time a crack is revealed, there are always those ready to plug the hole with new iterations of the myth. We can’t let it go."
"If we were able to let go of our myths, our exceptionalism, our relentless reification of whiteness, we’d find that we really do have the potential for something special here. Not because of the ideas of slaveholding white men 250 years ago, but because of our vibrant diversity of peoples and cultures—the very thing our power structures seek to eradicate."
With the horrifying racist pogroms going on this week in Northern Ireland a reminder to also read this recent piece by Hussein Kesvani.
Luke O’Neil
"Speaking to Muslim family and friends who have seen a marked rise in anti-Muslim hostility and attacks, both in the news and in their personal lives, all while existing on an internet where anti-Muslim content, misinformation and Islamophobic AI slop have become so common as to be unremarkable, a common sentiment emerges: Yes, we’ve been dealing with Islamophobia for a long time, and for many of us who grew up in the shadow of 9/11, it has lurked in the background of our formative years. But this time something feels different. We’re now dealing with an Islamophobia that’s far more abstract, fixated on Western civilizational collapse as an opportunity to instill racial purity, and far more sinister in its intentions."
A couple years ago Simon Childs wrote for Hell World about similar racist and xenophobic violence in the UK that helps explain how the country got to this point.
Luke O’Neil
"This new form of far-right organizing hasn’t sprung up overnight, but it has gone into overdrive in recent months. Until recently, Robinson was a busted flush. He was banned from Twitter for breaking its rules on hateful content and had become basically irrelevant. But in November of last year the platform’s new owner Elon Musk reinstated his account. Musk lately has been signal boosting Robinson’s content and saying that a race war in the UK is "inevitable.'"
"Musk has re-invigorated the far-right Twittersphere. Meanwhile the right-wing of British politics has careened even further right, and its media has become even more shrill and apocalyptic in its tone."
America 250: A Reckoning
by Josh Caress
Sandy, the fireworks are hailin' over Little Eden tonight. Forcing a light into all those stoned-out faces left stranded on this Fourth of July.
-Bruce Springsteen, “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)”
The dark blue of the dusk faded late in Michigan. Here mid-summer could delay the full onset of night past ten o’clock. So the kids—like me, gathered on the beach with their families—always delighted in the extended revelry of the Fourth of July.
The beach turned into shadow—bodies moving like ghosts against the backdrop of the lake, silhouettes of trees towering like sentinels atop the dunes, bonfires unfurling along the shoreline. Finally a fire of our own so we can see each other’s faces.
They flicker orange now in my recollection—Mom, Dad, my brother, some aunts, uncles, and cousins—laughing and singing “Barbara Ann.” I didn’t understand it as anything but nonsense then, much like my mom humming “Stars and Stripes Forever” in trumpet noises as I lit my sparkler. I only knew the melody as the soundtrack for this moment of wonder, with the sputtering flame glowing in my hand.
We roasted marshmallows and watched the fireworks explode over the lake, reflecting in a rippling shimmer. I remember this is when I first heard the term “grand finale,” as the cacophony of light and sound brought the evening to a close. The high feast of summer, a marker of time in the endless days of childhood.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the mythology of white America, how we got here, and what we can do to break its hold. “America 250” is upon us—which means I’ve lived through nearly one fifth of that history—and as I continue to untangle myself from the trappings of “patriotism,” I keep coming back to memories like the one above.
I was born during the Carter administration, at the tail end of one of the most progressive swings in American history. Many of us are more aware now—of both the lies we were taught and the truths they covered over—but that hasn’t seemed to shake us free. Rather, my entire lifetime has been marked by the integration of these uncomfortable truths into a liberal vision of democratic progress. We keep retooling the story to make it fit—we need to make it fit. That’s not who we are, we say, against all evidence to the contrary. But why?
The short answer is that so many white Americans have stories like mine, where amorphous ideas of “America” were entangled with other feelings, inculcated through repetition, and planted in the fertile soil of our childhood imaginary. Other such attachments seem to fade as we grow up, while this one is constantly reaffirmed, entrenching itself in our psychic foundations. Why does it feel so personal, so intrinsic to our identity? So much so that we would let things come to the verge of total collapse rather than let it go?
The Phantasm
In Who’s Afraid of Gender?, Judith Butler asserts that the burgeoning right-wing anti-gender movement works by creating a “phantasm,” built on people’s fears and anxieties. This phantasm operates beyond any objective reality, taking on a power of its own that short-circuits rational thought. Once a “phantasmic scene” like this is empowered, fighting against it requires striking at its roots—the fears, anxieties, and “cultural codes” that Butler says “enter into the most primal fantasies where there is no clear way to dissociate the unconscious from the work of the cultural.”