America at 248

I have been told that, over the last couple of weeks, America has fallen apart. This is the sort of thing that sends a person thinking.

Just last night, I started reading A Detroit Anthology, and in one of the early pieces therein, it was frankly admitted (this as of about 10 years ago) that nobody really knew what to do for Detroit, but, just maybe, people’s optimism could see the city through anyway. The story of Detroit is perhaps the most extreme manifestation of a broad chapter on the story of America, and so it occurs to me that much of America has been falling apart for a while, and yet somehow it keeps motoring along.

We were on vacation last week and did not witness the spectacle of whatever exactly happened in what was supposedly a presidential debate - I say supposedly because neither major party has actually held its convention yet among other seemingly salient points.

As frenzied and concerned as so many people are about the mental fitness of the presumptive major party nominees - and, while the New York Times apparently doesn’t see fit to point this out, I will: Trump’s mental fitness seems to be quite clearly worse than Biden’s overall - I can’t help but shake the feeling that a lot of what’s motivating people to be bent out of shape is the desire to be present for some kind of historical factoid. It seems to me that even if people sincerely believe that Biden should step aside, on some subconscious level, for a lot of Americans, there’s some sort of latent fever dream here to live through The West Wing. It feels a bit like college football fans longing for maximum chaos in the final regular season results because, deep down, they’re less interested in who the eventual national champion might be than they are in their right to be pissed off about the final rankings.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t plenty of blatantly obvious problems with what’s passing for American politics today, but rather to say that we seem to have entered a period where policy itself - actual opinions about governance - is wildly down the list of what we’re collectively most concerned about. Again, it’s not that we shouldn’t be extremely concerned - the Supreme Court is clearly out of control, and the Congress is clearly out of control in a completely different way - but rather that what seems to have us - by us I mean the American people writ large - actively concerned is somehow removed from actual policies or decisions. There’s plenty to be angry about but the anger seems to be existing on its own plane, sometimes outright disconnected from any about.

It is in this overall context that, upon returning from vacation, I found myself in receipt of the June 20 edition of the Desplaines Valley News.

The masthead for the Desplaines Valley News declares it to be “A Household Name in the Southwest Suburbs Since 1913”. This is a very strange newspaper, strange for reasons I’ve written about before and which I won’t go into in much depth here. The publisher, Southwest Community Publishing Company, also publishes four other similar papers, none of which I have ever seen before, but which I assume have very similar content, especially on the Commentary pages.

About every 3-4 weeks, the Desplaines Valley News runs a column called “RIGHT from the MIDDLE:” - the capitalization and punctuation is indeed in the column title - under the name of William O. Lipinski, who served 12 terms in Congress as a Democrat representing Chicago’s southwest side and nearby suburbs. Upon his retirement, he gave his seat to his son Dan, who lasted another 7 terms. Both father and son were “Blue Dog Democrats” which, in short, means that if they had been from some other place where you didn’t have to be a Democrat to get elected to high office, they would have been Republicans.

Bill Lipinski is 86 years old, and I would characterize his expressed politics today as an odd MAGA variant, one which instead of being laced with racism, actually seems to be wildly unaware of the existence of any people of color. Some of his columns have been extremely bizarre, and the June 20 column was no exception.

The column isn’t available online, or I would just direct you to it. Instead I’ll quote liberally from it for you all:

[deep breath]

There are so many things which could be said here. I could write several paragraphs here about how absolutely nobody who has ever read up on the matter could possibly claim that the Spanish American War was anything less than a war of conquest and empire. I could point out that nobody today runs 50-yard dashes!

What gnaws me at this Independence Day, though, is this: that even though so much of what Lipinski suggests here exudes ignorance, exclusion, erasure; even though so much of what is presented is well-known to have been twisted in recent years into a sledgehammer intended to divide us; even though this has all the feels of a sociological miasma theory, whereby he has diagnosed a malady and recommended that a hole be drilled in our collective skull so as to allow the bad vapours to escape…

I think he’s right. We must believe in ourselves as a nation. And we don’t.

Bill Lipinski probably never read Lies My Teacher Told Me. Why would he? The American mythos that Lipinski grew up on served him remarkably well. And let’s be honest: It served most of you who happen to be reading this pretty darn well.

There are all kinds of inflection points where we could say America believed in itself a little bit less than it had before: assassinations, wars, elections, it’s a long list. What I would argue is that the post World War II fetishization of the greatness of America was doomed in large part because of its inflexibility. It was an impossibly high bar that America didn’t even meet at the time, but which people could pretend was being met because so much poverty and racism was out of sight, out of mind, for so many of the people who wholeheartedly bought in. And as it became increasingly difficult to deny where and how America fell short, it became increasingly easy to blame, to scapegoat, to grasp dearly to those aspects of the myth which were hardest to refute. America might have problems, but hey, we won the Cold War, didn’t we? And so on and so on.

Last night we finished watching Unstuck in Time, Robert Weide’s decades-in-the-making documentary about Kurt Vonnegut. I knew it, but the movie refreshed my memory of, how Vonnegut, for all the sarcasm and all the satire, genuinely believed in America, or perhaps more pointedly, in the idea that America could keep getting better. But his beliefs were largely shattered by Bush II, the second Iraq War… things which happened as Vonnegut was an old man and about which the curmudgeon found it increasingly difficult to see any silver linings. One can only imagine how mortified Kurt might be over what’s gone down the last couple of weeks.

One of the things Weide emphasized, though, which I did not really know, or at least had never really appreciated, is how in his later years, Kurt was, perhaps above all other things, lonely. And so here too is something which I think Lipinski got right, even though he surely has it horribly wrong, in speaking of “the great division that rocks our land.”

America, on the event of its 248th birthday, and in terms of its demographics, is aged. And with that comes grave loneliness, which has been exacerbated by extreme divisiveness intended to put us in conflict with one another. This divisiveness takes a great any forms, but I think the best way to understand it is in terms of why corporations hate unions so much. When workers are weak, separated, and disorganized, corporations are much freer to exploit and abuse. The lane to pursue greed to whatever extent they please is wide open. And so too it is with the populace at large. This is nothing new - politicians (among others) have long sought to pit people against one another. But when we are already divided in other ways - often very natural ways, by which I mean what happens when you grew up as one of nine siblings and the other eight are gone - the potential for exploitation skyrockets. When we are persistently made to fear one another, how can we possibly believe in ourselves “as a nation”?

And so the conclusion seems to be: America may or may not have fallen apart, but it surely will, if we do not change course, and this requires that we come together and believe in ourselves as a nation.

Well, this isn’t going to magically happen by all of us marching around shouting “Remember the Maine!” It’s not going to happen through a series of fevered Thomas Jefferson 1-mile runs. It’s not going to happen by falling into a deep well of lies which fundamentally undermine the whole concept.

Bill Lipinski did give us something though. I’ll repeat it:

This is all true. That America has often fallen short on the expressed ideal does not make it false. When we have excelled as a nation is when we have been the most inclusive. Right now, when people doomsay America’s future, the circumstances we confront largely stem from the great division, and that great division is racism and homophobia, and it is hatred of Jews and Muslims, and it is contempt for the cities and contempt for the countryside, and it is overall a divisiveness built upon the exploitation of fear and loneliness, and it is more than all of that, and it is not at all new, but its fervor is in ascendance.

And so I do not offer actions intended to “restore us to greatness” because the very framing there is wrong. What I instead offer this Independence Day are prescriptions for the miasma, not such as to possibly be complete and sufficient, but rather part of a list which must necessarily grow and change and morph because as humans and as a nation and as part of a planet, things change and morph and so must we:

You’ve got to be kind. This is the one rule Vonnegut knew. We’re not always great at following it. But this is the bedrock of everything.

Policies should be rooted in a basic respect for people’s humanity. By “policies” I mean much more than just governmental actions. I think especially of our health care system, which is awful in spite of the involvement of so many people who truly care about the well being of others. If a person visits a doctor’s office, that person is, first and foremost, a person, not a problem to be solved, not a line on the day’s calendar, not an account number. The extreme aggregation of human beings into data points is a somewhat understandable outcome of the postmodern condition, of the desperate quest for “efficiency”, but people are human beings first and foremost, and this is how we should always think about what we design.

Teach the truth. We should be learning American (and not just American) history throughout schooling, not to preach a gospel of American greatness, but because we should understand the world in which we live. Understanding the extension of freedoms to people over time can easily be framed as evidence of America’s ongoing greatness, and can also easily be framed as something very different. Explain these framings. Children aren’t idiots. They can understand nuance. They can understand how a person can have done great things while also falling short in other ways. It’s when we deny this, when everything must be reduced to good or bad, that the seeds are sown for division.

Foster inclusive communities. I am not using “inclusive” as a narrowly defined code word here. What I am getting at is how so many people in this world do not sincerely feel like part of a community. By “community” I do - but I also don’t - mean what Vonnegut meant by a karass - a group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner. What I’m getting at is that a person isn’t part of a community, whatever kind of community it might be, if they don’t feel included in that community. And no, most people aren’t going to fit in most communities, and that’s not what I’m trying to get at. What I’m getting at is emphasizing that when and where a community does exist - say, a company employing 110 people, all of whom work remotely - that the people who desire to feel part of the community of people with whom they work should be welcomed, whatever that might mean. I’m not saying this is easy! Community can be difficult! Being human can be exceptionally difficult!

Take care of others and take care of yourself. These ideas are not in opposition to one another. We are humans. We need to take care of each other. And this means we need to take care of ourselves. Balance isn’t always easy to strike, but, we’re humans, we’re not perfect, we’re not going to strike perfect balance, and this is why we need to take care of each other and take care of ourselves!

America matters. I think this is the point that can seem incongruous with the others, especially to people who really dislike “the nation” as a cultural construct, who balk at militarism and other elements of excessive patriotism. My thinking though is that we don’t have to define “America” or “as a nation” in narrow, exclusive ways. We’re here. The country exists and we’re participants in it and we are impacts in innumerable ways above and beyond just being participants on planet Earth. We might not like all of those ways, but outright rejecting everything accomplishes nothing. When America is better, then it is better for Americans broadly. When our government (at all levels) is competent and functional, we are much better off than when our government is floundering and lost. And the idea of America, as something beyond a geographical or political idea, but as the city upon a hill… there’s a lot of baggage there but there’s a lot of great stuff as well. I think the political left often does a poor job of understanding how to articulate all this, because the political right has so thoroughly dominated the framing, and the political center is so afraid to challenge that framing, but wow, I can find something to believe in in the American flag without in the back of mind thinking “Grenada ‘83 - we kicked ass!” I can believe in the inclusivity that Lipinski mentions - granted, I suspect my notion of inclusivity is a wee bit more inclusive than his - and champion that as America at its best. You can too. And you should!

I don’t claim in all this to have come up with magical solutions. The state of politics in this country is really, really rough, for many, many reasons. The omnipresence of greed all around us, for example in the forms of price gouging and service depletion, is palpable to an extent I’m just not sure most of us have experienced before. The withering of communities, the diminishment of public spaces, the feelings of loneliness and hopelessness that accompany thoughts of civic discourse… this is heavy, heavy stuff.

At the top I mentioned Detroit, and the idea that just maybe people’s optimism could see the city through anyway. But of course it’s more than just optimism. It’s kindness, it’s community, it’s effort. If you think someone else is magically going to fix something for you, you’re not an optimist, you’re merely an idle dreamer.

I went outside earlier to clean up the yard and found that someone had left a flag in the ground for the Fourth of July, as they did all over the neighborhood. I don’t know what group this was, and I don’t know if they think about the flag the way I do, or if they think about America more like Bill Lipinski does, or if they long to join together in patriotic songs. But we don’t need to think about it all the same way. I appreciate the gesture, because even when there’s a lot to disagree about, we should be able to find the things we do agree about: community, inclusion, and that whatever America is today, it can be better.