My New Year's Message to Lou Dobbs (and other earth residents)

[DuctapeFatwa]

The USA - a land born of genocide and suckled on slavery and cradled in manifest destiny, all the while declaring itself to be the greatest thing to happen to mankind since the Code of Hammurabi.

When the best defense against its crimes it can muster is the timeless cry of the naughty child - "sister did it tooooo!," the thoughtful cannot help but engage in a little introspection, even if it stretches unused muscles.

In the family of nations, America is a child, more accurately an infant.

Ringing prose about modernism and enlightenment will be read with a different perspective by those who count the age of their culture in millennia. As a fine piece I lost the link to mentioned, much of the ills of the world today are merely unpleasant side effects of the blip that consists of the economic preeminence of Europe these last few centuries.

Is the United States a nation at all? In the sense that it declares itself to be so, and thereby becomes one according to the institutions and constructs of its own design, sure.

But it is a nation in the same sense as Kurdistan? Iran? China? Egypt?

The demographic changes that are underway now may lay the foundations of making it one; the popular Amanda Pepperidge concept of the US's "founding," of MinuteMen and pilgrim feet will, in centuries to come, rate closer to a Leif Erickson size paragraph in the history books, while the current labor pains of desperate desert crossings and perilous sea voyages in nonstandard vessels, the ghadi made sari made poncho by women who pat out naan and tortillas and injera and fill them with whatever their neighbor's mother taught in a land they never heard of, brave men whose unshakable recognition that there is not and never shall be any real difference between "in" and "on" raise the poor patchwork soup of leftovers called English to a new place of dignity that at last brings the rules of its pronunciation into a blessed harmony with its phonetic chaos: who is to say that "th" cannot be pronounced as "s" if the speaker pleases, in an alleged language in which "gh" is usually silent?

The Founding Fathers are at this moment hard at work hanging sheet rock, suppressing a smile at the funny people who do not even know how to find their way home without a sign with writing on it, who do not even know that they who now hang the sheet rock were Americans with written languages and poets and astromomers long before the funny people used tools.

The process of reclaiming the continent has begun. And yes, it is one continent.

The Founding Fathers and Founding Mothers come in twos and twelves and sometimes dozens, however they can, from other parts of the continent, from all other continents. They come for those they leave behind, but they also come to build a nation, a nation built from fringes that roofs and landscapes and manicures and woks its way into the center, replacing what cannot hold with something permanent.

They come to slowly, inexorably make the lie into reality, tap tapping with hammers forged in ancient fires to homeimprove the facade, a foundation, walls, sides, a roof.

No law, no migra, no fence can stop them, no draconian regimes, no war can impede them, no amount of parental angst can prevent your children from marrying them.

It was remarkably clever of Mr Jefferson to pen his own remake of the Great Law of the Iroquois, and it is remarkably courageous of the Founders to apply themselves to the task of wresting it from the slimy maw of exploitation in a capitalism T shirt and install it firmly in the temple of Hope.

-------------

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Langston Hughes

[efhmc]

1. Too heavy for me, hon, but I respect your depth.

[DuctapeFatwa]

2. LOL, well, thanks - I think.....

:)

[sistersofmercy]

3. One of my favorite Langston Hughes poems

[Dirk39]

4. Dear DuctapeFatwa!

I'm somehow really impressed by your post, but I only understand half of it! I'm german and it's not a language problem, might be more of a cultural problem, but I would really appreciate it, if you could give a few more hints.
As a "counterpoint", I immediatly thought of the passages Negri and Hardt did write about Europe in "Empire".

"From our standpoint, however, the fact that against the old powers of Europe a new Empire has formed is only good news. Who wants to see any more of that pallid and parasitic European ruling class that led directly from the ancien régime to nationalism, from populism to fascism, and now pushes for a generalized neoliberalism? Who wants to see more of those ideologies and those bureaucratic apparatuses that have nourished and abetted the rotting European elites? And who can still stand those systems of labor organization and those corporations that have stripped away every vital spirit?" (Finis Europae)

When I did read your text for the first time, I somehow feared, that you would just repeat the old european complaint about the USA that it is not a real "nation".
I think a lot about these things, cause it seems to me that the old european nationalism is something to be avoided by any means.
The USA still is a "nation" that isn't founded on "blood" or "ground" or "race", despite all the ugly chapters in it's history, but the direction it is heading now, is frightening.
I find myself in a trap a lot of the times, being a radical left - but inconsistent somehow and with a lot of doubts.

I still look at the USA without illusions, but somehow convinced: if the USA doesn't work, if this experiment goes wrong, then there isn't much hope left.
In a way it seems to me that the radical and loud nationalism and patriotism in the USA under the Bush-Junta might be just an artificial airbulb. Maybe it's as brutal and loud as it is, BECAUSE it lacks any foundation. Bush and the PNACs can't found themselves on irrational values like blood, race etc. ppp., they try it with "american values", but the more often they repeat words like "freedom", "democrazy" or "free market", the more empty these words become.
Hello from Germany,
Dirk

[DuctapeFatwa]

5. It sounds like you understood it pretty well :)

Europe has its share of people who aren't adjusting well to global demographics and the twilight of European (and European colonies like the US and Australia) domination, and like their US counterparts, the best advice is what the old man said to the young lady who was worried that her descendants might not inherit her blue eyes: "they won't, and there's nothing you can do about that - what you can control is whether they inherit your green thumb!"

:)

[DuctapeFatwa]

6. Kick in honor of Lou's Big Day today