In my beginning is my end.
T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
The universe doesnt care what human think or do, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has been telling us for years. The universe is expanding. Rapidly. One day, our Sun will die and Earth will cease to exist. We are infinite, and so is our world.
Helplessness is our response to this reality. Fear. We cant confront this reality of infinite existence. So a narrative has been sustained, in which we relinquish responsibility, calling reality unknowable. Refusing to stand on the side of history, the history of the oppressed, a leader has come along defending the history of the oppressed. Theres heaven for me and a hell for thee. It would be fit for a Monty Python skit, if not for so much suffering and death.
And the contradictions Who wouldnt expect the Gatsby party, with the host, the president of the US?
The image of a limo, driven by a white chauffeur and three modish Negroes, two bucks and a girl, is followed by Gatsbys party, the marble steps, and trays of cocktail in Gatsbys lavish garden. Dancing girls, dancing in eternal graceless circles, superior couples holding each other tortuously. There is jazz and a tenor singing while happy vacuous bursts of laughter rose toward the summer sky.
Followed by the reality of hungry American children. Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latino, Muslim, LGTBQ+, white children and MAGA children, scared parents, standing in food lines at food pantries because there are no SNAP benefits on November 1st.
Its predictable.
Historian Greg Grandin opens his discussion on space noting that for the New England colonists space is what they saw when they across the Atlantic and stepped on land here. They didnt see humans, that is, Indigenous, because not Christian because not white. Anglo Saxon.
In time, the newcomers created a narrative in which the savages simply wasted land, land that rightly belonged to them: white Christians. Its mine! Its mine! Because God given!
The British colonies in America, Grandin writes, were conceived in expansion. America was an aspiration, an errand, and an obligation, born out of violent Christian schism and Europes interminable religious and imperial conflicts. Furthermore, unlike the Indigenous, the New Englanders were a people with a future. And with the Fraternal genocide of the Indigenous on the horizon, endless sky could meet endless hate.
With the help of the Iroquois, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Cherokee, Spain and England expansion became the answer to every question. Who will be surprised when the whole White House, like Gaza, is reduced to rumble and a massive structure, reaching the sky? And, who will be surprised at the name given this monstrosity?
Americans have allowed robber barons to morph into tech billionaires and lobbyists, who, doing the biding of these capitalists lords, buy politicians while liberals insist that we live in a democracy. Weve allowed a never defeated force of fascism, instead, to create a narrative in which non-whites, laboring enslaved Blacks, Indigenous, Latino/as, Muslims and Arabs, LGBTQ+, continue to be thought of as the scourge of the land. A blight, if you will, that is problematic because it exists, and, if allowed to thrive, will contaminate the whole of a white Christian America.
And I have to wonder, why there are so few Americans, in any generation, learn this pattern of denying the rights of other lives? Why so few refuse to know what happened in Chile or Peru? Why so few believe the Afrikaners to be victims of Black South Africans? Do Americans even know that a US-back dictator elsewhere contradicts the idea that we live in a democracy here in the US? What do Americans know of the democratically-elected Lumumba and his removal and assassination with the help of the USs CIA? His replacement with a man what was anything but democratic?
Its said that America is a free country. As Grandin writes, born of the freedom to expand. And yet, the country has a problem when it comes to learning how to expand its way of thinking about other lives its willing to toss aside or use. Or misuse. In this free country, particularly after McCarthyism, writes Grandin, we are prohibited like children from discussing alternatives to capitalism, such as democratic socialism. No problems with fascism, however.
Was America serious about progressive thinking? As historian Timothy Snyder explains in On Freedom, so long as Marxism was a present alternative, Americans tired to justify their own system with ideas and safeguard it with structures. In other words, Americans, particularly, liberals, were never serious about the voting rights of Blacks or Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). We are witness to a US president cuddling up to Putin, Nayib Bukele, and Javier Milei as if natural and normal. Business as usual for the US. And hasnt it been business as usual to say we are a democracy and to support the brutal regime of a Augusto Pinochet? Or a Mobuto?
There are consequences for not heeding warnings.
When I see what Trump and Russell Vought, one of the masterminds behind Project 2025, are accomplishing, criminalizing good resistance and social welfare programs to expand democracy, I think they see cities in rumble born of chaos. Only then can space open up for the building of a new America. Or will our country be called Trumpland?
Why else is ICE and US troops in the streets of our cities, brutally arresting non- citizens and citizens?
Rents are rising right along with skyscapers. What did the average citizen think when they were removed for the rise of the Shard in London? Or the Burj Khalifa in Dubai? Or the World Financial Center in Shanghai? The capitalists didnt see the people, citizens. They saw opportunity zones, to use Quinn Slobodians term. In Miami the capitalists destroyed the old to build luxury housing. Developers, like Americas first developer president, arent considering low-income housing for the working class. And why should the working class have to wait on the development of affordable housing? Why arent the wages livable?
Why are the capitalists determining what exists on this planet and for whom?
Theres a telling quote Slobobian cites in Crack-Up Capitalism. It was uttered by a NY councilor complaining that billionaires shouldnt be able to buy the sky and cast the rest of the city in shadow.
Whats the ultimate goal of troops in American cities if not to clear space for developers, cleansing the cities of its Black and Latino/a population, first.
No holds barred now! The fascists have been reading and learning and creating plans. Nonetheless, behind the happy vacuous bursts of laughter are nervous actors. Hoping that the people will cave, capitulate. Accept without resistance.
Maybe this is a dark vision. But not one that is so far afield. As Grandin reminds us, after the Civil War, the massacre of Dakota Sioux by General John Pope was the largest mass execution in the nations history: 38 Dakotas were hanged the day after Christmas 1862. There was the hunting of African Americans not long after Reconstruction because they were perceived as subversive of Americanism. The white working class, writes Grandin, transferred their dislike and hate for the system to victims of the system.
Is the US destined to be as unrecognizable as the gold-studded White House? Democracy will be a pile of rubble.
Freedom, Snyder explains, must be about possible futures and any possible future exists on a line from an actual past. He asks, how are we, in the US, to draw these lines without history?
Americans today, Snyder argues in On Tyranny, are no wiser than Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century. We have the advantage of being in their future, and yet, what have we learned?
But we were warned!
Freedom for Americans in the US has been about an identification with expansion, writes Grandin. Quoting political scientist, Louis Hartz, he writes that the very idea of old, the thought that limits, decline, and death might pertain to them, is, for so many Americans, blasphemous. Instead, Americans swing free in seemingly limitless space unhampered by the dead and deadening hand of the past.
In order to sustain this concept of freedom, the US has executed one removal operation after another. That meant Indigenous had to go. America had to be free for settlers and speculators. This freedom, writes Grandin, became a way of life.
Expansion as freedom because life itself!
America has always been familiar, too, with this history.
Post Article Comment and Rate This Article
