For an elder, (or for anybody in fact) contemplation of the tableau of US history can become a habitual 4th of July conversation.. As commonly told and commemorated on Independence Day, our nation’s story begins glamorously enough, erupting into the world with streaming banners of righteousness and courage. There’s Paul Revere tensely listening for oars, poised on his horse and ready to hurtle through the night to Lexington and Concord; Washington crossing the Delaware on Christmas amidst icebergs, hail and snow; Valley Forge, snare drums, … brilliantly written, defiant documents, and Francis Scott Keyes’s anxious vigil on the truce ship watching, and writing about the first fireworks, later set to a soaring melody (of “To Anacreon in Heaven!”), gold fringe, marching bands and the rippling Red White and blue.
Thrilling. As a little child in New York, I used to run, at a diagonal, through the ranks of those bands as they sashayed down 5th avenue.
However, through aging and experience, this glorious tableau fades, cracks and metamorphoses, like the portrait painted of Dorian Gray, in Oscar Wilde’s novel, a man who sold his soul in exchange for the gift of undying, lifelong youth and beauty. As the gorgeous Dorian leads his life of wickedness, his portrait, hung in magnificence on the wall, gradually becomes coarse, gnarled and pockmarked, shrunken, villainous and malevolent.
Like Dorian, the ugliness of the United States is slowly revealed as nothing but an aggressive metastasis of the marauding British empire. “Liberty” meant, and means, the freedom to plunder and murder. “Equality” and “Justice” were, and are, as limited in their scope as the rules of a croquet game, which only billionaires can play. By the time Martin Luther King ascends to the stage of history, he can say, and pay with his life for saying, that the United States in the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” ..…a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
The US has become ever more violent since his murder. We have bombed 32 countries, some to smithereens, and caused the death of millions through sanctions designed to weaken and kill the peoples of the world. Further, we have punished other countries who disobey the sanctions we impose.
US taxpayers are now spending $98,000 a minute on upgrading our nuclear weapons. We have 1100 military bases around the world. We have broken or withdrawn from almost all the arms treaties. At the same time Gorbachev ended the Cold War, seduced by the vision of a “common European home” and a “common security architecture” , US President Bush was secretly betraying him (remarking to Mitterrand and Kohl, “to Hell with that! We prevailed, they didn’t!”). NATO immediately began a hostile, implacable advance toward Russia’s borders, with missile bases and military exercises.
The Plan for the New American Century, made public in 1995, is unyielding in the current version of our National Defense Strategy. The method for achieving this plan is violent, brutal conquest. We have armed the world, and have become adept at igniting rebellion and purchasing sedition, provocation, infiltration, media disinformation dissemination, sabotage, use of special forces, and relentless forward motion of weapons and military bases toward our chosen enemies. We are openly smug about fighting our wars with other countries’ soldiers. “Let them kill each other off”, a formula expressed by Truman (“If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible”) has been repeated in numerous South American and Asian countries, and, in this century, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Ukraine, to name a few.
Indeed, the phrase ”To the last Ukrainian” has turned into a satirical promise of US fidelity to our luckless ally.
In the final pages of The Picture of Dorian Gray, the painted image of Dorian grew misshapen, shrunken and hideous. So it is with the United States. Our Congress, marshalled by billionaire money, struts in lockstep with each bloodthirsty Administration. And the people, who pay for what W.E.B. Dubois called the “democratic despotism” of US imperialism, become more and more conditioned to accepting the atrocities their votes are paying for. Electing our government representatives, we are herded like sheep down the same narrow paths toward profit for our masters, absorbing the lies of mass media, or remaining in ignorant indifference. Journalists who risk life and freedom to bring the truth to a passive public despair as it falls on deaf ears and fails to make a difference.
A perfect caricature for the political moment is this ancient cryptogram, used by children for jumping rope:
Early in the morning in the middle of the night
Two dead boys got up to fight.
One was blind and the other couldn’t see
So they chose a dummy for a referee.
Back to back they faced each other
Drew their swords and shot each other.
A deaf policeman heard their noise
And came and shot those two dead boys.
The only note of hope (for the US) in this cartoon is the deaf policeman, representing the people, who is finally awakened by the danger (Apocalypse!) and, hopefully, brings a new dispensation.
But it is late. It is all happening in the middle of the night, under the Doomsday clock.
We, the United States, leading producer of the poisonous fossil fuels and weapons, whose resultant wars alone create more greenhouse gas than all but three other countries, must abandon the Plan for a New American Century, and conjure up a new Gorbachev moment.
Israel, which cannot be removed from the Holy Land by force, must be made an offer it cannot refuse for a new Nation State, since that is what it wants.
Yes, but somewhere else. It was a mistake.
The crime occurring in Palestine is of such a scale that even an atheist cannot avoid using the word “sin.” It is flagrant, and being shamelessly committed before our eyes such that none of us can claim ignorance. It condemns us. There can be no rebuilding of the Temple. Al Aqsa mosque must be rescued by a giant Crusade, encompassing all religions and non-religions, who stream as pilgrims into ancient Palestine, and symbolically lay down their swords and shields by the river Jordan.
With our Greenhouse turned up 1.5 degrees centigrade, we must “love thy neighbor” without waiting another moment. Let that be the Second Coming.
I understand there is still some open space in Antarctica