By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ I have never been much of a fan of ‘patriotism’. In fact, I believe it was Ralph Waldo Emerson who declared that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” What he meant was that no matter how much of a rapscallion or rotten sod a geezer is, he can always redeem himself by exalting the flawless and everlasting greatness of his nation. “My country right or wrong!!” he will cry, and to augment the effect he will start yelling “The Fatherland ! The Motherland!” – And if ‘his’ country is indeed at war against the Marauding Monsters from across the border, he will now consider himself exonerated of all previous evil – just as the religious equivalent (his brother in fraud) can expect the same service from God for becoming a Born Again Christian. Clean slate, Buddy. On your way and sin no more.
And fuck knows, we’ve seen and heard enough of it out of Russia for the past several years: ‘Z’-bearing ‘Ultras’ screaming for the blood of people they have more in common with than their own face and ass cheeks but whom they accuse of being ‘Nazis’. (Have you noticed – everyone who disagrees with anyone these days is immediately labeled ‘Nazi’?) But other countries have the same mentality. The United States is no exception. Being ordained by Heaven above to keep the world ‘safe for democracy’ (whether the populations in question want it or not), there always has to be an Enemy. After all, what currency would ‘Good’ have if there weren’t any ‘Evil’ to combat? That is the very nature – the heart and soul – of goodness; evil must be hovering as a constant predatory threat. So at various times, the Americans, ‘good’ to the core, have met the ‘bad’ in the form of Native Americans, Spaniards, Mexicans, the British, the Germans, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Vietnamese, the Iraqis, the Iranians, the Chinese, and the Russians. THAT’S a lot of motherfuckers.
At this moment, the United States of America is going through something of an identity crisis involving those who attest to America’s ‘greatness’ or at least want to make it ‘great’ again – and those who find NOTHING to praise about America and only want to tear it down. Given the smothering presence of Social Media, which puts a super-amplified microphone under the chin of anyone with a meme, an attitude, a soundbyte, or just a grudge to shout out about or hiss to a waiting world salacious for the next ‘viral’ event. In other words every bombastic fuckhead, malcontent, or mere self-promoter – and what we have is a perfect formula for chaos, hatred coming from all directions, and the politicizing and polarizing of EVERYTHING.
Ok, so why not let’s attempt a history lesson? I teach it, which may or may not entitle me to claim an advantage over one who doesn’t (but surely it does over those who won’t read or study) and I do a lot thinking about how to understand history and how to give instruction in it. Lesson # 1 is to avoid — (as today’s young British and American idealists, for example, are often too caught up in their brief interlude of untamed ‘idealism’ to do) — yes, by all means avoid judging past people by present standards. This is where the ‘progressives’ – like all angry people of lore whose noble ideals led others to the chopping block – get it wrong every time. They use their own contemporary biases to castigate the thoughts and deeds of all previous generations, conveniently ignoring the fact that one day they will be exposed in their folly and ineptitude and subjected to the same judgments. It is like caterpillars protesting against butterflies. Malignant cancer cells screaming at benign ones.
The truth is that in the bloodbath we call history there have always been more bad guys than good guys in a general sense; in between, there has unfailingly thrived a huge supporting cast of the basically hapless, nondescript, dull, vulgar, and vile gossipers, snivelers, ass-kissers, pencil-pushers, shit bucket emptiers, wife beaters and husband poisoners of which all the Golden Ages are composed and made romantic by the painters and poets and utopian assassins. On the edges, we find mean-spirited cowards who manage to keep their heads just above the law, idealists who are flayed and eviscerated by the holy mob; and always the extreme masters and monsters ranging from Leonardo da Vinci to Jeffrey Dahmer, and from Robin Hood to Jack the Ripper. No matter how far you go back in time, you meet these people over and over, and don’t let anybody tell you that things are different today.
For that reason, please consider a discouraging idea: There Never Was A Golden Age. I have come to see with scathing clarity that life at any and every time in the past had its daily and lifelong horrors to deal with. (Maybe not for long because life was short, but you get the point.) And yet those people also found pleasure and beauty in life. They had their dreams and playtime, and always, always, always, their lovers. I sometimes take a wistful delight in the fact that, thousands of years before I was born, people in countries all over the world and through history, were sipping wine, guzzling ale (or whatever its equivalent) and fucking up a storm, with no thought at all that one Eric Le Roy would be born in 1949. Indeed, as Yeats wrote, “those dying generations at their song.”
But I digress. The point is, they knew the answers. They knew that all they had to do was kill the king and restore the true religion, and all would be well. Dead and gone now, their God-driven sermons and Ale-driven exhortations, pamphlets, and broken scribbles on the prison walls just before their hideous executions before laughing galleries, attest clearly to the fact that they had the answers. (Uh….you mean to say they didn’t?)
Ah, the glory of the Revolution ! A momentary giddiness until the magic brew wore off and the broad gray and unwashed reality-incarcerating blanket pressed down on their waking heads. They remembered, often with trembling morning hands, the unbridled bliss of the previous night when plans to overthrow the tyrant were hatched. And, you know, maybe some of these dreamers were and should be remembered as GREAT. I guess it would depend on your definition of the word, but if you mean ‘PERFECT’ , then no one has ever come close. The rebels become the tyrants. Read Animal Farm. It describes the process in a nutshell.
And let’s make a note of something. The United States has never, not once in its history, been ruled by a Religion or a King. But before we start jumping up and down, let’s examine the flaws in what some patriots euphemistically refer to as the ‘American Experiment.’
In a sense, the idea of “Make America great again’ leaves me scratching my head. The Founding Fathers were slave owners, women were nothing but hard-laboring broodmares, and children (mostly uneducated) made excellent stable boys and farm hands. Some, it is true, became apprentices, and naturally there were those invariably lucky fellows born with silver spoons in their mouths (and who automatically assumed that this made them better than everyone else) that went about their usual business of running the show – usually in the same exploitative – if not criminal – fashion that their fathers had done. Even after slavery, there were race riots, and the Civil War was an ugly, hideous event, fought a mere 70 years (Seventy Years!!) after the great Birth of the Nation – which, by the way, did not start out as a true democracy because ONLY white male landowners could vote. Violent uprisings (murderously suppressed) came about over tax laws and from ‘marginal’ citizens being excluded from due process… so let’s forget – PLEASE – all talk of any sublime ‘Republic’. For during these formative years of democracy, the Native Americans were being subjected to calculated genocide both by the musket, whiskey, the Christian Church, and the arrival and deliberate indoctrination of contagious, lethal European diseases. Black people like Dred Scott were evaluated as being 3/5 human.
After that came the Gold Rush and another episode of hysterical GREED, resulting in lawlessness of all description. Boom towns arose with nothing but saloons, prospecting equipment, and whores shipped in for entertainment purposes. Then came the Wild West, and a bunch of great guys like Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Black Bart, and the Dalton Gang. Meanwhile, the corruption back East (as well documented by writers such Theodore Dreiser) focused on the ‘freedom’ of corporate criminals to find new and creative ways to rob the public. Then came Prohibition, the First World War, and the Roaring Twenties, which saw the Mafia take over the big American cities. Al Capone, Dutch Schultz, Lepke Buckhalter, the Gambino ‘Family’, the Genovese ‘Family, etc.and many more. Also, the Great Depression was a period in which, following the crash of the stock market, nobody had a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, and this gave birth to adorable people like John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Ma Barker, and Bonny and Clyde. Jim Crow racism was the universal standard beneath the Mason Dixon line and widely practiced everywhere else. Then came World War II. Truman chose to drop the atomic bomb on two Japanese cities, wiping them from the face of the earth. Next, the Cold War. Then Vietnam.
So when was America Great? Well, the obvious answer is Never, but – though it might shock you – I would argue that in spite of all those failing marks, America has been great. Real democracy eventually took hold in the United States, and, after all, slavery was abolished. Immigration brought multitudes of people Stateside for a new chance at life. People have freedoms in the US that are unheard of in many parts of the world. The US helped Russia during World War II when the Nazis were bearing down on them and played a huge part in rebuilding Europe after the war ended. The US has been propping up NATO for years.
But everything and everybody has a past, right? And one of the main emblems and trademarks of the past is that people in the present cannot figure out why they were so vicious, stupid, revolting in their views. You ask: Why did the Protestants and Catholics of Medieval and Renaissance Europe hate each other so much that they would burn each other alive for interpreting the will of a ‘loving’ God in different ways? Why were old Egyptian pharaohs so arrogant and brutal as to have their servants murdered in the belief that they would continue serving them in the next life? Indeed, why has human sacrifice been thought the right measure to take to appease God? The (the big bearded celestial lug was hungry???) Why were unwanted female babies (in China, in the Roman Empire, and even by that splendid fellow Rousseau) left by the side of the road in hopes that the next child would be male? Why did the Chinese bind the feet of little girls, leaving them crippled for life?
Why has human slavery always been part of the world’s policy and lifestyle? Why, as Mark Twain asked, did God create a world where so many people are miserable when, with the same amount of effort, He could have made one where everyone was happy? Indeed, why do so many people continue to believe in and justify this infallible but ever elusive Pillar of Perfection whose breath in the garden mere human beings have craved to feel on their necks, this simple zephyr of absolution that would make all suffering bearable and explicable, and whose footsteps they have waited patiently for among wildflowers and garden flowers alike, the lilies and dandelions and revolutionary weeds, dreaming of those prodigious feet that, thumping toward them, would resolve all echoes of doubt, and keep coming closer until visions of death became comedy, a tale of happy endings, and Fear put to rest. Heaven at hand AT LAST.
But the footsteps don’t come and earth and sky dwindle down into the fact of dry finitude, prayers from death-stuffed coffins looking forward to the Golden Age behind the last sky..
Eldorado. But, as we historians look back at them, we find them wanting. We say to ourselves, “How could they?’ And we wonder how such savagery could have come from anything good, and how any sort of God, creeping in the vineyard or defining the sky, could have invited them forth or even cast them down, or cared at all.
And the reason is very simple. Incredibly simple. They saw the world through their OWN eyes, not through mine, yours, ours. They saw a world that existed according to, and was ruled by, the perceptions and visions of the days they were an inextricable part of, and this included all the superstitions and fears, the filth and squalor, the rampaging marauders, the diseases that brought early death, and, above all, GOD. The agony and ecstasy of life on life’s terms, take it or leave it. And of course, they lived in the three ways we all live: the past as it had been told to them (vague recordings mostly via an oral tradition since most of them couldn’t read); the mental and physical demands of the present as set down for them by the rigorous dictates and demands of their lived, contemporary day – both insidiously and violently enforced by church and crown; and a hazy vision of the future, undetermined but full of forebodings and dire predictions. For many, life was over before they knew it.
Who can say what they were thinking about? Were they all as religious as we imagine them to have been, or were there, secretly, atheists who thought that the ‘Faith’ was one big farcical fiction? Did they feel pain in the same way we do, or did their hard lives enable them to blunt much of it away? Did the common folk have strong senses of personal identity or did they just melt into the stony abyss of the passing crowd? Certainly the monarchs had egos large enough to surpass even those of today. I mean, wasn’t it the ‘divine right of monarchs’ idea that the kings used to justify any and all forms of excess? And what bigger crock of shit could ever be imagined? But people back then bowed down to it. People believed it, clung to it, swore by it. And just think: the greatest minds of the day – men (almost exclusively but not entirely) far better educated than most of us – who labored day and night over issues of God and monarchy. Did they throw their lives away by torturing and murdering each other over these now anachronistic principles? They didn’t think they were being foolish. They were convinced that they were doing God’s will and winning a ticket to Heaven in the process.
The catastrophic mistake (from a historian’s standpoint) is to judge the past by present standards. And yet that’s precisely what the people who hate America (American citizens and neighboring critics, I am speaking of) try to do. They come up with reasons why Americans should not celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas (as a Christian holiday), Easter (for the same reason), Halloween, Valentine’s Day, the 4th of July – because these days are designed to glorify the capitalist greed and brutality of Today’s Greatest Villain: the White Man. Thus, all of the Founding Fathers were beyond redemption because they owned slaves. These were the evil men who started up the White Patriarchy of White Privilege that the poor minorities – victims one and all – must suffer from today. America was always devoted to the subjugation and enslavement of all people aside from other white people. White men are all sexist exploiters of women, and everybody is racist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamaphic, PhobicPhobic. If you don’t believe me, just ask a loud-mouth, sassy, self promoting media creation like Jasmine Crocket. Or the panel of The View. Or any member of ‘The Squad’. They hate America. And yet America has made many of them rich and famous.
So my vote goes to America as a great nation, warts and all. Most of the Jew-haters leading pro-Palestine demonstrations against ‘Zionism’, the domestic terrorists burning Tesla cars and plants, and those who would love to kill Donald Trump, those who want to protect illegal immigrant criminals, and those who want to see men dressed up as women stealing trophies from legitimate biological women and flashing their dicks in girls’ locker rooms – they are the ones who call America racist, sexist, genocidal (in a figurative sense at least) and irredeemably foul and rotten.
I disagree. I say that the United States is still an open vista for those who come to it with open eyes and not an axe to grind. If you are Nigerian, don’t expect Brooklyn, New York, to roll out the red carpet for you. BUT feel free to ask for a fair chance. If you come from Syria, don’t start out by laying down the blueprints for a mosque. Eat a hotdog and watch a baseball game. Be glad, like the arrivals (I call them a second wave of pilgrims), who came to America, not to sell fentanyl, but to look up at and sail under the eye of the Statue of Liberty. Really and truly idealistic people who rejoiced in their chance to find something better than what they were leaving behind.
But even here there were lies, and disappointments, and horrendous challenges. But they soon learned and adjusted to that. For what did they expect? Disneyland? Fuck Disneyland. There never was a Magic Kingdom, just as there never was a Golden Age. Nor an Eldorado. Life is what you make it, and in America you have a better chance than where you came desperately running from. Indeed that is what makes America – if not ‘great’ at least not so bad – the fact America is the place you come to when you have nowhere else to go. Gee whiz, why didn’t you want to remain in Haiti or Syria or Afghanistan? You came to look for America, which is the only place that offered such a new way, a new road
Think on that one a spell. Don’t know about you, but I would choose a whore serving pancakes and expecting a tip over a dictator selling nightmares while demanding absolute obedience and calling it Your Good Luck. Freedom, like air and water, only invites definition when it is taken away. And so the next time you hear calculating hustlers ragging on America, don’t correct them by talking of a Golden Age. Tell them to count the gadgets, trinkets, and rolls of cash they have stockpiled. And to celebrate the fact that they can open the window and shout without worrying about a gestapo guy with binoculars standing on the doorstep.
And then look them in the eye and tell them to count their blessings, as they –or their parents or their parents’ parents who, having nothing, came hoping to be blessed. Tell them that in a generation or two they can run for office, they can own businesses, and they can marry or fuck whoever they want.
And if by then, like so many ‘progressives’ now, they hate America, and if you dare question their hatred, rest assured that you will be hated too just for asking. Don’t tell them George Washington was a hero; don’t ask them to listen to something other than sound-bytes or read something besides the Tabloids. If you do, you are likely to be confronted by the Thought Police. Then you must decide whether to stand up and move forward or back off and sit down.
Say Jefferson was great. Robert E. Lee was great. Colonel Sanders and Walt Disney were great. Or else learn to repeat: Jefferson and Lee were racist. Sanders was a phony ‘southern gentleman cracker who probably hated black people. Disney was a chain smoking communist witch-hunter and a bad husband and father. They were All Bad, goddamn ‘em. Tear down the statues!!!
So – if you have no integrity or guts – let’s go tear the statues down. The Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Statue of Liberty ?? Shitcan ‘em. They were built by devils. More mosques, I say!! And let’s install machines with prophylactic ‘rubbers’ (Trojans with extra sensitive ridges) right next to the tampon dispensers in women’s toilets and locker rooms. Bring on the Brave New World of Inclusivity.
