Tuesday, October 26, 2010

(Not so) Theological critiques of America: Part II

In the prior posting I dealt with the theological element of Burke's post. Yes it may have been muddled, convoluted and at times non sensical, but it was honest. So we'll leave it there and move on. And to be honest I didn't even really care about it until I wanted to respond to Burke, and felt that I had to respond to his quoted source.

The idea of the American narrative and modernity.


Hauerwas writes and Burke quotes,

"America is the exemplification of what I call the project of modernity. That project is the attempt to produce a people that believes it should have no story except the story it chose when it had no story. That is what Americans mean by freedom.

The problem with that story is its central paradox: you did not choose the story that you should have no story except the story you chose when you had no story
."

I admit I had to Google Hauerwas to find out about him. He strikes me as impressive (at least he has his own wiki page), and a past in the building trades. His place of birth (Texas), well I'll try not to hold that against him and I often times share his fatalistic view of America. But I fundamentlly disagree with his concept that the American version of freedom is somehow tied up in inventing narratives of our past.

Though I must confess I can see where he gets his fatalism and how he comes to argue his point. While coming back from elk hunting I watched Glenn Beck while I ate a Whopper at Burger King. Truth be told, both the meal (though it was better than the McDonalds I ate in Vail) and Beck sickened me. I loathe the politics of fear, plain and simple. Beck, along with Tom Tancredo exemplify that lowest common denominator style of politicking (spelling?) that explemify the new libertarian Republicanism.

The problem with this new brand of libertarianism is the changed fabric of American life. Gone is the time of cooperative living amongst a community. The new American order consists of buying everything you need from Wal-Mart or Sam's Club. There's an excellent book by Robert Putnam which dissects and discusses the decay and collapse of American community. Where I live now there are still a few old Grange buildings left and there's still a co-op in my dad's home town (where I just got back from pheasant hunting). These endeavors and those like them are not inherently a harbinger of a distant rural past full of altruistic progressivism (is this even a word?). It is a reminder of a time when people had no other choice than to rely on one another. Yes there were/are progressive elements there, but to say that the underlying foundation was ideological rather than utilitrian is mistaken. Right now there is alot of soul searching going on in rural Colorado as the effects globalization make family/local grocery stores obsolete while at the same time showing the limitations of box chains like Wal Mart who can be located well over fifty miles away. This can mean literally having to go without food when highways are closed during winter snowstorms.

While full well acknowledging that the rural population is an ever shrinking segment of the population, their plight is endemic and to me a least a harbinger of our common futures and why the new libertarianism is not a harbinger of by-gone liberties and community, but actually the death knell of communities and democracy, as business is granted apriori status over civil society.

And though my blog has an ever shrinking readership from not posting for almost half a year at a time I am still unable to keep on track for even a single post. And Jesus wept....

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My main point of contention is the idea that we as Americans simply pick and choose in the most debasing of ways in order to simply create a narrative that suits us. I fundamentally disagree with this assessment in as much there is a difference between the ignorance of fucking idiots and the reality of a multi-generational, immigrant nation, that holds multiple and contradictory stories which are all part of the tapestry of the American narrative. One of the ones that springs to my mind as of late is the wave of forty-eighters who enlisted enmasse for the union and went into battle singing German socialist anthems which their commanding officers could not even understand. We often forget that until the civil war, the 1848 revolution was hot shit stateside (and rightfully so). But to that story let us next choose an easy narrative to comprehend with Frederick Douglass. Okay that one is easy enough. Those two narratives dovetail quite nicely. But shooting off of Douglasses narrative, what about the Irish shipyard apprentices who beat Douglass to the approval of a northern crowd? What about his old master? What about the multitudes of Southern soldiers who fought tenaciously to uphold a system of which they were not part of (ie owning slaves)? These are all part and parcel of the American story. Is it any wonder that people feel overwhelmed and simply pick out the narrative that suits them best?

Another part of the issue is the idea of assimilation and forgetting the old stories of where immigrants came from in favor of the American one. This is not hard to understand. One need only to look at the long and sorted history of anti-immigrant hysteria dating all the way back to the American revolutionary period to understand how many immigrants would deprive their children of their pasts in order to help their future in America. My own family is a great example of this as within a generation my family lost two out of the three languages spoke in our homes due to the desire to "be" American. It is funny because when recently visiting the graves of my great grandmother and grandfather (after whom my son is also named) it simply gave their dates and the simple inscriptions, "Born in Hungary". My grandfather who was also "Born in Hungary" made the choice during the cold war to not teach his kids his native tongue. And while it ensured that they were "good" Americans it also ensured that they were ignorant of much of their own stories. My uncle was nineteen when his father passed, and my own mother was only in her early twenties. How much was lost? Lord only knows. And how many snippets of conversation which make up so much knowledge of our families was lost due to the fact that my mother's generation were ignorant of the language in which the stories were being told? Again, the Lord only knows, but I think that this situation would be a fairly common thing.

If we as Americans "choose our own stories", it is often not because we choose to, but that we are forced to by the burnt bridges approach of assimilation. Left with only kitsch knick knacks, romanticized and idealized versions of the home country, is it any wonder we're in the state we're in?

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