“The major theme of all my work,” Perlstein told me in a recent interview, “is a certain kind of denial that you hear again and again, especially among gatekeeping media élites”—the assumption that divisive partisan rhetoric will be self-defeating, that racist or reactionary gestures will be punished at the ballot box, and that, after the dogmatism of Goldwater and the ruthlessness of Nixon and the mendacity of Reagan, the Republican Party can’t possibly get more extreme. “I think liberals tend to see the world in enlightened terms, that the grand story of our history is reason chasing out unreason,” he said. “But there is this constant appeal of reactionary ways of seeing the world. The world is a scary place, America is a scary place, and people want to revert to easy truths and binary black-and-white ways of seeing the world. And that’s just a constant in American history.”
I agree with Rick Perlstein, and I think the reason for this innate conservatism is deeply American, and it isn't traceable just to the rejection of European monarchy or John Wayne-ish "rugged individualism." In fact, I think both those aspects of American culture actually trace back to this one: we are an immigrant country. And immigrants always reach back to the culture they knew when they left the "home country." They may despise the home country, fleeing it because of despots or war or poverty, but they cherish it, too. They bring it with them. They plant it like a flower in their new garden, a memory of "home." And they preserve "home" in amber. Like family members you don't see for decades, like nieces and nephews who don't stay children except in your memory, where they are children forever, "home" is unchangeable, and any change to it, is decay and destruction.
I know the feeling. My formative years, after high school (which really formed me, the years up to high school graduation) were spent in one town. I lived there as long as I lived in the town I grew up in. By now I've been away from that town twice as long as I lived there; but it wasn't supposed to change. It did, of course. Even the house I owned there (the first one ever I owned) is gone, replaced by a more modern home. Restaurants I frequented: gone. Roads I knew as two-lane, are now divided highways with a dizzying set of on-ramps and off-ramps, and I try to avoid it whenever I'm there. Nothing is as it was, but it wasn't supposed to change. It all changed. And I don't like it. The city I have lived in for 22 years has changed dramatically since I moved here; but I like it. I'm comfortable with those changes. Things gone are replaced by things better. Even the town I grew up in is no longer the town I grew up in. The high school and elementary school I attended, are gone, replaced by new and different (and better) buildings. But I didn't want it to change; I still don't want it to change.
The further you get from "home," especially in time, the more you want "home" to be the same as ever it was. So we are wildly nostalgic for Christmases and Thanksgivings we never had. I never had a Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving, but I want to think I will, someday. I never had a Currier and Ives Christmas, but still I kind of dream of a "White Christmas" as the ideal I should one day see. We want the "holidays," by which we mean Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's Eve, to be "perfect." We want to recapture and keep, something we never, ever had. So of course we "want to revert to easy truths and binary black-and-white ways of seeing the world," of course that's "just a constant in American history." That's why we came here in the first place: to bring "home" with us, and do it right this time. We constantly and consistently remember home; and we constantly and consistently want to "fix" home and make it perfect, beceause perfect means unchangeable and unchanging. But we never have been able to; and we never will be able to. This is home; but we still want it to be like "home." Nostalgia, is our original American sin. And we will never extirpate it.
How can our culture not be a racist one? We were born in a racist time, just as "race" itself was becoming a social and even a scientific concept. When Shakespeare wrote about Othello "the Moor," he wasn't writing about a black man as we think of one today, but about a foreigner, an outsider who didn't know all the cultural clues of Venice, where Othello served the Duke and won the heart of Desdemona. When Iago tells Desdemona's father that Othello's "black ram is tupping your white ewe," Iago is not drawing a picture of miscegenation, but appealling to the basest kind of imagery of the elopement of the two, to shock the man into action, not to make him seek a cross to burn. All of that came centuries later. We learned to be racists, and we did it in the crucible of reason which didn't drive out unreason but gave it legitimacy. It still does. It took us until 1964 to pass a Civil Rights Act that actually gave some measure of legal equality to people we had denied it to even after the Civil War. And even then the act only passed over the grieving for JFK, and as a memorial to him as much as for any other reason. We've learned to live with that, but white men gutted the Voting Rights Act, the first law to actually implement the promises of the 15th amendment, because voting is real power, and civil rights have sort of become background noise. The more the VRA was implemented, the more dangerous it became, and after 50 years we couldn't have that anymore. There are still so many ways we don't honor civil rights, but we tell ourselves basketball players are rich, so why do they complain? How many such men who earn their millions in sports can establish dynasties of wealth like white families such as the Kushners or the Trumps, is a question we never examine. Just like we take it for granted that "gangs" are for blacks and browns, while white men form "militias." "Gang" is not a word you find in the Constitution; but "militia" is. One word is scary, especially to white people; the other word is not, except to agencies like the FBI.
Of course, we also fear black people because we fear justice. We know how they got here; we know why they were brought here. We know what we did to them for centuries. We pretend someone else did it, and the blame was laid to rest long, long ago. But in our hearts we know better, and we are afraid. This is the "hidden wound" in America, the one that won't heal because we won't admit it's there. Just this week Nikki Haley told us America is not a racist country, even as another black man was shot in his car, and the only justification for it so far is that there was a knife in his car. I have a knife in my pocket. I used to carry a folding knife on my belt. I'm white; no policeman was ever going to shoot me in my car over a knife. And when a white man shot three people in Kenosha, the police who had just thanked him for being there rushed to the blacks and the people standing with those blacks, and ignored the white boy with the rifle. They still are. It's like the old joke I heard in my childood, where the black comedian told of his life in the Marines. The commanding officer told the assembled troops that there was no racism in the Marines, but after the meeting was dismissed he wanted the "dark green Marines" to police the area and clean it up. We aren't racists; black and brown people just get into trouble more than white people. It's just the way it is.
We are terrified of justice. We fear one day that it will actually be done; and then where will we be? How else can we preserve ourselves, except "to revert to easy truths and binary black-and-white ways of seeing the world"? I will tell you that I don't think Christianity is supposed to support that. I don't think Christianity is supposed to uphold our traditions and our "way of doing things" because "we've always done it like that." I tried telling my congregation that the hour of worship on Sunday shouldn't be the relaxing time where you "recharge" your spiritual batteries so you can get through another week in the world, but an encounter with the living God so wondrous and challenging and maybe a bit terrifying, that the rest of the week is a piece of cake. True Christian worship should change your perspective on your life in this world, and change it for the better. An encounter with eternity, however brief it might be, would make the daily grind insignificant, even luminous with wonder! It's really no surprise I didn't keep a church for long, and no other church was that anxious to have me (or I to take a chance on them). I often thought of the last line of Twain's "The War Prayer," except I didn't mean it as self-justification when I applied it. I meant it (and still do) as self-criticism: "It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said." As Dirty Harry said, "Man got to know his limitations." I'm still not convinced there's any sense in what I say.
But how much sense is there in "Congratulations, you poor! The earth is your inheritance!"? I mean, I understand what I understand it means, but I think the lack of sense in it, is the sense in it. And I think there's more sense in the gospel and the epistles and the witness of the saints and the clouds of witness themselves, than in all the philosophy and literature in the world. But I don't think that's proof that I know what I'm talking about. At best I'm Socrates, and I can perhaps persuade you that you don't know what you're talking about. And that might lead you to an epiphany; but not until you face the dark interval of doubting whether anything you know is right. That's how the parables of Jesus work, as Dom Crossan taught me. The prodigal son, for instance, tells his father to drop dead so the son can have his inheritance now. And the father does, metaphorically, drop dead, to accede to his son's wishes. And when the son comes home penniless and broken, the father welcomes him back (who among us wouldn't? But who among us would divide the estate in the first place, and give it all to the children? We all know the lesson of Lear.) and slays the fatted calf (which belongs to his other son) and calls for a party (paid for by his other son), and then tells that other son his brother who was dead is alive, and this calls for a party! And we are the other son, standing outside the party, ashamed to go in, ashamed to stay out. And in that dark interval, what do we decide, and why?
"Congratulations, you poor, you destite, you who have nothing! The earth is your inheritance!" We are so very afraid that might be true. That nothing we have is legitimately owned; and that we can't go home again. What else can we do except "revert to easy truths and binary black-and-white ways of seeing the world"? What else can that be except "a constant in American history”?
"O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?"
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