Is America Just Spoiling For a Fight?

 

It's been a long, long time since I was in a fight but not so long to erase the memory of the dance that precedes it and signals that "it's on." That's usually well before either side takes a swing.

I wonder if America is in that moment right now. Are we watching the dance unfold? Is Red State America spoiling for a fight?

How many hoped that the election of a man of colour to the White House would ease racial tensions in the United States? Yet it didn't. It only seemed to inflame the racist contingent, to bring them out from under their rocks, snarling and bitter.

Not all Republicans are racist but some are and there are more yet who are willing to look the other way because a vote is a vote. They have empowered and emboldened all manner of white supremacists, white nationalists, outfits such as the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo Boyz, even the Ku Klux Klan.

How many hoped that the election of Joe Biden and Democratic control of the House and Senate would lead the US to a moment of healing and reconciliation? So far the signs aren't encouraging. 

Yesterday we watched the Republicans double down to embrace the Big Lie, to make it an integral part of GOP orthodoxy. Trump says the election was stolen, it was stolen. Liz Cheney got the boot for defying Trump.  Besides the vox populi doesn't matter. Republicans have become masters of circumventing the popular vote.  They win, they win. They lose, they still win a lot of the time. Hardly a stirring endorsement but, hey, power is power.

Lincoln is remembered for saying that a house divided against itself cannot stand. He was quoting scripture but no matter. His words were prescient as his country was plunged into civil war even as Lincoln sought to find some accommodation, some compromise that would appease the slave states. By that time the slave south was already doing the dance.

I grew up in the shadow of the United States just across the river. I watched a race war played out from the safety of a waterfront park bench on our side of the line. A few years later I was in the States attending school during the Viet Nam war and got caught up in some of the demonstrations. My best friend, until his death a few weeks ago, was a born and raised Yankee. I recall much of the good and a lot the bad. But I have never seen America as the country is constituted today.  Lord of the Flies America, tribal and angry and deeply divided across every conceivable fault line.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the legendary Democrat senator from New York, is best remembered for saying, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts." Facts are the bridge that connects different sides and by which they communicate. Facts are the essential precursor for debates, arguments and compromise.

Trump introduced "alternative facts." 

When facts falter, tribalism ensues. It fills the void. It builds walls, hurdles. Turf wars. What is gerrymandering or voter suppression but an underhanded means to expand one's turf, to cement control by contrivance? It's putting a heavy thumb on the scale to pervert an outcome, to defeat democracy.

This brings to mind a passage from Carl Sagan's "Demon Haunted World."

“I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.

The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.”

Pseudoscience and superstition. The siren song of unreason. Habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. Demons begin to stir. Has the world Sagan foresaw in 1995 emerged, a quarter century on, to become reality?

As Chris Hedges points out, America has been waging wars incessantly around the world with the same predictable outcome - failure.

With the exception of the first Gulf War, fought largely by mechanized units in the open desert that did not–wisely–attempt to occupy Iraq, the United States political and military leadership has stumbled from one military debacle to another. Korea. Vietnam. Lebanon. Afghanistan. Iraq. Syria. Libya. The trajectory of military fiascos mirrors the sad finales of the Chinese, Ottoman, Hapsburg, Russian, French, British, Dutch, Portuguese and Soviet empires. While each of these empires decayed with their own peculiarities, they all exhibited patterns of dissolution that characterize the American experiment.

There is not a single case since 1941 when the coups, political assassinations, election fraud, black propaganda, blackmail, kidnapping, brutal counter-insurgency campaigns, US sanctioned massacres, torture in global black sites, proxy wars or military interventions carried out by the United States resulted in the establishment of a democratic government.

Its military adventures abroad reduced to ashes, will America, once again, unleash itself on itself? Can it go on with two distinct and incompatible realities?