Say what you like about Donald Trump’s former adviser, Steve Bannon, but his ‘flooding the zone’ thing really works, doesn’t it? Bannon’s thesis about political communication – which is, really, a thesis about political communication as political warfare – is that you need to pump out such a torrent of outrageous and chaotic actions and pronouncements that the press and your opponents are overloaded, flummoxed, thrown into confusion. Nobody can see the big picture. Nobody can focus on anything for any length of time because there’ll immediately be something else still more bizarre or disconcerting to digest.
America isn’t just a place. It’s an idea. An idea to do with freedom
I say this only because, a few days ago, I realised that I had entirely forgotten, amid this and that, that the US administration had taken to blowing up boats in international waters and, what’s more, boasting about it: mass-murder as policy. At least when Henry Kissinger was illegally bombing Cambodia he kept it on the down-low. But, as I say, what in any other era would have been an epochal scandal barely lasted a news cycle. It barely lasted three days in my head. We were onto the next thing, and the next.
One of the next things was Trump ordering the prosecution of the former head of the FBI, James Comey, on some charge, any charge (cf Laventa Beria: ‘Give me the man, and I’ll give you the crime.’). Using the Justice Department as a tool of revenge on your political enemies? That sounds like what in any other era would be an epochal scandal, but…oops, and off we go again. Now the US president wants to send the army to Portland, Oregon, to crush antifascists (why does he have such a bee in his bonnet about antifascists?) with what he ominously but vaguely calls ‘full force’. Like an update of Alice’s Queen of Hearts, our man can commit six impeachable offences before breakfast.
Amid all this, his Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth called a sombre press conference to announce that the soldiers who fought in 1890’s battle of Wounded Knee (sceptical quotation marks may be applied to ‘fought’ and ‘battle’, here, to taste) would not, after all, be stripped of their Medals of Honor.
‘We’re making it clear that they deserve those medals,’ said Hegseth. ‘This decision is now final and their place in our nation’s history is no longer up for debate.’
There’s a lot to unpack in that sally, not least the notion that all it takes to settle the big questions of history for good is a medal and a pronouncement from a podium. It’s a move on one level intensely irrelevant to the present moment; and on another, pointedly directed towards it. You can see in it, first, the administration’s preference for culture-war rage bait over governance. At a time when the geopolitical order is crazed with fracture-lines, the leader of the most powerful military on earth is making it a priority to adjudicate the meaning of something that happened 135 years ago.
No doubt a case could be made for the refusal to revoke those medals in terms of not condescending towards the past from the present, of leaving our mistakes on this historical record for study, or of bureaucratic niceties. But ‘they deserved those medals’? That is just trolling. It is a conscious choice to say that the men who massacred many dozens of women, children and unarmed men as part of a programme of what we’d now call ethnic cleansing were heroes. It doesn’t just forgive or forget the historical violence of white America against nonwhite America: it openly celebrates it.
I’m not going to pretend this doesn’t depress the hell out of me. America isn’t just a place. It’s an idea. An idea to do with freedom, opportunity, plurality, equality under the law and resistance to autocratic power. And great violence is currently being done not just to the place, but to the idea.
I find myself thinking a lot, these days, about Allen Ginsberg’s poem ‘America’, from 1956. It strikes me still, and again on rereading, as a wonderful poem. Ginsberg was a gay Jewish pothead with anarchist/communist sympathies, and very much the kind of person that the Pete Hegseths of this world probably identify as un-American. But the poem he wrote – even though most of it is an antic series of rebukes to the nation as he found it – was not a rejection of the country to which he belonged, but at bottom a loving embrace of its idea. Its basic rhetorical mode is apostrophe: he’s addressing America, buttonholing America, telling America off. He’s using, you might say, his first amendment right to dissent.
‘America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing,’ the poem opens. As it proceeds, the speaker of the poem rants and raves, sulks, throws tantrums, makes absurd and self-aggrandising remarks (it’s a very funny poem), gets maudlin, and flounces off (‘I don’t feel good don’t bother me./ I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.’). And he enjoins America – as every believer in the American idea has – to live up to its promise: ‘America when will you be angelic?/ When will you take off your clothes?’
The speaker of the poem is fugitive and plural. At one point he declares: ‘My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I’m a Catholic.’ (Ginsberg was not a Catholic.) At another: ‘It occurs to me that I am America/ I’m talking to myself again.’ This is a very consciously American poem, in the tradition of Walt Whitman – with his self-contradicting multitudes, and with his determination to identify self with nation. Its messiness and silliness and argumentation – its wild capaciousness – is exactly what Whitman saw and sought to hymn in the American idea.
The crunch is that this poem of crazed and polyphonic dissent, swinging between tender personal specificity and grandiose hyperbole, enacts a seriousness even in its unseriousness (‘Everybody’s serious but me,’ he says, a few lines before declaring: ‘America this is quite serious.’). Its argumentative nature is by way of a lover’s tiff. And it ends with an affirmation all the more moving for what comes before: ‘America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.’
I don’t know about you, but I would take the Allen Ginsberg version of America over the Pete Hegseth or Donald Trump version of America any day of the week.
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