An Idea of America

I’m not the sort of person who voluntarily stands for the flag, or for the official national anthem with lyrics by Francis Scott Key. I certainly don’t kneel before the cross; I have never accepted that one must be any sort of Christian to be an American. Nor have I ever truly pledged allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. I merely milli-vannili’d the words to the pledge at school.

Some will say this makes me unpatriotic at best. Let them. I was never their idea of an American, let alone their idea of a patriot. But before we continue, Occasional Reader, indulge me as I share a national anthem that does move me in a way that “The Star-Spangled Banner” cannot.

The following might mark me as old or out of touch: I refuse to accept that America is about blood and soil. I am saying that as somebody who could claim to be a “heritage American” by virtue of the fact that I have ancestors on my mother’s side (a branch of the Lovelaces in New York) who came to the country before the American Revolution. Some fought for independence, too. Some fought for the Union, and one lost an eye to a Confederate round.

Some of my ancestors, however, came to the United States after the Revolution, if not after the Civil War. They did not all come voluntarily, either. I have Black ancestors, the descendants of African men and women taken as prisoners of war in their homelands and sold into slavery by their captors. I have Jewish ancestors who fled pogroms. I have Irish and Polish ancestors who fled poverty and starvation. I have no idea whether my French ancestors freely chose to emigrate or not.

What does all of that mean? It’s complicated. I’m a descendent of oppressors and the oppressed. Some of my ancestors were enslaved. Others were slaveowners.

If nothing else, it leads me to scoff when anybody proposes a national identity for white people. The very notion of whiteness is one that demands that one sacrifice all ties to one’s national origins, culture, and language so that one might assimilate and become the ruling classes’ idea of an American.

Thus I find the notion of one’s claim to American identity depending on one’s ancestry—a claim pushed by the likes of Vice President J. D. Vance —utterly repugnant. You are not more of an American than anybody else because you can trace your ancestry in this country back to before the Revolution. If we’re to play that game, then the descendants of the First Nations have us all handily beaten. And if you yourself claim descent from the First Nations, and insist on having a greater claim to being an American, I will still disagree with you.

The very notion of one’s claim to Americanness being dependent on one’s ancestry seems to fly in the face of the ideals on which this country had been founded two hundred and fifty years ago. The men who attended the Second Continental Congress in 1776 made their intent plain:

...all men are created equal... We don’t give that much thought, except perhaps to ask, what about women? or to note that many of the signatories were slaveholders—most notoriously Thomas Jefferson. We are not wrong to do so. The Founders were only men, after all. They might have held ideals, but they did not consistently live up to them. Regardless, what they accomplished set the stage for others to take up the cause of Liberty and demand further expansions of individual rights, if not individual sovereignty.

It might bear mentioning that until recently “Man” and “humanity” were all but synonymous. This being the case, this preamble on its own is a rhetorical ICBM launched across the Atlantic Ocean at London. Though aimed at King George III and his government, the fallout spread across Europe, and then the world.

Consider also the mention of the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. This is not God as understood by most Christians, let alone most traditional Catholics, right-wing cafeteria Catholics like Vance, or evangelical Christians. This is a direct reference to Deism, and to a God who set the universe in motion but does not interfere with Creation.

If the Deism of many of the Founders does not put paid to the notion of the United States as a country founded on Christianity, and you are the sort of Christian supremacist who insists on taking literally the parts of the Bible that you find agreeable, then I defy you to take another look at Romans 13, verses 1-7, and perhaps pray in private for understanding:

If Christianity demands obedience of its adherents, not merely to religious authorities within the church, but toward secular authorities, then how can a nation founded in revolutionary defiance be a Christian national in the sense that it was founded on the Christian religion? The US might still be mostly Christian in terms of demography. But the historical fact lends itself more toward the United States as a Satanic nation than a Christian one.

It bears mentioning that Romans 13 was no doubt convenient to the aims of Constantine, who made the church a whore of the state to consolidate his power over the Roman Empire; one could almost suspect that the text attibuted to St. Paul might instead of been written by committee. After all, the Bible had been compiled by a succession of committees and synods beginning with the Council of Nicea, which began codifying early Christianity into a coherent belief system that served the state instead of threatening it with the the Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed.

How can a religion that demands obedience to authority be compatible with a Declaration of Independence that explicitly says, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. That doesn’t make sense to me. Nor does it make sense that anybody claiming to be an American or a patriot would accept that some people are or should be less American because they don‘t have five generations of ancestors buried in a churchyard in Kentucky, as J. D. Vance defines heritage:

Fuck this utter clown and the false dichotomy he rode in on. Vance has ancestors who fought in the Civil War? Fine. But as I noted earlier, so did I, and I reserve the right to disagree with Vance. For somebody who graduated from Yale Law and should presumably have been given cursory exposure to the philosophy of the Enlightenment, particularly that of David Hume, he seems to have a habit of trying to derive ought from an is he cannot even prove.

I refuse to accept that they were fighting merely for blood and soil, even if that had been a common slogan. Both sides were fighting for ideals, and what is an ideal but an abstraction of which people are determined to make a concrete reality? What about the millions of American men who fought in Europe and the Pacific Ocean during World War II? Were they fighting merely for their homeland, or were they fighting for ideals as well?

For my part, I am fighting right now. I chose to take up a pen instead of a sword. I do not want to kill, but to persuade those who are willing to listen, and to demonstrate to those who will not that they face opposition. I don’t do this for my homeland. The closest I have to a homeland is New York City, but I never lived there. Because of my parents’ poverty, I grew up in a succession of rentals around the city, moving at least a dozen times before I was thirteen years old.

As for the town in which I spent the latter half of my childhood and then my adolescence? I left it behind thirty years ago, and that ungrateful country shall not even have my bones. It is not for the town in which I grew up that I insist on putting forth my idea of America. It is not even for New York City. It is for the very abstractions J. D. Vance denigrated in his 2024 acceptance speech before the Republican National Committee.

• I believe in the natural and inalienable rights of all human beings to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
• I believe in the inherent sovereignty of individuals, and that even unconsciously we choose to associate and to yield part of our sovereignty by delegating it to a government that serves us so that we might prosper in peace, to engage in mutual aid for mutual benefit.
• I believe in equal justice under law.
• I believe in the separation of church and state.
• I believe that none of us are or should be the means to anybody else’s ends.
• I believe in freedom of speech.
• I believe in freedom of religion.
• I believe in freedom from want.
• I believe in freedom from fear.

Vance might call these abstractions, but without them, what even is America if not the force for tyranny that its most vicious critics claim it is? Why did USMC Major General Smedley Butler expose the Business Plot of 1933 (a Republican plot) and then write War is a Racket in 1935? Did he not believe in America, that America was founded in greatness and could be made greater still through the concerted efforts of her citizenry?

I wrote at the beginning that I do not stand for the flag nor pledge allegiance to it. Likewise, I do not kneel to the cross. I am not a Christian, but I am an American, and my allegiance is not to the flag, or even the Republic for which it stands, but the Constitution of the United States -- from which the government of the United States draws its just powers when it homors the Constitution.

Some of a more conservative persuasion might claim that I am ungrateful. They are welcome to do so. I recognize no obligation to perform a gratitude that stifles dissent. As an American, it is my right as both a citizen and a human being to speak up when I see my country falling short of the ideals on which it was founded, or outright betraying them. It is for that reason that I am writing this tonight, Occasional Reader, on the night of the Fourth of July, two hundred and fifty years after the ratification of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia.

I never had any sympathy for “Make America Great Again” because I grew up believing that my country was great from the start, is still great, but could be greater still. However, it can only become greater, or be made a more perfect Union, if we hew ever closer to the ideals of universal liberty and equality that inspired the American Revolution in the first place. America must be a nation of ideas, first and foremost, because otherwise it can never become one out of many. When we divide ourselves each against the other by tribe, or nation, or faith, we betray every one of our ancestors who chose America by coming here.

Nor can we keep looking back at our past. To paraphrase Michael Moorcock’s The Revenge of the Rose, a nation that focuses too much on its past soon has nothing but its past to offer! That is not an America for which I would take up either pen or sword. I mentioned Moorcock because I have come to think that America is—like Tanelorn or Leo Tolstoy’s Kingdom of God—both a place and an idea one carries within the mind and heart. One need not come to America; by working in concert with others one could build America where one stands. It won’t be easy. It is inherently fragile because it stands in defiance of entropy and humanity’s tendency toward blind obedience to authority. It is, nonetheless, worth struggling to create and to maintain. As Camus wrote, One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

At least, that is how I feel. Nor is this wholly abstract philosophy for me. It is not merely a matter of principle. This is personal, and thus political. My wife, Madam Catastrophy, is herself an immigrant. She came to the US from Australia in 2004 to marry me, when I had been willing to emigrate for her sake. Am I truly to accept that she is less of an American because she chose to become a citizen and had to work to earn her citizenship instead of possessing it by birthright?

Too many of my fellow Americans seem to think so. Well, they are no friends of mine. Regardless, they have no less a right to their opinion than I have to mine. They have an equal right to speak their mind, as well; the fact that I disagree with them does not prove that their opinions are objectively wrong.