An Idea of America | starbreaker.org
Author: Matthew Cambion
Description: Some thinking I’ve been doing on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence

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.

>     This land is your land, this land is my land
>     From California to the New York island,
>     From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters;
>     This land was made for you and me.

>     As I was walking that ribbon of highway
>     I saw above me that endless skyway;
>     I saw below me that golden valley;
>     This land was made for you and me.

>     I've roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps
>     To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts;
>     And all around me a voice was sounding;
>     This land was made for you and me.

>     When the sun came shining, and I was strolling,
>     And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling,
>     As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting:
>     This land was made for you and me.

>     As I went walking I saw a sign there,
>     And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
>     But on the other side it didn't say nothing.
>     That side was made for you and me.

>     In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
>     By the relief office I seen my people;
>     As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
>     Is this land made for you and me?

>     Nobody living can ever stop me,
>     As I go walking that freedom highway;
>     Nobody living can ever make me turn back
>     This land was made for you and me.

“This Land is Your Land” (1940) by Woody Guthrie

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:

> ## In Congress, July 4, 1776

> The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—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. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

The Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson, et al

...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:

> 1. Let every soul be subject to higher powers: for there is no power but from God: and those that are, are ordained of God.
> 2. Therefore he that resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God. And they that resist, purchase to themselves damnation.
> 3. For princes are not a terror to the good work, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? Do that which is good: and thou shalt have praise from the same.
> 4. For he is God's minister to thee, for good. But if thou do that which is evil, fear: for he beareth not the sword in vain. For he is God's minister: an avenger to execute wrath upon him that doth evil.
> 5. Wherefore be subject of necessity, not only for wrath, but also for conscience' sake.
> 6. For therefore also you pay tribute. For they are the ministers of God, serving unto this purpose.
> 7. Render therefore to all men their dues. Tribute, to whom tribute is due: custom, to whom custom: fear, to whom fear: honour, to whom honour.

Romans 13, Douay-Rheims 1899 American Edition by Paul of Tarsus

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:

> As a United States senator, I get to represent millions of people in the great state of Ohio with similar stories, and it is the great honor of my life.

> Now in that cemetery, there are people who were born around the time of the Civil War. And if, as I hope, my wife and I are eventually laid to rest there, and our kids follow us, there will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky. Seven generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.

> Now. Now that's not just an idea, my friends. That's not just a set of principle. Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland. People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.

speech given upon accepting the Republican Party’s vice presidential nomination in 2024 by Vice President J. D. Vance

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.

skip all tangents

## a tangent on the personal being political

The personal is political, comes from an essay by Carol Hanisch given that title after its publication, as she notes in her introduction. In her discussion of feminist “consciousness-raising” sessions in which women are offered a figurative ‘red pill’ of understanding regarding life under patriarchy, Ms. Hanisch writes:

> We have not done much trying to solve immediate personal problems of women in the group. We’ve mostly picked topics by two methods: In a small group it is possible for us to take turns bringing questions to the meeting (like, Which do/did you prefer, a girl or a boy baby or no children, and why? What happens to your relationship if your man makes more money than you? Less than you?). Then we go around the room answering the questions from our personal experiences. Everybody talks that way. At the end of the meeting we try to sum up and generalize from what’s been said and make connections.

> I believe at this point, and maybe for a long time to come, that these analytical sessions are a form of political action. I do not go to these sessions because I need or want to talk about my ”personal problems.” In fact, I would rather not. As a movement woman, I’ve been pressured to be strong, selfless, other-oriented, sacrificing, and in general pretty much in control of my own life. To admit to the problems in my life is to be deemed weak. So I want to be a strong woman, in movement terms, and not admit I have any real problems that I can’t find a personal solution to (except those directly related to the capitalist system). It is at this point a political action to tell it like it is, to say what I really believe about my life instead of what I’ve always been told to say.

> So the reason I participate in these meetings is not to solve any personal problem. One of the first things we discover in these groups is that personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution. I went, and I continue to go to these meetings because I have gotten a political understanding which all my reading, all my “political discussions,” all my “political action,” all my four-odd years in the movement never gave me. I’ve been forced to take off the rose colored glasses and face the awful truth about how grim my life really is as a woman. I am getting a gut understanding of everything as opposed to the esoteric, intellectual understandings and noblesse oblige feelings I had in “other people’s” struggles.

The Personal Is Political (1969) by Carol Hanisch

My own experience suggests that the personal being political is not merely a women’s issue. It is a human issue. I have come to think that the extent to which the personal is political is the extent to which an individual is subject to tyranny.

If your church demands that you marry a person of the opposite sex regardless of your preferences, and engage in sex for the sole purpose of reproduction: that is the personal being politicized. When you are stopped by police and asked not merely to identify yourself but to explain where you had been and where you are going: that is the personal being politicized. When your employers tell you not to discuss your salary or whether you got a raise with coworkers: that is the personal being politicized. When people with no official authority give you shit because they don’t think you’re performing your assigned gender ‘correctly’: that is the personal being politicized. When your family demands that you pursue a particular career or follow the same life script they had followed, even if it no longer makes sense to do so: that is the personal being politicized.

Even in the United States of America, a nation founded on the principle that all human beings are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights—among them the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—none of us are truly free. Each of us is subject to at least one of the five tyrannies of church, state, capital, society, or the family.

This, as Ms. Hanisch noted in 1969, is not a personal problem amenable to personal solutions. For example, because Madam Catastrophy was born a citizen of Australia, it was more difficult than it might otherwise have been for us to marry. It was not enough merely to request a marriage license—itself an intrusion by the state in a personal matter—we were also obliged to secure permission from the US government for her to enter the United States for the purpose of marrying me.

While we were able to navigate the system at considerable expense, enduring intrusive questioning and proving that our marriage was not merely one of convenience, our ability to successfully carry out the process was not a solution. The solution is for borders to be made as irrelevant to labor as they are to capital; if freedom of movement is a privilege reserved for the wealthy, then citizenship is mere serfdom.

The liberalization of migration is not something any individual can accomplish on their own. Only by banding together and demanding change of our leaders, who derive their just powers from our consent to be governed, can we solve this problem.

More generally, I have become convinced that the only way to depoliticize the personal is the outright abolition of every from of tyranny over the individual. This means the refusal of unchosen duties and ties. It means the shattering of unchosen bonds. Conservatives and communitarians would argue that you owe the world because you were brought into it. But if each of is is thrown into existence, and were offered no choice in the matter beforehand, then how can any claim on us imposed by others be justified?

The world owes you nothing because it was here first? Fine. But you never asked to be here, so you owe the world nothing in return. I say this not to be edgy, but because I believe that freedom should not merely be a matter of existential philosophy. Only if one is truly sovereign, and subject to no arbitrary power, can one have a truly personal life.

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