Writing Our Country
By David Corbett | July 9, 2021 |
In 2017, during the early days of the last presidency, a quote from the American Pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty—from two decades earlier in 1998—went viral due to the eerie prescience of its prediction:
“Members of labor unions, and unorganized and unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots… Once the strongman takes office, no one can predict what will happen.”
The quote was from a collection of lectures Rorty had given that were collected into a book titled Achieving Our Country. What may have surprised those who took the time to read the book (and not just the viral tweet) would be the context in which Rorty made the foregoing remarks—a lament for the decline in national pride on the American Left.
Now that we have experienced—and continue to experience—the unpredictable, it’s perhaps time to ask how a lack of national pride played a role in what took place, especially among writers, artists, and the rest of the “intellectual elite.”
For Rorty, national pride is to a country what self-respect is to an individual: “a necessary condition for self-improvement.”
“Those who hope to persuade a nation to exert itself need to remind the country of what it can take pride in as well as what it should be ashamed of.”
And since countries “rely on artists and intellectuals to create images of, and to tell stories about” the nation’s self-identity, he singled out for scrutiny what he considered a regrettable and potentially dangerous development among American novelists.
In the first half of the 20th century, writers such as Theodore Dreiser in An American Tragedy, Upton Sinclair in The Jungle, and John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath, despite an often scathingly critical view of the America of their time, nonetheless wrote “in the belief that the tone of the Gettysburg Address was exactly right, but that our country would have to transform itself in order to fulfill Lincoln’s hopes.”
In contrast, by the same century’s closing decades:
“The only version of national pride encouraged by American popular culture is a simpleminded militaristic chauvinism. But such a chauvinism is overshadowed by a widespread sense that national pride is no longer appropriate. In both popular and elite culture, most descriptions of what America will be like in the twenty-first century are written in tones either of self-mockery or self-disgust.”
As examples, he cites:
- Neal Stephenson’s dystopian Snow Crash, in which the country is balkanized into corporate-sponsored enclaves (one of those “corporations” being the Mafia), and the protagonist retreats into an artificial virtual world called the multiverse.
- Other novels with a similar theme, that America is in fact secretly run by a shadowy conspiracy of corporate interests, include thrillers such as Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate as well as more ambitious works such as Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland and Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost .
- Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, which ends with a vision of the descendants of European conquerors and settlers being forced back to Europe, fulfilling Native American prophecies that “the whites would be a temporary disaster, a plague that would last no more than five hundred years.”
Rorty does not fault the quality of these books; on the contrary, he admits they’re all quite good. Instead, he questions their “rueful acquiescence in the end of American hopes.” The difference between these novels and the earlier work of Dreiser, Sinclair, and Steinbeck, he believes, is “the difference between agents and spectators.”
Anyone who’s read David Foster Wallace’s essays on irony and “the new sincerity” will recognize this theme, as well as the fact that he made his observations at about the same time Rorty was expressing his, i.e., well over twenty years ago.
In his biography of Wallace, Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story, D.T. Max noted:
“[I]rony got dangerous when it became a habit. Wallace quoted Lewis Hyde, whose pamphlet on John Berryman and alcohol he had read in his early months at Granada House: “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage… This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive… [I]rony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. [It’s] defeatist, timid, the telltale of a generation too afraid to say what it meant, and so in danger of forgetting it had anything to say.”
What makes this observation particularly poignant is that Wallace’s major work, Infinite Jest, deals with exactly the same theme of corporate takeover of government as some of the novels Rorty finds lacking. But Wallace suggests a way out, in much the same way he puzzled over the fact we teach students how to write fiction but not why—to explore what each of us needs in order to be, in his words, “a fucking human being.”
Rorty would add that one of those needs is a sincere conviction that hope in the future is meaningful, and that to the extent any such hope envisions a better culture, society, country, or world, it requires some belief that attempts at political solidarity with the purpose of achieving a more just and equitable America are not naïve, sentimental, or misbegotten.
He fully recognizes that, for example, Silko’s contempt for the environmental degradation, cultural nullification, and legal subjugation of native and minority populations must be squarely admitted and redressed. And in his criticism of the Left’s neglect of pursuing economic justice in favor of cultural and identity politics, he nonetheless applauds and recognizes the importance of including previously marginalized authors in the academic canon. It’s the only way to point out and rectify the “humiliation which previous generations of Americans have inflicted on their fellow citizens…Encouraging students to be what mocking neoconservatives call ‘politically correct’ has made our country a far better place.”
But in coming to terms with the dark side of our American past, we nonetheless have a choice:
“What makes us moral beings is that…there are some acts that we believe we ought to die rather than commit… But now suppose one has in fact done one of the things one could not have imagined doing, and finds that one is still alive. At that point, one’s choices are suicide, a life of bottomless self-disgust, and an attempt to live so as never to do such a thing again.”
Part of being an American is recognizing that our history is rife with events that we would rather have died than done. What now?
The current backlash against Critical Race Theory, for example, which is both shrill and intellectually dishonest, is largely motivated by a suspicion that its real purpose is to force white Americans into an emotional ghetto of “bottomless self-disgust” or some form of suicide—cultural, political, physical. It seems unfathomable to such people that the third option, devoting one’s life so as to never repeat the errors of the past, is viable. Either their self-regard is so distorted that they believe they’re already living in such a way, or their view of others is so distorted that they lack any faith that whatever effort they make will ever prove sufficient.
This is where the title of Rorty’s book, Achieving Our Country, becomes germane. It’s taken from a 1963 essay by James Baldwin titled “A Letter from A Region in my Mind,” which was later included in his book The Fire Next Time:
“Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.”
This cannot be done as spectators. Yes, much of writing is observational, but fiction is also a kind of conscience experiment, posing the moral question: If I were in that situation, what would be the right thing to do? Would I do it? Why—or why not?
This is why Rorty puts such emphasis on the arts. In a separate book (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity) he writes:
“In my utopia, human solidarity would be seen not as a fact to be recognized by clearing away “prejudice” or burrowing down to previously hidden depths but, rather, as a goal to be achieved. It is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers. Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people. Such increased sensitivity makes it more difficult to marginalize people different from ourselves by thinking, ‘They do not feel as “we” would,’ or ‘There must always be suffering, so why not let “them” suffer?’
“This process of coming to see other human beings as “one of us” rather than as “them” is a matter of detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and of redescription of what we ourselves are like. This is a task not for theory but for genres such as ethnography, the journalist’s report, the comic book, the docudrama, and, especially, the novel. Fiction like that of Dickens, Olive Schreiner, or Richard Wright give us the details about kinds of suffering being endured by people to whom we had previously not attended. Fiction like that of Choderlos de Laclos, Henry James, or Nabokov gives us the details about what sorts of cruelty we ourselves are capable of, and thereby lets us redescribe ourselves. That is why the novel, the movie, and the TV program have, gradually but steadily, replaced the sermon and the treatise as the principal vehicles of moral change and progress.”
In accordance with both Baldwin and Rorty, I believe that achieving our country requires us to set about “writing our country,” doing so in service to the kind of empathy that can open our eyes to previously unacknowledged or misunderstood suffering—to forge a solidarity equal to the task of creating a “more perfect union.”
This doesn’t require us to write politically. It requires us to write about ourselves authentically and about others honestly—a task far simpler to state than accomplish. But it lies at the heart of moving beyond the question of how we should write our stories to why.
I’m not even sure it’s possible not to “write our country.” It provides the parameters—moral, cultural, spiritual, psychological, emotional—of what is possible in the worlds we create, even if that world is fantastical, or lies within another nation’s borders. It forms the foundation of our characters’ dreams, for they cannot help but see with our eyes.
As I’ve noted previously, I’m currently writing a dystopian novel about a near future in which America is ripping apart into militarized factions. As you can imagine, given what I’ve written here, merely embracing a pessimistic view of our ability to live up to the promise of this country is not enough. I’ve tried hard to emphasize that there will be those for whom that promise remains real, and worth fighting for, even as others believe with equal conviction that the country they are fighting for, rooted not in a hopeful future by an idealized past, is “the real America.”
One reason I’m writing this book and the others in the series is because I fear for my country, fear for the ideals it represents, the hope of a historically unprecedented multi-ethnic and multicultural democracy. And in whatever way I can, I intend to convey to my readers that, even if this particular republic should crumble apart, we retain what is required to continue building the future it represented.
How are you “writing your country”—i.e., does your story in some way express hope in a future rooted in the promise of your national culture? Can you see where even a story about family, criminal justice, romantic love, or the monster in the darkness could serve this purpose?
What does writing authentically mean to you? How can we be sure we’re doing it?
Are you addressing the issue of suffering in your story, especially among those whose afflictions have previously been overlooked, minimized, or willfully ignored?
[Note: I’ll be on the road when this post goes up, and may be delayed in responding to your comments.]
David Corbett (he/him) is the author of seven novels: The Devil’s Redhead, Done for a Dime (a New York Times Notable Book), Blood of Paradise (nominated for numerous awards, including the Edgar, Do They Know I’m Running?, The Mercy of the Night, The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holliday, and The Truth Against the World. He has also published the story collection Thirteen Confessions and the novella The Devil Prayed and Darkness Fell.
David’s short fiction and poetry have appeared in a broad array of magazines and anthologies, with pieces twice selected for Best American Mystery Stories.
His non-fiction has appeared in numerous venues, including the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Narrative, Zyzzyva, MovieMaker, The Writer, and Writer’s Digest.
He has taught both online and in classroom settings through the UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program, Book Passage, LitReactor, 826 Valencia, The Grotto in San Francisco, and at numerous writing conferences across the US, Canada, and Mexico. In January 2013 Penguin published his textbook on the craft of characterization, The Art of Character (“A writer’s bible that will lead to your character’s soul.” —Elizabeth Brundage), and Writer’s Digest published his follow-up, The Compass of Character, in October 2019.
Dave, thanks for such a thoughtful essay on the current condition of our country. I’ve been following politics since the 1960s and I never thought I would see the day when our country would become so divided. And, what’s worse is that there are no shared truths. Facts and data should be indisputable, but those of us who care about truth and context must fight a daily torrent of disinformation and propaganda. How will it end? Sadly, my answer is that I do not know. My current WIP plays with the idea of triangles: political and romantic. As a lifelong moderate, I firmly believe the best way to solve our country’s problems is for people of good faith to sit down and craft compromises that work for the public. Yet, politics today is a blood sport, a zero sum, winner-take-all game. And the fragmentation of traditional media, coupled with social media, has worsened the problem. As writers, we must stand up for the principles on which our country was founded and write authentically and honestly about our nation and its flaws as well as its virtues. I always appreciate the thought and care that you put into your essays. Thanks for sharing these important insights with us. Best wishes to you for a great summer.
Thanks, CG. Your idea of mirroring triangles is intriguing. The personal is political and vice versa. And I agree that as writers we should strive to live up to the promise of our country. And I do not mean by that or expect that such writing will provide a uniform vision of what that promise is or what future lies ahead. But the time has come when even escapism is a political statement.
Thank you for this excellent essay. Much to think about.
Thanks, Vicki
Thank you, David. This is an inspiring and very timely essay that speaks directly to my novels, nonfiction, and work as a board member of a nonprofit publisher, Torrey House Press.
I’ll share it widely and dig into Rorty. Meanwhile, I hope someone can fix the typos that detract from such a shining piece of writing
Thank you, Charlie: I just re-read the piece and found two omitted words, which I corrected. The curious spellings in the quoted sections from various sources are in the original pieces. If there’s anything ese you feels needs attention, please let me know.
“…there are some acts that we believe we out to die rather than commit…”
s/b “ought” I’m guessing.
(An editor is never off duty.)
Thanks! Sheesh…
Thank you for this powerful, insightful post. It’s given me a new angle of approach to a story I’m incubating: how to create change by erasing the illusion of “them” instead of compelling change for “good”.
I’ve been thinking of ways to have the fracking executive, for example, experience the suffering of of those his work poisons, but came to the conclusion persuasion was ineffective. Having the horrifying discovery that “I have been poisoning US” is a much better approach. Harder character work, but worth it.
My overarching issue is global rather than national, but my belief is that a new worldview is still part of “”writing our country.”
Whether I can do that authentically is another question. My authenticity meter has sometimes proven unreliable. I’ll certainly give it my best shot.
Thanks, Lloyd. Authenticity is tough. It requires that we not lie to ourselves, and the human psyche is capable of incalculable self-delusion. Writing our country does not require us to confine ourselves within its geographical borders. It merely asks us to look honestly within, identify those aspects of our belief system that resonate with what I would call our national sense of purpose, and recognize when we are projecting them honestly or not. And as Rorty notes, that will require some sense of national pride–not jingoistic arrogance, but not suffocating shame either. Good luck with the story. Having heard certain talking heads talk about “clean” natural gas without noting that methane leaks create far more damage than carbon dioxide, I think you’re onto something with your fracking executive.
Thank you so much for this post. I have some reading to do with the titles above that I haven’t read. I’ve written down quotes and book titles to share with my writing group. I’ll suggest the group also read this post. Personally, it gave me reassurance that common sense is still common sense.
Thanks, Dawn. Interesting–I’m currently reading Andrew Bacevich’s “After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed,” and one of his main arguments points to the damage created by the idea of American exceptionalism. Ironically, he traces that notion back to, among other sources, a pamphlet titled “Common Sense” by Tom Paine. So, in at least that sense, perhaps “Common Sense” could use a bit of reconsideration.
Thank you for this, David. So much here to unpack and digest. “This doesn’t require us to write politically. It requires us to write about ourselves authentically and about others honestly – a task far simpler to say than accomplish.” For me, this statement of yours lives as a kind of mandate. A reminder that no matter what genre we write in, we can open windows onto the ‘other’…other cultures, other experiences of race and gender, and present them as what they really are, part of being human on earth. I’m writing YA Urban Fantasy and am discovering veins of gold about what we believe being shown up as false, then going through the stages of grief in order to accept a new truth. But for me, and I believe you say it here, is that at the root of all the madness is fear., the opposite of which is Love.
Hi, Susan. To write that the root of the madness lies in fear, the opposite of which is love, is very much in tune with Walt Whitman’s optimistic sense of an America in which the truth does not descend from above (whether heaven or “our betters”), but is agreed to among free people.
We have to admit, however, that in this cultural moment writing about others is hardly unproblematic. We can try, but need to expect pushback from members of whatever community a member of which we have tried, however honestly, to portray. This is why authenticity is also necessary–we need to be fiercely honest about our own motives, morals, and understanding of the world. Even that cannot spare us criticism, but at least we know we did the personal homework required to feel grounded in what we attempted.
An excellent thoughtful essay.
Thank you.
Your REMARKABLE essay, the best I’ve ever read on this subject, has me all kinds of lit up right now. Thank you for writing it.
Like you, I strongly believe that fiction enables us to fully inhabit the perspective and experiences of other people, people who are “not like us.” Movies do this, too, but we are observers there, not inhabiters.
The only thing that will pull us through our present day war zone of factionalism is empathy, the kind of empathy novelists in particular are capable of inspiring in hearts and minds. But, of course, empathy requires that people read, and if you wake up on the wrong side of capitalism every morning, finding time to read is difficult and requires greater effort than most people have. This can lead to a profound cynicism.
There was a time in my life when my disillusioned idealism took a downward spiral into cynicism. Cynicism is cheap. It’s intellectually lazy. Life is far more nuanced than what is convenient for us to consider. Cynicism is all too often a default setting for “word people” who can make it sound witty and self-deprecating. I was guilty of this.
After I moved to Italy eight years ago, I began to see my country (and myself) more objectively. Yes, we have a multitude of problems, even beyond systemic racism. But we ARE capable of greatness. My Gen Z daughter is a lesbian in Texas in a mixed-raced relationship. That alone gives me hope—and a powerful incentive to keep fighting for the America I know we can become, that we already are becoming, in many respects. She’s proof it’s working. Also, American culture is Black culture. We export it. That should inspire us to take deep pride in who we are as a nation.
Progress is incremental, rarely linear, and never bloodless. BUT AT LEAST WE’RE CAPABLE OF IT. Here in Italy, a country mired in its own history that we Americans travel so far to see, progress moves at a snail’s pace. It makes me appreciate our American zealotry for reform, an earnestness that almost seems naive at times, but is the engine that turns the wheels that move us forward.
That’s why writers, as witnesses to history, have a sacred obligation not to preach, but to tell the unvarnished truth about ourselves and our characters and the psychological Venn diagram where the two overlap.
We must be eyes for the blind.
We must not be afraid to see.
And we must never be afraid to speak truth to power.
Thanks, Stacey. That’s so well put. Being married to a woman who is half Norwegian, half Turkish has given me a whole new perspective on our country, not too different from your experience of living abroad. (We in fact spend a lot of time traveling to visit relatives and–before COVID, anyway–spent a great deal of time in one or the other of those two countries, themselves very different from each other and from us.)
As noted above, writing across cultural and ethnic lines presents challenges that are increasinly apparent. Someone of another culture may find my attempts at empathy to be wrong-headed or even patronizing. And yet as Americans how can one write honestly without addressing the multi-cultural, multi-ethnic nature of this society? We’re constantly put into the double bind of “You need to undertand” and “You cannot possibly understand.” This creates impregnable cultural silos of subjectivity.
And yet perhaps that’s not the stifling trap it seems to be. Again, authenticity may show the way out. We might take heart in something Simone de Beauvoir said in a review of Violette Leduc’s memoir, La Bâtarde: “She who writes honestly about herself speaks to us of ourselves.”
Just everything I’ve been thinking. WOW. I feel far less marooned than I did even yesterday. Isn’t this always our cognitive bias? We believe we’re the only ones brooding over these thoughts.
Again, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. What you wrote mattered to me a lot. This has been a cherished article, one I plan to tuck away for safekeeping.
Frankly, I wish I didn’t care so much about the fate of our country. But I do. My God, I do.
Me too. Dammit.
Your take on empathy, cynicism, and the novelist’s role in encouraging the former to overcome the latter is spot-on, Stacey. Could not have said it better myself.
Thank you for this wonderful post. I have added Rorty to my list of must reads. I have struggled with many of the issues you raise. I do not agree with the messaging on a lot of social media that the primary role of a writer is as an entertainer. This seems overly facile. It’s more complicated. Like our country. One of the characters in my first novel is mixed race. As a mixed race Native American and white woman who lives with the legacy of state sponsored expulsion (I no longer call them “removals”), I am always acutely aware of cultural noise. My character states, “I am both conqueror and conquered.” As a citizen of this country, I am always acutely aware of this noise and that probably finds its way into my writing because it stems from a worldview that inherently warns me of danger. It is dangerous to NOT be fully assimilated into the prevailing society. My family has always lived with the “ghosts” of being seen. This is a fragment of American history that still has not been addressed. This became clearer in my graduate studies in history. History is a narrative. A narrative with which we have only begun to struggle. It is a narrative that is entangled within our entire legal structure. From the beginning and continuing still. The Doctrine of Discovery underpins the entire framework. I can’t see us untangling it, but I can envision reckoning with it. This is where Critical Race Theory comes in.
Burying an apology for the full scope of what happened in a defense budget bill as line item number 150 cannot help us reclaim who we are as Americans or humans. It cannot erase the genocidal impact of the Lincoln Code and it cannot render the language we use to express our heritage less weaponized.
I have never believed that guilt is a strong motivator. It only leads to shame. There is nothing productive there. But expressed and accepted truth is powerful. Story is powerful. It has the power to unwind narratives and express truth WHILE entertaining. That is why so many voices that have traditionally been marginalized are so impactful. When you are used to being ensnared within a narrative, it is the power of story that helps dissolve the binding.
Reconstruction, at least on the face of it, promised a reckoning with slavery. We’re behind and clearly still working on it. We don’t have anything that even begins to address the “planting” of this country or any other country in the Americas. As a descendant of one of the conquistador families told me, “We were the only non-violent conquest.” It was an illuminating comment after a long and friendly conversation, but it stuck with me. That is a good place to start.
All conquest is violent. Power tends to subsume that truth inside a narrative that is tricky. Writers are good at detecting and conveying that truth. This will upset some people, but immigration was a weapon throughout the 1800’s. It filled in the spaces from “sea to shining sea” and was understood as an imperative. There were discussions about “relocation” versus “extermination” of native populations during this period. The legacy of that century led to alcoholism, suicide, and early death in my family. Yet our family survived. In Indian Country, there is a term for it. Survivance and radical hope. Yet, for people like me, we are not even supposed to exist. You are either in or you are out. It is why so many have forgotten their story as I’m sure was the case with Elizabeth Warren. Unfortunately for us, the trauma is still present and the story is still fading.
I believe in the aspirational hope of my country, but in some respects it is tough to read Rorty’s words (though I intend to,) because it feels like it speaks to a section of society that doesn’t necessarily reflect the experience of the entirety that now calls the U.S. home. This is perhaps the hardest part of what it is to be American. How do we come together without imparting guilt but also including the disparate experiences of those who have been left out? How do we talk about the weaponization of the law, immigration, education, race, labor, and entitlement without admitting that our exceptionalism might be a difficult thing to defend? How do we make it right?
That’s where the power of narrative and story trump technology. By the way, my current WIP is speculative fiction. My nonfiction WIP is still in its planning phase because unraveling the narrative of my family’s past is like chasing a ghost into the hinterlands.
Thanks for the incredibly thoughtful and detailed comment, Elizabeth. One of the major insights I’ve experienced this past year is the awareness my ancestors were not immigrants, they were settlers, meaning they were here to occupy land formally inhabited by Native Americans to solidy the U.S. claim to a continental empire.
I’m not so sure guilt is so unworthy of our attention, for it not only leads to shame (and anger, and resentment), but also offers not only the prospect of forgiveness but the opportunity, one might even say mandate, as outlined by Rorty, to live is such a way as never to commit such a wrong again.
Of course, this generation did not commit the wrong, and so its guilt lies not in deed but in perpetuating the myth that the wong never happened, or was not really a wrong, etc.
I’m not a big believer in “true” history (neither is Rorty). Rather, history is the story we tell ourselves to inspire us to create the future we want to come to pass. There will therefore never be a history that unites us–and unity is itself a myth that all too often demands conformity — and punishment, exclusion, or exile of those who resist. Rather there is the attempt through free discourse at some semblance of solidarity in achieving consensus.
What we’re living through now is a period where that consensus is changing, and those opposed to that change are fighting fiercely to resist its influence. Here’s hoping we don’t murder each other in the process.
I agree David. It is very brave that you even wade into this pool of fast moving water. I think one of the things that mystifies people is the legal aspect. The Doctrine of Discovery (Dum Diversas, Romanus Pontifex) is something that people think is part of a bygone era. Surely something written by a pope in the 16th century could NOT be codified into international law? And yet, it was and it remains with us. In Johnson v. M’Intosh, Supreme Court Justice John Marshall explicitly tied aboriginal land title to the doctrine of discovery where it remains today in case law. In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, Marshall explicitly located all natives as separate but dependent nations as in “ward to its guardian.” It is hard to imagine coming to terms with the legal foundation. When the rule of law is the land, the law becomes inviolable in people’s minds. You’re right. It will be very hard to find unity. But history has been constructed as a horizontal unfolding of events with dramas surrendered across the field of time. True history is a spider web with interconnecting and converging tendrils of the perceptions and viewpoints of those who lived during the time. If we could write about history from multiple perspectives, it might just open up minds. It’s one of the issues with completely deconstructing the narrative. That also takes away the story from a perspective that might be challenging, but is also true. Fascinating times we are in.
So, I read your comment with interest. As with so many of these essays, I wish you had run it by someone from the right before publishing. It seems almost all writers, agents and publishers assume all their readers are on the left.
That’s not true. You do express some salient points. But others, such as your comments or critical race theory, don’t ring true for me. It is possible not to be racist and to believe that U.S. history should not be entirely trashed. Patriotism is okay, and the U.S. has had many world achievements. I wan’t to be proud of my country, whether or not you are.
But if I dare express my views I am excluded from the literary community. Anyone who voted for Trump is automatically evil. There are many many people in the U.S. who believe the way I do.
One of the commenters above addresses the “evils” of fracking. I live in Pennsylvania. Hundreds of thousands of people are employed by fracking. How much quantifiable harm has been caused by fracking? Is it better for all those people to lose their jobs, that America becomes energy dependent on the Middle East again?
It’s quite frustating to be unheard by a community you would like to be a part of. Beware and be wary of the exclusion you create.
Hi, Mary Anne:
I want to let you know that I re-read my post and every comment preceding yours before writing this response,
First, I’m sorry you feel excluded. However, you should take heart from the fact that your comment posted, no moderator censored you, and no one has responded to your comment in a dismissive, rude, or otherwise unacceptable way. Quite the contrary, your post has been liked three times as of this writing.
I’m guessing you feel excluded on the grounds of the post’s topic and the subsequent remarks people made—meaning, I suppose, you do not share the same perspective(s). And you feel I took it for granted that all my readers would be politically aligned with the left, therefore excluding you.
The piece actually begins with Rorty’s condemnation of the left for not taking seriously the deteriorating prospects of the working class, who then did revolt against this neglect. This is a position I could easily imagine gaining agreement from not a few conversatives.
The post then goes on to chastise the left for not taking sufficient pride in American ideals—again, a position I hear and see a great deal in conservative media. (And yes, I do read conservatives—like Andrew Bacevich, who I mention above.)
Given that, I thought if I did catch any flack for this piece, it might well come from the left (and did, by the way, outside the forum).
As for running my post by someone from the right before posting, are you saying that we on the left need to have our statements pre-approved? Do you believe similarly about people on the right?
If you mean I should take into consideration how someone on the right would feel given what I wrote, then we’re veering into the territory of microaggressions and feelings-trump-all, something conservatives usually decry.
You also mention a commentor (his name is Lloyd, and you should feel free to converse with him directly) talking about the “evils” (your quotes) of fracking. Actually, Lloyd never used that word. And I imagine the “quantifiable harm” you want provided is part of the novel that Lloyd is writing—why not ask him? Engage with him, just as I’m engaging with you.
If many of the comments and my responses to them seem like “liberals talking among themselves,” well, yeah. But that’s kinda how this works—people provide their own individual perspectives on what was posted, and I respond to each individually. Like you.
I get that you feel outnumbered. And yet that just reflects the makeup of the arts community in general and the writing community in particular (though my genre, thriller-crime, has a great many conservative voices in it).
You say, “I want to be proud of my country, whether or not you are.” That’s particularly baffling, since the entire piece is premised on the need for national pride. True the pride I envision is open-eyed to the dark sides of our history, but it is also not morally paralyzed by them. Are you suggesting the only viable patriotism is an unquestioning one? Again, I’ll invoke James Baldwin, who said (paraphrasing), “I love my country, which is why I reserve the right to criticize it relentlessly.”
No one has suggested “trashing” American history; on the contrary. Elizabeth for example, who has Native American ancestry (and with whom who are also free to interact), argues for an honest reassessment of the impact of such things as the Doctrine of Discovery (which creates a legal foundation for the notion that all American land was unclaimed, “empty” territory “discovered” by European settlers, not land previously inhabited by natives). Recognizing the devastating harm inflicted by that doctrine isn’t destructive of anything except an insupportable myth of national innocence.
To seek such honesty in our history, to revisit it so it better conforms to the known facts, is not to “trash” it. On the contrary, what’s the point of revising something you think is “trash.” Underlying the need to reflect honestly on our history is the assumption that our history matters, that its study is not just worthwhile but necessary.
You conclude by stating somewhat ominously, “Beware and be wary of the exclusions you create.” Let me respond that, again, I understand you’ve felt left out or outnumbered or even considered “evil” (your term) in previous forums or gatherings. But no one said any such thing here. Please appreciate that.
Thanks for chiming in.
So this response is patronizing and offensive as is the response to the woman who responded to my comment. Like most liberals you are convinced you are smarter than conservatives and you cant resist the temptation to try and point that out. It goes along with the fact that liberals rarely if ever admit they are wrong. For example if you knew my background you would be sirprised at my support of African American and Native American rights. But just because a group has been oppressed does not mean there can’t be bad actors on both sides. And as far as liberals reading my work is concerned I would welcome it. Perhaps they might learn something.
As far as your arguments that the founding fathers were Deists and the religious groups fought among themselves- nowhere in the founding documents does it say that religion has been banished from the public square which is effectively what has happenef. I am old enough to know that wasnt always the case.Thomas Jefferson BELIEVED IN GOD, and so did John Adams who never owned a slave. How many liberals today really believe in God? Christians are an oppressed minority in this country-the last one it is still okay to discriminate against, except for fat people.
If liberals could respect conservatives’ beliefs in religion and a higher power instead of thinking we are stupid for it we would be in a better place. And it doesnt matter whether you or anyone associated woth this column has said it. Truth is truth.
I hear you, Mary Ann. I often think of St. Benedict and feel the tension between wanting to withdraw even as I feel called to be engaged.
David, I’ve been reading Scalia Speaks and On Faith and so impressed with his originalist interpretation of the constitution. Our Founding Fathers were wise and although we did not live up to “all men…are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” we try to redress the wrongs in our past. We ought not to throw out the foundations of our nation, which are Judeo-Christian, but that is what I see taking hold and it is destructive. Parce Domine!
My own writing strives to give voice to those who have none, esp. those who are disabled in any way. I write for children because that is where our future lies. My hope remains in Christ, not men of this world.
Hi Vijaya:
I’m sorry you sometimes feel inclined to withdraw. I certainly have never seen you treated with anything but courtesy and respect.
In particular, I admire your giving a voice to the voiceless. I think this is one of the highest callings to which a writer can aspire.
However, just like everyone else here, when you take a position, there is no unwritten law that says people cannot respond as they see fit. I realize you may feel like a lone voice in the wilderness. But if Writer Unboxed is the wilderness, the wild ain’t what it’s cracked up to be.
Concerning the poinst you made:
Although the English roots of this country are indeed Christian–the Founders would never have used the term “Judeo-Christian”–the religious groups that founded the country differed profoundly on what that meant.
I mention “Albion’s Seed” in a response to a comment below. It points out that the Puritans hated the Anglicans and the Quakers (and banished both Quakers and Anabaptists from the Massachusettes Colony under penalty of death); the Anglicans despised the Quakers and Puritans; the Quakers held the Puritans and Anglicans in low regard; and the backcountry Presbyterians hated everybody else.
These animosities were real and raw, because each of these groups had persecuted or been persecuted by the others back in England. It was one reason these groups colonized geographically distinct regions–they could not get along. They unified principally in opposition to the English Crown’s attempt to impose Anglicanism on all the colonies as the official state religion, as it was in England.
It was precisely this potential for Christian animosity, conflict, and violence–and the memory of how the Christian wars of religion had ravaged England, Scotland, and Ireland as recently as the mid-to-late 1600s–that prompted the Founders to draft the first amendment guaranteeing not only free expression of religion but prohibition against any attempt by the government to impose a state religion. In other words, they saw fit not just to protect religion but to protect the varous sects from each other.
Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” actively opposed the imposition of Anglicanism as the official religion of Virginia (and later drafted the disestablishment clause of the First Amendment accordingly), because he believed that an established religion was detrimental not only to freedom of religion, but also encouraged closed-mindedness and unquestioning obedience to the authority of the state.
Furthermore, Jefferson, Washington, Monroe, Franklin, Tom Paine and several other Founders were profoundly influenced by Deism, which comes in both Christian and non-Chrstian forms. While affirming the existence of a Supreme Being, it nonetheless maintained that human experience and rationality—rather than religious dogma and mystery—determine the validity of human beliefs. It routinely denied the existence of miracles, tended to resist the influence of organized religion of any kind, and in general had more affinity with Newton’s mechanics than the Bible.
As for originalism, saying we should abide solely by the original text of the Constitution and nothing else would re-institute slavery and the three-fifths clause–not very Christian, though many Christians at the time clearly thought otherwise. (The Quakers were a notable exception, though even they did not become devout abolitionists until the middle of the 18th century. Their reasoning was based on the golden rule, not the Bivle: I would not want to be enslaved, so I should not enslave anyone else. The Congregationalists of New England also eventually opposed slavery, though more through pragmatism than out of idealism–the region was too cold to be suitable for African slaves.) The Anglicans of Virginia and the coastal south and the Presbyterians of the backcountry embraced slavery whole-heartedly. So when referencing the “Judeo-Christian values” of the Founders, these less-salacious features cannot be overlooked unless one intends to be dishonest.
Returning to originalism, saying all interpretation of the Constitution should rely solely on the text is akin to saying mathematics should have stopped with Euclid. Not even the Founders believed this was the right approach, which is why Madison left so many things open-ended, knowing (because he and the others were indeed wise, as you say) they could not predict the future.
Indeed, within their own lifetimes, unforeseeable events involving the French Revolution, the slave rebellion in Haiti, high-seas piracy, the Napoleanic Wars, conflicts with Native Americans (see Elizabeth’s comment, above), and other events all required novel interpretations of the Constitution under their watch. (See Elizabeth’s point about John Marshall and the Doctrine of Discovery.) If they objected to this, they would have made a point of saying so. The historical record, however, is scant.
You note that we try to redress the wrongs of the past. I agree. I think we should try harder. But neither I nor anyone I know on the left — especially here at WU — has ever advocated for “throwing out the foundations of our nation.” This kind of mischaracterization is not helpful.
Incidentally, you invole the Constitution but then the quote you use concerning rights is from the Declaration of Independence. This is a frequent mistake, so you’re by no means alone in making it.
Again, I know Mary Ann and you may feel outnumbered, but I’ve taken your positions seriously. I just disagree with them. This is not exclusion. It’s conversation.
About a half hour after finishing my remarks immediately above, I came across this statement concerning originalism from historian Heather Cox Richardson, an expert on the Reconstruction, in her daily newsletter from yesterday (I’m beihnd on my emails…yipes):
“The principles behind the Fourteenth Amendment were behind the 1870 creation of the Department of Justice, whose first job was to bring down the Ku Klux Klan in the South.
“Those same principles took on profound national significance in the post–World War II era, when the Supreme Court began to use the equal protection clause and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment aggressively to apply the protections in the Bill of Rights to the states. The civil rights decisions of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, including the Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in public schools, and the Loving v Virginia decision permitting interracial marriage, come from this doctrine. Under it, the federal government took up the mantle of protecting the rights of individual Americans in the states from the whims of state legislatures.
“Opponents of these new civil rights protections quickly began to object that such decisions were “legislating from the bench,” rather than permitting state legislatures to make their own laws. These opponents began to call for “originalism,” the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted only as the Framers had intended when they wrote it, an argument that focused on the creation of law at the state level. Famously, in 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork, an originalist who had called for the rollback of the Supreme Court’s civil rights decisions, for a seat on that court.”
I know you believe that “we try to redress the wrongs in our past,” but this makes your embrace of originalism puzzling to me. It was conceived preciesly as a means to reverse some of the effort to redress those wrongs.
David: important in so many ways. Thank you.
At some point (I don’t know when), careers in literary criticism and serious journalism started to demand a reflexive, self-guarding emphasis on avoiding the appearance of naivete. To be seen as not worldly-wise, as innocent became the kiss of death. Along with the convincing arguments you offer from Rorty and Wallace, over time I think this orientation has led to a loss of balance in literary/creative life. The idea of a whole genre devoted to collapse–dystopian fiction–is one example.
But it’s impossible to exaggerate the importance of new technology in making the old maxim of print journalism universal: if it bleeds, it leads. This now applies to pros as well as hobbyists, to writers for respected publishers/publications as well as to citizen journalists. What’s the quick fix for anyone trolling for readers/viewers/dollars/tenure? Out-of-balance pessimism in the guise of wokeness.
Hey, Barry:
“Out-of-balanace pessimism” — how well put, particularly in contrast to Elizabeth’s reference to Native American “radical hope.” I think one of the great ironies of our current moment is that the communities most profoundly invested in equality and justice for all are those who’ve historically been denied that equality and justice. Maybe we should learn from their example.
How am I “writing my country”?
My most recent manuscript is an heroic story that is emphatically anti-superhero. It’s a lost love tale with a supernatural twist that is deliberately anti-paranormal romance. I think those genres get something terribly wrong…especially something wrong about America.
In my story, a whiz kid science writer living in New York City goes on a cross-country quest to find the girl who disappeared from his life when they were teens. She can see the future, but in my story that is not a superpower. Girls in our society are exploited–abused, trapped and trafficked–and ask me any girl with a special ability would be exploited even more.
Thus, in my story there is an underground world of religious millennialists who believe that girls with abilities like hers are lower order angels sent to bring word from God about the End Times, by foreseeing, speaking with the dead (who would know) or otherwise. They are captives in isolated communities, although not all believers are bad. Some help the angels.
Superhero stories say that only superheroes can save us. I do not like that message of dependence. Paranormal romance says that a supernatural ability grants unnatural power. Baloney. We all can prognosticate, learn from the dead, hear celestial music and more. Does that save us, or even help us? Not necessarily.
The America is my novel is suffused with religion, but religion which in isolation and in extreme can, and often does, become misogynistic. Religion is not a bad thing by itself, but men can sometimes make it oppressive (and women can sometimes enable that) and when that happens the subjugated are always female. That reality is not unique to America but it is as true in America as anywhere.
America was founded by religious extremists fleeing persecution and seeking freedom and that strain of the American character–like self-sufficiency, pioneering, distrust of government and more–are enduring qualities. At the same time, we wish to fix our ills. Our popular fiction sometimes leans on superheroes and super abilities but that’s wishful. If entertainment is the only end, fine, but ask me storytellers have a responsibility to show America as it is.
That’s why I have written my story–which I nevertheless hope will be entertaining–in the way that I have. It’s set in America, but the America that, in part, I see.
HI, Benjamin:
I love the premise of your story. I just finished one of the best histories of America I’ve ever read, “Albion’s Seed,” about the four distinct English communites that comprised the original wave of white Christian settlement and largely forged our conflicting notions of liberty: Puritan Calvinists (“ordered liberty”), Cavalier Anglicans (“hegemonic liberty”), Quakers (“reciprocal liberty”), and Scots-Irish Presbyterians (“natural liberty”). The role of religion was central in each community and its concept of freedom. But though women were treated variously, they were overwhelmingly considered secondary to the men. (Quakers were the most egalitarian, but by no means feminist.) Good luck with the story.
David, what you’ve written is eloquent, important, and emotional. The questions about how we, as writers, approach these issues can feel overwhelming.
Speaking only for myself, based on my experience of the world, I approach it from the level of the individual. Regardless of the story, what I hope to write are individuals who ultimately are the best of what we, as human beings can be. It’s not anything overt in some cases, in others, maybe so.
I know my understanding of politics was forever changed by Brenda and Robert, two Canadian friends who worked tirelessly for Arts against Apartheid when I first knew them. I was with Brenda the day Nelson Mandela was release from prison and we watched it together as she wept, saying she didn’t believe it would happen in our lifetime. One (or two) person(s) can and do make a difference. In the end, that’s all that ever has made a difference. I guess that’s what you’re saying too – that we, as individual writers, can make that difference.
Hi Doc:
I think the kind of courageous, hopeful forebearance in the face of such profound injustice exhibited by Mandela and MLK, Jr. (among others), is something we could all revisit in great depth and be better off for the effort.
David, so sorry I am late responding, a busy Friday morning. And thank you for this. I feel privileged to have friends like you who provide witness to the present and keen analysis of the past. Change creeps up on us. The prediction of the “strongman” gives me chills. But why did so many fall in step? Men and women who knew better. Is the thirst for power satisfied by a pat on the head from the despicable? We are in true crisis now, when millions cannot separate lies from truth. Still I want to read more of Baldwin, support TaNehisi Coates and the 1619 project. I want to speak the truth whenever I am challenged. Covid has made me bolder. And that’s not a bad thing. .
Thanks, Beth:
I’m currently listening to Patrick Radden Keefe’s podcast, “The Wind of Change,” about the story that the CIA actully wrote the lyrics to the Scorpions hit by that same name, which became hugely influential behind the Iron Curtain in the last days of the Soviet Union. He makes the point that conspiracy theories naturally result from our understanding that the truth is often not apparent, and deliberately hidden. So believing in conspiracy theories is not an indefensible position. But you have to be open to discrediting evidence when it’s presented–and that’s where the current situation seems to have spun out of control. Far too many are seeking merely to validate, not challenge, their preconceived notions.
But the Mafia really did kill JFK. A cousin of my brother-in-law’s stepsister’s nephew told me all about it.
Thanks for chiming in. And yeah, I think this is crisis time. If not, it will do until the real crisis arrives.
Oh, No. My hairdresser told me it was LBJ
Hi, Everyone:
Thank you all for the thoughtful and generous comments. As noted at the end of my post, I’m on the road (with my wife and pooch) and have large chunks of time when I’m unavailable. But I will do my best to respond to each and every one of your comments tonight, tomorrow, or Sunday.
It’s Saturday morning here in Seattle, and I think I’m caught up. I’ll check in later in case anyone has anything to add. Thanks!
What an intelligent, well-written essay. I want to add from a woman’s perspective to the list of books you reference; A Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. I read the book decades ago, but recently breezed through the Netflix series (I know–not as good as reading). There were two prescient scenes: one in which the United States capital is encroached and an actual coup ensues, and one scene in which immigrants from America are forced to cross the border into Canada. Frightening stuff. Truth is scarier than fiction.
Regarding your writing, I quote (I think) Stephen King, “I know it’s good because it makes me jealous.”
I tend the country that I belong to. It is not “my” country. No one owns the earth. Tending the Desire Path
I am lucky, more accurately blessed, to live a ten-minute drive from a little dirt road that curves through what’s left of a Northern Arizona Ponderosa forest. A narrow and rocky social trail runs parallel a few hundred feet from the road. I won’t tell the location and I’ll alter details so that the compulsive Instagrammer won’t be able to find this place.
A social trail is a path eroded into the earth by human or animal use. It can also be known as a game trail, use trail, bootleg trail or desire path. Eleven years ago, when I first moved back to Flagstaff, this trail did not exist. There were only second-growth Ponderosa, gambel oak, pine stumps, wild grasses and flowers. There were few walkers or bikers on the dirt road.
Six months after I returned to Flagstaff in 2010, Instagram began to colonize the Internet. Google Maps had arrived years earlier. The pimping of secret places was well begun.
-double space-
I once lived for twenty-three years in a cabin just off the little dirt road. I had no indoor plumbing or central heat. Those of us who lived in the dozen or so cabins used a central shower shack and a little further up the driveway, a two-room outhouse.
I walked the dirt road almost every day. I walked through blizzards, under a blazing late June sky, in monsoons and what the Navajo call female rain, a mist so delicate that I barely felt it. I found seven old Ponderosa clustered together and let myself enter their heart and shelter there when the human world seemed increasingly corrosive. I almost never saw another person walking that road.
The corrosion transformed Flagstaff into a bloated mockery of the our once little mountain town. I fled to the Mojave Desert, then to Central Oregon. The corrosion spread – and continues to eat everything: mom ‘n’ pop businesses, low-rent housing, diverse populations. It eats the authentic. It eats everything except the furiously ravenous entitled.
A few weeks ago, the epidemic corrosion was spread to a huge downed Ponderosa next to the little social trail. It is a sweet place to sit and catch my breath. I walked toward the old giant and saw dozens of clumps of toilet paper around it.
I thought of the chicly geared-out runners who used the trail, and of the mountain bikers zooming on their ludicrously expensive bikes toward some destination that exists perhaps, only in their minds. I considered posting a sign that read: This is not your toilet. Some of us are hiding in the forest with cameras – and, possibly, crossbows.
I remembered learning decades ago that the quickest way to get reactive humans to do something is to tell them not to do it. And, I took the only action that would help – and would keep me from ranting at the next jogger or biker I saw – or stopping their progress with my walking stick.
I went home and came back with a trash bag and rubber gloves. I picked up every clump of used toilet paper and put it in the bag. When I finished, I kissed the log. “I’ll be back,” I said. “I will clean up the human filth. I can’t change the entitled, the thoughtless, the users. I can only be medicine for what they do.”