along the highway from Tacoma to Mt. Rainier,
was an angry immigrant from Norway,
who became an American citizen with an accent.
He was angry because, when his mother died at his birth,
and he was raised by an aunt, for which there was, in fact,
probably no better solution--his father was a sea-faring man--
Dad felt that his family had somehow abandoned him.
So, at the age of seventeen, he emigrated to America.
He was included, once, in an oral history project
conducted by someone at Pacific Lutheran College
(or perhaps it was a University by that time).
The young student who interviewed him pressed him
about his hopes for his children, and whether he wanted
them to preserve of his Norwegian heritage.
(Dad's Norwegian heritage was as thick as his accent.)
He had not intended to teach us Norwegian, for instance.
He wanted us to learn English. We did, of course.
That always happens to the children of immigrants.
"So what do you want for your children?", the interviewer asked.
"I vant for dem to be Yeffersonian Democrats!", he said.
As a concomitant to a recent road trip, I have just finished listening to William Safire's, Scandal Monger, a fictionalized account of the tension in America between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. In its beginnings, in the beginnings of forming the United States of America, Hamilton and Jefferson represented something we have never really put behind us. One might defensibly say that our present political mess is a current version of something that has almost always been there.
The story, ostensibly, is about James Callender, an angry immigrant from Scotland to the American colonies, where he became a newspaper writer and owner. The surface trivia of the story is how both Hamilton and Jefferson's sexual affairs were used by Callender to hammer at each of them, in turn. An angry Scottish newspaper man is probably something like an angry Norwegian fisherman, I suppose. Everything looked like a nail, to both of them.
As the story goes, Alexander Hamilton admitted to "a sexual affair" in order to distract attention from what was alleged to be a more important financial abuse. And it is a recluse, indeed, today who does not know that when Thomas Jefferson's wife died, he entered into a long-term relationship with his wife's half-sister, a black slave in the Jefferson house, whose father was also Jefferson's first wife's father. It wasn't just slavery: it was the morals of slave owners that was at stake.
Hamilton was the champion of a strong central government with centralized banking, and a national army. Jefferson had championed strong de-centralized State governments whose ongoing consent made the nation possible. That, in time, the antagonists began to appreciate the position of the other is almost lost. Potential wars with England or France or Spain made a strong nationhood necessary, as did raising the money to purchase the Louisiana territory.
On the other hand, the obvious White Supremacy that made the notion of slavery possible at all, was easily transferred to States Rights. Slave holding States asserted States Rights, and weaker nationhood, which evolved easily into Segregation and Separate-but (not)-Equal, and an endless recitation of White Supremacy by other means.
Sometimes we say that the Civil War never really ended, and clouded by the dust of other arguments--such as States Rights, or distrust of strong, central nationhood--it has not ended. Today, for instance, the rhetoric of White Supremacy even adopts overt Nazi language, and wraps itself in the religious language of long centuries of Chosen People. We hear lofty claims to American "Exceptionalism": that smells rancorously of White Supremacy, even when it claims to be something like being a Promised Land. Israel #2. A gift of God.
The other issue coursing through "Scandal Monger" was that, early in the history of our nation, the status of the Courts in adjudicating the importance of the Constitution and the balance of powers of not just the Executive and Legislative branches of government, but of the Judicial branch as the custodian the proper territories of each branch under the Constitution, was not yet agreed upon.
All of that is here today: White Supremacy, States Rights, the power of a national armed force, the power of taxation, and of our common identity as Americans, not just Texans Under Water, or the skin color of citizenship.
It is not just the ugly side of the centuries-long debates that have surfaced with Donald Trump, but it is that, too. Our distrust of government itself is a distrust of the very concept of nationhood, and of our responsibilities to each other, of our commitments to each other, of our belonging to each other.
We are in one of the times when we have almost forgotten that we are not just another large tribe with food and clothing peculiarities and preferences, or of skin color or language or religion or dietary restrictions. We, all together, are a nation, and we have written a Constitution that represents what we want to be. Jews might prefer to marry Jews, and Southern Baptists might prefer to marry born-again, thoroughly immersed baptized believers, but that is not what makes us Americans. We are a new kind of nation that wants to find a larger commonality than skin color or religious or non-religious preference.
And right now, we are in danger of losing our way.
So every now and then, I think of my father leaving Norway when he was seventeen, and angry, and worried. I think of just about everybody else who came here, too, sometimes by choice, and sometimes by force, and of those eighteenth century male chauvinists who dared their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to make a new kind of nation, even when they still owned slaves, and did not allow their wives to vote, and squirmed uneasily about really asserting that we were a nation, and not just a commonwealth of colonies, or another tribe.
We find it hard to drag our old baggage with us, and even harder to put it down and walk free.
Comments
Post a Comment