Understanding, Forgiving, the USA

There are probably other people of my age who experienced the years of the U.S. war in Viet-Nam and who realize at some point that they have never really forgiven the US for what it did in Viet-Nam. It seems to me now that this lack of forgiveness isn't good, either for us or for the country. Something has to be done about it, some resolution found.

I also find myself still basically bristling from what the US did, with fun-loving Henry Kissinger and headache-inducing Richard Nixon, in Chile in the 1970's.

There is actually a long list of things that the US has done to other peoples, as well as its own people, that are hard to forgive. There is the whole slavery/Black thing.

Another one that touches me often is the extermination of the Great Plains Native Americans. I often think of the sensitive dark eyes of a beautiful young Native American girl whom I once met near Little Big Horn and how Old John Bartram, a third-generation Quaker yet, said that “The only way to deal with an Indian is to bang him stoutly.”

Bartram (1699-1777) - “The greatest natural botanist in the world,” said Linnaeus, – was a Quaker, an obviously able and intelligent man. He was just articulating the widespread, common outlook and assumptions of his age and the society of which he was a member, an outlook and assumptions that have pretty much been the same here from the time of Hobbes and Locke to the time of Bush, Cheney and Fox News. The fundamental outlook hasn't changed much at all - De Tocqueville's observations about the US in the 1830's feel as if they could have been written today.

So, yes, I have been angry and unforgiving about that outlook for most of my life. I realize also that other people have picked it up in me, and are as unsatisfied about it as I am. That bitterness, that anger, does no one any good, least of all ourselves. There is even a point at which the anger and unforgiving become the very thing which one despises.

Some kind of forgiveness seems necessary of My Lai, for example, of the people who made it possible, of the people who did it, of the people to this day who defend and excuse it, to choose one example of many US atrocities that just make my blood boil. Not to forgive seems like a dead end for everyone. Forgetting about the past is also a dead end. So how does forgiveness work in such situations as what the USA did in Viet-Nam or Chile or Iraq?

Understanding seems to me to be at least part of the resolution, of the “forgiving.” A nation's strengths, like an individual's strengths, are usually the other side of its weaknesses. The two are closely related. The US has a vitality about it, and an undying hope, a vision, that Old Walt Whitman articulated so beautifully. Weeping and wailing and bowing down to ancestors that lived thousands of years ago upon the earth – all that is so deadening.

It is understandable how a nation composed of people who left the “old countries” and went to the US could adopt such an outlook. It's the US at its best, and Whitman knew about it, sang about it, embraced it heartily.

But the weaknesses closely associated with such strength bring disaster to all if not acknowledged and handled properly, what Whitman called the “hollowness” to which it could default.

The most insidious evil that attaches to the US's strengths is, I think, the very devaluation of the past that is so appealing in other circumstances! The US did Iraq just as if Viet-Nam had never happened. The US voted for Bush-Cheney a second time, to the amazement of the world. “How could the US be so stupid as not to learn anything at all from the past?” One of my old teachers in Japan spoke despairingly of the US as being “half-baked.”

The past contains the materials, whether we are conscious of them or not, with which we approach our future problems. Being conscious of the past does not necessarily enslave us to it, but being unconscious of the past does enslave us to it. Reject it – good, fine - but be conscious of it.

Here is one last US weakness associated with its strength. The “Song of Myself” and “Song of the Open Road” - Yes! Yes! - but those songs can degenerate to “I've got mine. Fuck you, pal, and your family too. You're on your own. Loser.” There is a paradox in that our self-hood, our individuation, the construction of a mind, is achieved only through participation in the other. There's nothing more herd-like than the chant, “USA! USA! USA!” even though the chanters see themselves as so very independent of what anyone else might think or be.

Richard Rorty's, “Achieving Our Country,” is the only book I know that even recognizes the problem I'm working on here. I think what he is saying, basically, is that understanding the US will solve my problem: - that I have been too old-world, too smug, in thinking that there is some truth or ethic that is above human history and that I know what that truth or ethic is.

Here are a couple quotes from his book:

p. 29. “Repudiating the correspondence theory of truth was Dewey's way of restating, in philosophical terms, Whitman's claim that America does not need to place itself within a frame of reference. Great Romantic poems, such as 'Song of Myself' or the United States of America, are supposed to break through previous frames of reference, not be intelligible within them. To say that the United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem is to say that America will create the taste by which it will be judged. It is to envisage our nation-state as both self-creating and self-created poem.”

pp. 25-26: “Dewey's principal target was institutionalized selfishness, whereas Whitman's was the socially-acceptable sadism which is a consequence of sexual repression, and of the inability to love.”