Manifest Destiny

Over the last few weeks I've been following the American election campaign with some dismay and what I've seen depresses me no end. I thought it was only Walker who was monumentally thick but...

Obama "pals around" with terrorists, he's a Muslim goddammit ! , a "redistributor"(I don't think Rawls would go down too well!), a socialist* for Christ's sake! Why, he ain't even a "real" American. I'm not even sure if he "loves" Israel like me! That's the level of the 'debate' in the world's most advanced democracy! And no, what catches the eye of commentators and bloggers alike: let's talk about Palin's $150,000 spending spree, not her right-wing fanaticism. "Who is Obama?" and other insidious nonsense.

* For most normal people, of course, socialism is not a bad word, nor is liberal. I must admit, I love seeing the libertarians squirm, fearful that their 'rugged individualism' and 'the American way of life' is under threat once again from the commies, big govt. and a whole host of other ghouls and demons...Hell-Fire Nation

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Manifest Destiny: to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated and self-government entrusted to us.

In the light of the most current attempts at the sacred mission of spreading democracy and freedom to the rest of the world, liberating those pesky towel-heads from their convoluted ways-and socking one to 'Old Europe' at the same time-such age-old religious zeal is not that surprising.

But how did it begin?

America was bought. From the Russians (Alaska for five million dollars) and the 'Louisiana Purchase'. But what was there before? Nothing. Just wilderness , emptiness, wild spaces for miles on end. But in another sense, here was the promised land, the land of milk and honey, a place where one could begin again, a place of redemption of salvation. Praise the Lord!

But how did it all begin?

The land of the free! This is the land of the free! Why, if I say anything that displeases them, the free mob will lynch me, and that's my freedom. Free? Why, I've never been in any country where the individual has such an abject fear of his country-men....

What did the Pilgrim Fathers come for, then, when they came so gruesomely over the black sea? Oh, it was a black spirit. A black revulsion from Europe, from the old authority of Europe..they came her largely to get away - that most simple of motives. To get away. Away from what? In the long run, away from themselves. Away from everything. That's why most people have come to America , and still do come. To get away from everything they are and have been. ..Which is all very well, but it isn't freedom. Rather the reverse. A hopeless sort of constraint. it is never freedom until you find something you positively want to be.

America soon killed the belief in the spirit. but not the practice. The practice continued with a sarcastic vehemence. America, with a perfect inner contempt for the spirit and the consciousness of man, practices the same spirituality and universal love and KNOWING all the time, incessantly, like a drug habit. And inwardly gives not a fig for it. Only for the sensation. The pretty-pretty sensation of love, loving all the world . And the nice fluttering aeroplane sensation of knowing , knowing, knowing. Then the prettiest of all sensations, the sensation of UNDERSTANDING. Oh, what a lot they understand, the darlings!
---D.H. Lawrence, Selected Essays

Is there something inherently restless in the American character and does this derive from the frontier experience? The attitude to the land, as something that is only worth talking about in terms of its commercial value, may itself be one enduring characteristic of the wild west experience. Inalienable property rights-and not property-are the foundation of democracy, and perhaps the rugged individualism is also linked to this formative stage as well.

The Promised Land.
America as the New Jerusalem, the city on the hill, taking on the mantle of civilisation; America as the emblem of universal history, a universal nation: Empire. California was the shangri-la, and people were told that one could live to the ripe old age of 200 there. Myth and history are deeply intertwined. From 1841-48 about 15,000 people move west, mainly middle income farmers and their families but with the gold rush this soon changes: a quarter of a million from 1849-61. and the composition changes as well; this is the birth of individualism, the 'pioneering spirit', that is the dynamo of the land of opportunity. The Romantic individual, the outsider, and the outlaw, are all myths that owe something to the frontiersman. But the self-made man, independent of state and society, seething with his contempt for those on welfare and hand-outs is also, perhaps, an indirect legacy of a life forged under those harsh realities.

Turner, 1893, Chicago exposition.
The frontier permanently marks the American psyche. Could American economic and political life if there wasn't an area to be expanded into, conquered? If so, the closing of the frontier is a crisis. The tension of garden/wilderness would be meaningless without it, the forward drive, the ever pushing forward into the future too. Utopia, like American happiness , is always just across the border...

Frontier Life.
Wanted, dead or alive. That Bush has to repeat what he's heard from t.v. films is ironic; it comes on the back of a president who actually acted out the wild west : Reagan. We're gonna smoke 'em out, track 'em down. This isn't even genuine cowboy talk, not even a nostalgia for the passing away of a golden era, but a phony attempt to tap into something deep in the collective memory-except that the memory is largely that of the electronic media.

Our words give us away. No matter how hard American cowboy films tried to cover up the atrocities against the 'savage Red Man', the truth would always out. White man speak with forked tongue , the Red Man would say in his slow, deliberate way. And every school child knows that the shout of Geronimo ! is synonymous with courage. But all that changes. 1869 and the transcontinental railroad ensure that land is too valuable to be left to the unproductive savages.

Settler mentality.
Settlers always see emptiness where there are people. People are always irritating 'dots and dreams' in their schemes. The Black Man was 3/5 ths of a person under the constitution and the Red Man? Nothing. Pure and simple. The frontier must be kept open, otherwise it would collapse under its own weight, and political interests, 'factions', would take over. Only a vast and expanding net could ensure the vitality of the political system.

Reality: savage+ rum =0.