03/02/2023
The Idea of America
Our host Robert Harrison on America’s nature and political history. Songs in this episode: “I’m A King Bee” by Grateful Dead “Machine Gun” by Jimi Hendrix “Dear Mother Earth” by Canned Heat
03/02/2023
The Idea of America
Our host Robert Harrison on America’s nature and political history. Songs in this episode: “I’m A King Bee” by Grateful Dead “Machine Gun” by Jimi Hendrix “Dear Mother Earth” by Canned Heat
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This is KZSU Stanford, special greetings
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to the entitled "Pinnions Brigade," from your host,
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Robert Harrison, and our allegiance producer, Vittoria Mo Lo.
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We've been coming to you somewhat erratically of late,
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an episode here, an episode there with indeterminate gaps
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in between.
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It's not that we're petering out, or that I don't love you
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as much as I used to.
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It's just harder for some reason to keep up
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with all the demands on one's time and energy these days.
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A lot harder than when we first launched this program
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in our days of innocence, back before there were iPhones
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and the word podcast didn't even exist.
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Speaking of podcasts, nowadays it seems
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that every third person in America is starting one.
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There's a lot of talking going on in this nation of ours.
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And yes, I'll admit, at times I am in fact
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tempted to go silent once and for all
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and let the cacophony go on without me.
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But entitled "Pinnions Doesn't Die Easily,"
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he thinks mostly to you, our loyal fan base.
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So here we are back in KZSU, the underworld,
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ready to share some thoughts with you about America,
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more specifically about the nature and idea of America.
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When I say the nature and idea of America,
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I mean the birth of the American nation,
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as well as the North American continent.
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How do they relate to each other?
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That's the question that interests me today.
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And I may as well start with the word nature,
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which comes from the Latin nashii to be born
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and shares the same root as the word nation.
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We could say, therefore, that America's nature
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has a spatial dimension, one that extends
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from one coast to the other.
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And it also has a temporal dimension.
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And so far as the nation was born at a specific moment
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in history.
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Abraham Lincoln was well aware of this
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when, in his Gettysburg Address, he described the founding
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of the American Republic as a birthing process.
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Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth
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on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty
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and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
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That declarative sentence turns our fathers into mothers
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or maybe into midwives who brought forth a child
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in a place indicated by a demonstrative pronoun, this continent.
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The child in question was a new nation, new,
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because it was newly born, but also because in a world
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dominated by monarchies and aristocracy,
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it was conceived in liberty.
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In other words, it was also new historically speaking.
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America begins with its conception
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or what Lincoln called its proposition.
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We hold these truths to be self-evident
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that all men are created equal,
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that they are endowed by their creator with certain
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unalienable rights and that among these are life,
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liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,
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that to secure these rights, governments are instituted
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among men, deriving their just powers
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from the consent of the governed.
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It's a beautiful idea that opens the declaration
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of independence, but an idea is a very strange thing
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to found a nation on.
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Most nations are founded on history, traditions, people's,
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shared customs, shared moorays, a common set of laws
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and institutions that have grown up over time.
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The founding fathers did not conceive
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of their nation ex-Nihilo, but they did conceive
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of it abstractly as a set of principles
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and they framed a constitution accordingly.
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The problem is that the American idea
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and the American nation do not share the same Natality.
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They were born separately as it were.
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The institution and horrors of slavery
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made a mockery of the Declaration of Independence.
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And to this day, the idea of America divides the nation
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as much as it unites it.
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And in addition to that,
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the American Constitution's abstract body of laws
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was not bound to a specific location,
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at least not in theory.
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The Civil War erupted from within the fissure
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that separated the American idea from its reality.
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It was on this fissure that America wobbled,
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its foundations about to collapse.
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It fell upon Abraham Lincoln to re-found the American nation
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on its guiding idea, as well as on the solid ground of this continent,
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where the newcomers from Europe had set up residence
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during the previous two centuries.
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He did this by engaging a war to decide the future meaning
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and future authority of the American Constitution.
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He made very clear what was at stake in that war
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at Gettysburg, who cemetery received the remains of those
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who had died on behalf of the Union or the Union's idea.
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Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth
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on this continent, a new nation conceived in liberty
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and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
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Now we are engaged in a great civil war
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testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived
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and so dedicated can long endure.
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We are met on a great battlefield of that war.
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We have come to dedicate a portion of that field
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as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives
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that that nation might live.
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It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
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But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate.
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We cannot hollow this ground.
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The brave men living in dead who struggled here
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have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.
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The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here,
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but it can never forget what they did here.
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It is for us the living rather
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to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here
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have thus far nobly advanced.
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It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task
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remaining before us that from these honored dead,
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we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave
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the last full measure of devotion.
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That we here highly resolve that these dead
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shall not have died in vain that this nation, under God,
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shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people
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by the people for the people shall not perish from the earth.
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In Lincoln's words, the Civil War appears as a crucial moment
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of America's ongoing unfinished birth.
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Lincoln linked the new birth of freedom to the underlying land of the American continent.
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What so remarkable about this address is the way it brings history
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and geography together in time and place.
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The moment is now in the midst of a Civil War,
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the place is here on the battlefield.
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The word here occurs in astonishing eight times in the speeches 14 sentences,
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and in each case it refers to the ground, this ground as Lincoln emphasizes,
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where the slain have been laid to rest.
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By declaring that the dead through their dedication to the nation's founding proposition
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had consecrated the ground on which he stood,
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Lincoln associated the blood of the wars martyrs with the birthing process of the American Republic,
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suggesting that now, for the first time in its history,
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the nation could come together and root itself here,
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where the sacrificial bones of the dead took possession of this ground.
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In his speech act, he did nothing less than assert the nation's possessive claim
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over the American continent, which henceforth,
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if these dead shall not have died in vain,
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will ground the unity of the American Republic and with it its redeeming idea,
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or so Lincoln hoped at the time.
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The tragic irony of America's Republic is that it was born defectively,
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or only partially, and it would have to be born again, not once,
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but many times in the course of its future history.
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A century after Lincoln's speech at Gettysburg,
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Martin Luther King stood in the riverside church in New York City,
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and in the midst of another conflict that was tearing America apart,
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echoed Lincoln's now when he declared,
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with reference to the Vietnam War,
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we are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.
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King went on to proclaim, "Now let us begin, now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter,
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but beautiful struggle for a new world."
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Barack Obama would later take up and repeat word for word,
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King's words about the fierce urgency of now,
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applying it to his own historical moment.
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When we look at American history, we see a nation forever struggling to be reborn into its founding conception.
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To this day, America continues to obsess over its birth,
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to war over its birth, and to correct its birth.
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Lincoln asks whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
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Yet an equally pertinent question is whether the birth of such a nation remains always an ever-receding prospect.
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Not that long ago, Langston Hughes wrote,
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"America was never America to me, and yet I swear this oath, America will be."
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More on America's birth pangs coming up.
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Happy New Year, first of all.
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[applause]
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Yeah, by the way, I'll tune that in more of them.
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If we can get over the summer, yeah, yeah.
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When I did dedicate this one to the dragon scene that's going on,
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all the soldiers had a fight in Chicago and no one came to New York.
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Oh, yes, and all the soldiers fighting the Vietnam.
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I did a thing called "Machinga."
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HBase, well before the Republic was born as a political entity, the early Puritan pilgrims
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conceived of their crossing of the Atlantic as a kind of baptism for pairing them for spiritual
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rebirth on the North American continent.
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For whatever reason, this wild expectation of a reborn life in the New World, a Vita
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Anova in a Tera Nova never came to pass.
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An eye for one believe that it explains in part that deeply American sentiment of disappointment
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that runs like an undercurrent through our society, politics, and culture.
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Many of the early Puritans had resigned themselves to such a disappointment by the time
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Anne Hutchinson and her fellow antinomians, fomented such a dissent in the Massachusetts
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Bay Colony in the 1630s.
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Their pastors, or so they claimed, were still preaching the old covenant of works, while
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they, the dissenters, insisted that they had come to America to walk in the new covenant
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of grace, the outward signs of which surrounded them in the continents, luxuriant, in spirited
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nature.
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It's impossible to say how much of the antinomian movement was inflamed, nourished, or even
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sponsored by the prospect of grace that America's physical nature opens up in the soul of
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those who allow it to enter them.
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You can still feel it today, and the maddening thing about America's land, waters, skies,
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and all that falls under the rubric of what Wallace Stevens called the "silken weavings"
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of our afternoons is that they are full of intimations of paradise, yet we have no idea
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how to make ourselves at home here.
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It used to be called the "Spirit of the Land" surrounds us from all sides on this continent.
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It surrounds us and even permeates us.
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Yet in the end we do not belong to it.
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We do not fully inhabit it because we are not fully born into it.
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When I say we, I mean we, the citizens of the American Republic who are not indigenous
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to the land, who were drawn here from afar and continue to be drawn here by the extravagant
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promise of America.
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The Indians who were dispossessed of it belong to that land or this land, they are the
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sons and daughters of its spirit, the rest of us are resident aliens, and we act like
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it too, or at least the American nation does.
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As Jim Morrison put it, echoing a song of the Navajo Indians, "What have they done to the
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earth?
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What have they done to our fair sister?"
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Ravaged and plundered and ripped and bit her, stuck her with knives in the side of the
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dawn, and tied her with fences and dragged her down.
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I hear a very gentle sound with your ear down to the ground.
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Our alien residence has disfigured this land unspeakably and unforgivably.
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The American nation will never become native to the continent until and unless it learns
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to love it, honor it, and inhabit it in a new, less brutal way.
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We have a long way to go before that happens and maybe we should begin by putting our ear
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to the ground and hearing the gentle sound that comes from the earth itself.
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The sound of what America could become if only it would listen.
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I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions, say well, and take care.
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