School shootings, hatred, capitalism run
amok: This 4th of July, we are in the midst of a tragic public
derangement
Jim Sleeper
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood And fired the shot heard ’round the world. –Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Concord Hymn,” 1837
.
For
centuries most Americans have believed that “the shot heard ’round the
world” in 1775 from Concord, Massachusetts, heralded the Enlightenment’s
entry into history. Early observers of America such as G.W.F. Hegel,
Edward Gibbon and Edmund Burke believed that, too. A new kind of
republican citizen was rising, amid and against adherents of theocracy,
divine-right monarchy, aristocracy and mercantilism. Republican citizens
were quickening humanity’s stride toward horizons radiant with promises
never before held and shared as widely as they were in America.
.
The
creation of the United States really was a Novus ordo seclorum, a New
Order of the Ages, a society’s first self-aware, if fumbling and
compromised, effort to live by the liberal expectation that autonomous
individuals could govern themselves together without having to impose
religious doctrines or mystical narratives of tribal blood or soil. With
barely a decorous nod to The Creator, the founders of the American
republic conferred on one another the right to have rights, a
distinguished group of them constituting the others as “We, the people.”
.
That
revolutionary effort is not just in trouble now, or endangered, or
under attack, or reinventing itself. It’s in prison, with no prospect of
parole, and many Americans, including me, who wring our hands or wave
our arms about this are actually among the jailers, or we’ve sleepwalked
ourselves and others into the cage and have locked ourselves in. We
haven’t yet understood the shots fired and heard ’round the world from
74 American schools, colleges and military bases since the Sandy Hook
School massacre of December 2012.
.
These
shots haven’t been fired by embattled farmers at invading armies. They
haven’t been fired by terrorists who’ve penetrated our surveillance and
security systems. With few exceptions, they haven’t been fired by
aggrieved non-white Americans. They’ve been fired mostly by young, white
American citizens at other white citizens, and by American soldiers at
other American soldiers, inside the very institutions where republican
virtues and beliefs are nurtured and defended.
.
They’ve
been fired from within a body politic so drained of candor and trust
that, beneath our continuing lip-service to republican premises and
practices, we’ve let a court conflate the free speech of flesh-and-blood
citizens with the disembodied wealth of anonymous shareholders. And
we’ve let lawmakers, bought or intimidated by gun peddlers and zealots,
render us helpless against torrents of marketed fear and vengeance that
are dissolving a distinctively American democratic ethos the literary
historian
Daniel Aaron characterized as “ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free.”
.
Many
Americans are adapting to living with variants of force and fraud that
erupt in road rage; lethal stampedes by shoppers on sale days; security
precautions in their homes against the prospect of armed invasion;
gladiatorialization and corruption in sports; nihilism in entertainment
that fetishizes violence without context and sex without attachment ;
the casino-like financing of utterly unproductive economic activities
such as the entertainment I’ve just mentioned and the predatory lending
that has tricked millions out of their homes; the commercial groping and
goosing of private lives and public spaces, even in the marketing of
ordinary consumer goods; and the huge, new prison industry that
Americans have created to deter or punish broken, violent men, most of
them non-white, only to find schools in even the whitest, “safest”
neighborhoods imprisoned by fear of white gunmen who’ve often been
students themselves.
.
Abroad, meanwhile,
thousands more shots, fiendish and celebratory, are being fired into the
corpses of American national-security and nation-building projects by
terrorists and fanatics we were told had been decimated. These projects
cost trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives, limbs,
homes and hopes, including those of American soldiers, contractors and
idealists. Their sacrifices can’t justify retroactively what shouldn’t
have been undertaken in the first place.
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Stressed
by all this republican derangement, millions are spending billions on
palliatives, medications, addictions and even surveillance designed to
protect them from themselves. All those vials, syringes, security
systems and shootings reflect the insinuation of what Gibbon called “a
slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire…” until Roman
citizens “no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by
the love of independence, the sense of national honour, the presence of
danger, and the habit of command. They received laws and governors from
the will of their sovereign, and trusted for their defence to a
mercenary army.” Only a few late-Roman republicans, recalling their old
freedoms, concluded, with Livy, that “We have become too ill to bear our
sickness or their cures.”
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