by Douglas Messerli
Russell Banks Dreaming
Up America (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008)
Although I have
attempted to tackle some of these same issues in a few of the essays of My Year, Banks is a far braver man than
I; I am certain that had I been asked to do the same, I would have demurred.
For how does one speak as a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant for a nation which
Banks himself describes as a "Creole" culture from its earliest days,
with its vast displacement of Native Americans and its endless waves of
immigrant populations beginning with the Africans, who Banks, correctly I
think, refuses to describe simply as descendants of slaves. And then, of
course, there are those generations upon generations of German, French, Dutch,
Scandinavian, Irish, Spanish, Italian, Mexican, Japanese, Chinese, Korean,
Vietnamese, and vast ethnic populations Banks does not even mention such as the
Russians, Armenians, and Persians (who are represented by large populations in
my home city of Los Angeles)—all of whom are portrayed in popular thinking as
having merged and embedded their cultural identities within the larger whole.
Even in these cultural heritages Banks mistakenly combines religious groupings
(describing Jews as a single cultural entity—tell that to Jewish citizens from
Germany, Poland, Iran, and Ethiopia) and heaping all immigrants from Arabic-speaking
countries into a single whole he describes as Arabs (let us just mention not
only the differences between Arab-speaking people of different countries, but
the radical separations between Sunis and Sufis). One might as easily declare
that to be an American is be anyone from nowhere—or everyone from everywhere,
depending upon your point of view.
But to be fair,
this is not an historian's essay, let alone a coherent political commentary,
but rather an intelligent artist's perspective of what it means to be from the
USA. And from this perspective Banks presents a fairly credible and often
fascinating discussion of our inherent successes and failures as a culture.
Note that I do
not use the word "country." Banks argues, rather convincingly, that
when our nationalist tendencies show their ugly heads, they are often directly
in opposition to our founding members' philosophical viewpoint.
Banks argues that
three major strands of American ambitions are evident in the first European
settlers of the continent: in New England the English settlers' religious
dreams of the "City on the Hill," the Dutch and French desires for
commercial and trading success, the Spanish wishes for wealth mythologized in
Cortez's and Pissaro's "City of Gold," and the dreams of Ponce de
Leon for a "Fountain of Youth," ambitions that gradually were
interwoven to express the current American Dream, a hope for religious purity
and freedom of expression, our attempts to attain wealth, and our belief in the
possibility of making a new life, of starting over again. Yet these three
strands of the American Dream also pull us in different directions and often
play out our destinies in opposition to one another such as our Civil War,
which pitted our striving for wealth against the moral and spiritual opposition
to slavery.
Banks also points
to the basic hypocrisy of our values; while seeking a "City on the
Hill," a moral ground that permitted freedom of expression, we
simultaneously failed to recognize any rights for those that were here before
us and had tended the new world which the immigrants now felt was rightfully
theirs to settle and develop, to move ever forward with soldiers and fortresses
followed by the settlers themselves who took over Indian lands, dividing them
up into farms and ranches. Accordingly, Banks insists, racism was at the very
heart of the developing nation from its inception—an issue with which (and even
despite our joyful embracement of our first Black president) we have still not
completely come to terms.
What set this new
nation apart from other countries, however, was the radical embracement of
democracy and, in particular, its Enlightenment leaders (Washington, Paine,
Franklin, Jefferson, and others) who in documents such as the Declaration of Independence and our
Constitution spoke in a loftiness of ideas that embraced not just its voting
citizens (Blacks and women, we are reminded, not among them) but all of
mankind. These "sacred documents," as Black novelist Ralph Ellison
has described them, gave rights even to those who did not yet have them, and
had important consequences that even the founding fathers might never have
imagine.
As Banks writes
of the Constitution:
It's
fascinating to contrast the United States Constitution with the constitutions
of our
individual fifty states. Each state has its own constitution, usually a
litany of
laws. It's the same with most national constitutions—the new constitution
of Iraq, or
the French Constitution, for example. They're deliberately oriented
to a
specific people, place, and time. But the American Declaration of
Independence
has a poetic loftiness that universalizes its ambitions. It speaks of
mankind as
much as Americans. And the institutions laid out in the American
Constitution
are so decorously balanced that it manages to universalize our
country's
political structure, too. Both of our founding documents really are
extraordinary acts of creative genius.
Yet those pulls
that Banks spoke of earlier often contorted and twisted those sacred texts,
particularly given the enormous powers of the American presidents, that could
work for the good of the American populace (Banks predictably mentions Franklin
D. Roosevelt) or could push the country in the direction of a self-deluded
people who regularly commit genocide in the name of "Civilization,
Christianity and Capitalism." As he quotes D. H. Lawrence: "The
essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer."
The author of Dreaming Up America is particularly
critical of how through some of our technological advances such as television
we have turned our economic interests—that search for "The City of
Gold"—upon our own citizens, inviting the salesman, who we once kept at
the door, not only into our living rooms, but into our children's bedrooms:
We've
colonized our own children. Having run out of people on the planet
to colonize,
run out of people who can't distinguish between beads and
trinkets and
something of value, having found ourselves no longer able to
swap some
beads and axes for Manhattan Island, we've ended up colonizing
our own
children. ...The old sow is eating its own farrow.
I wonder,
however, just how gullible our own children truly are. I recall that when I was
a grade schooler, presenting a school-play with another young boy satirizing
the endless advertisements we had heard over and over again on both radio and
television in its earliest days. Perhaps our children, having encountered
thousands and thousands of such ads, may not be quite as naive regarding the
market as we imagine. Rather, I would argue that the greater danger lay in the
programming itself, in the empty narratives of television productions and news
reporting. When that emptiness is presented as reality, it contorts the minds
not just of our children but of adults as well.
Nonetheless, we
can well understand Banks's fears. And with the author we wonder where this
homicidal sickness caused by the "conflict of our material goals and our
spiritual justifications..." will lead us. That, Banks appears to argue,
depends of what we make of ourselves, on how we comprehend that despite our
commitment to this particular nation, we have, as individuals, not truly been
melted down in some metaphorical pot, but are still each different from one
other while sharing similar ambitions and goals. We are not anyone, but everyone from everywhere, a truly
universal force; and in that fact
lies our strength and our ability to renew ourselves and our country.
New York
City, January 17, 2009
Reprinted from Green
Integer Blog (March 2009).
