The Age of Innocence

October 17, 2019

     Every time that we think it can’t get worse, Trump finds a new low.  In yesterday’s aborted meeting with Congressional leaders, Trump resorted to hurling grade school insults at The House Speaker, calling her a “third rate [or third grade] politician,” (Source:  “Inside the Derailed White House Meeting,” by Katie Rogers, The New York Times, 10/16/19).  We have become inured to the “President” directing his ignorant, bellicose rants towards anyone who criticizes him.  We are seeing, on the global stage, the consequences of giving unchecked power to an unserious, incurious, toxic narcissist.  Four year olds regularly display greater emotional maturity and impulse control than this “president” does. The fact that someone so manifestly unfit has ascended this high should be a cause for deep introspection.  It is easy enough to say that this is the result of some anonymous diehard racists who comprise 40% of the electorate being empowered by that holdover from slavery, the Electoral College. The truth is more complicated and far less flattering than that.

     Many of us have been shocked at how rapidly America has devolved into a virtually authoritarian state, but if we have been paying attention, we shouldn’t have been.  “American exceptionalism” is a heck of a brand, but we have assiduously avoided doing the work to ensure that our product, “democracy,” lives up to that image. A tragic flaw in our national character is to blame, the illusion of our own “innocence,” and the deliberate ignorance required to maintain that illusion.

     Monday was the national celebration of Columbus Day, a holiday venerating the start of a regime of murderous colonization, that was itself a mechanism for accepting Italian immigrants into the white American mainstream.  As Brent Staples detailed in his piece in The New York Times, the Italian immigrants who first arrived here in the 19th century were considered more Black than white, and were reviled and persecuted just like us.  They did the same backbreaking work in the Louisiana cane fields that Black people did, and were subjected to the same indiscriminate mob violence. Columbus Day was initially declared by President Benjamin Harrison in 1892 after the horrific lynching of eleven Italian Americans brought Italy and the United States to the brink of war, (Source:  “How Italians Became ‘White’,” by Brent Staples, The New York Times, 10/13/19).  As the elevation of the Columbus mythology illustrates, all too often, the price of admission into the dominant class of the American hierarchy is to accept an origin story that erases the theft, violence and subjugation at the root and turns a blind eye to all of the fruit of that poisonous tree.  

      This studied ignorance allows dehumanizing stereotypes of Native Americans to be team mascots and renders  invisible the Native American women who are murdered and sexually assaulted up to ten times more often than “the national average for all races,” (Source:  “Murdered and Missing Native American Women Challenge Police and Courts,” by Garet Bleir, Anya Zoledziowksi, The Center for Public Integrity, publicintegrity.org, 10/29/18).  It allows people to ascribe the stubborn achievement gap between Black and white students to some innate deficiency, rather than the long history of criminalizing the education of Black people.

       Many of us embrace pernicious mythology because it makes our lives easier.  We can hoard educational resources for our children guilt-free, if we believe that those people don’t “value” education.  We can overlook poverty in East New York, or Puerto Rico, or West Virginia, if we don’t think about the federal budgets bloated with defense spending and precious little for education, healthcare or any social safety net.  We accept poverty and addiction as the cost of doing business. We the sheeple are bought off with tax breaks and flat screens. We cling to a belief in our innocence that is only possible by choosing not to know. That is what brought us Trump.  Until we face our own complicity, he isn’t going anywhere.