This final "yet compelling" part is most troublesome. And yet signs indicate that this "yet compelling" is becoming less so. Those who continue peddling the old language of the national we have either already surpassed the ordinary needs that sustainable nations at one time helped satisfy or are buried alive beneath the needs that they're financially unable to meet. It's no coincidence that the Tea Party base is primarily aging working class whites while the eye at the top of the pyramid is nearly classless in its infinite security, political omnipotence, and financial well being- think David and Charles Koch.
The idea that the extent to which we associate ourselves with a nation is fizzling out would have seemed outrageous at any one point in the ten years since 9/11. That miserable event sounded the jeremiad, the familiar call to arms and nation and god that many feel comfortable referring to in the spiritual language of awakenings. The dogged ethos of American Exceptionalism was, in the presence of a ubiquitous, vague and indefinable enemy, reborn, and with it the token demagoguery of our politicos and the quintessential and entirely predictable mad acquiescence of the people to their demands. I recall viscerally the utter nausea of seeing so many bumper stickers and flags enshrouding the countless indecencies and crimes America committed throughout the decade. I recall the helplessness so many of us experienced daily, so raw in its vulgarity and injustice that getting out of bed itself became a singular act of humiliation. Or the moments we thought we might move the machine, make a dent in its façade, only to end our efforts happy to have made new friends but without a trace of influencing anything.
You wouldn't have heard the fizzling even as recently as 2010, when the Tea Party stole the mid-term show. It was another bend in the nightmare from which any progressively minded, reasonable person has been for a longtime unable to awaken from. For my part I anticipated nothing of what happened in Wisconsin and Michigan and Ohio, or what's occurring right now on Wall Street, throughout the nation, and throughout the world. To my mind, we reached the breaking point a long time ago, but the corporate/political/sociocultural system reliably continued to strengthen itself. In times of crisis, this strengthening generally seems to be the case. We fall back on what Benedict Anderson referred to as our symbolic connection to our imagined communities. Today, in 2011, there's credibility in the idea that even those symbolic connections are on the outs.
The symbolic value of an idea gets drained of meaning if a long time has elapsed without a statue bleeding the passion of the Christ or the Devil's face appearing in a plume of smoke. One's faith gets shaken. The symbolic value of America, then, bolstered by our collective memories of historic events, functions well only insofar as it has a counterpart in the material world. The burgeoning middle-class of the latter half of the twentieth century was the material counterpart to the faith people had in the notion of the nation as special, anointed, exceptional. Middle class life revitalized the faith that in turn energized the ethic by which people worked, striving for their slice of the pie.
It's also interesting to note how transformative those years were for the nation: civil rights, women's rights, labor rights, the pill, etc. And it was during those years that within a decade a president and a presidential contender were assassinated, MLK was murdered, and Vietnam tore a hole in the confidence of the ancien regime. How did the nation, at that time, remain a nation? Where was the source of the strength that bound people together in some of the most perilous moments the country's ever experienced? I'd like to suggest that what insulated the nation against permanent destruction was a financially stable middle class, one capable of enduring eminent catastrophe and, most importantly, one able to evolve with the upheavals into a new stage of life. From this perspective, it makes perfect sense that today public safety nets are endangered, Planned Parenthood is on the verge of absolute defunding, civil liberties are curtailed, healthcare is an exclusive privilege, pensions are being raided, public education's at risk of privatization, immigrants are on the firing line, and environmental protections have no teeth. It makes sense because nations can't endure strife without the material strength to process it. While we're living now in a time of tremendous strife, what material strength we had is gone.
The theft of that material strength through shady financial practices and deregulation and concerted legislation has caused a rupture between the symbolic idea of the nation and the material prosperity it provides. Minus the jobs, the idea of the nation as a massive collective in which we play a part is less appetizing, and in the end, less believable. This is one reason why OWS is striking a legitimate chord that people can actually hear. Even the flag-waving Tea-Partiers are pissed and legitimately aggrieved, even though they continue to misguide their fire. They wave their flags, eat their hot dogs and sing the "Star Spangled Banner," but perhaps they do so more out of helpless anger than national pride.
What I'm really trying to get at is something my generation picked up on a long time ago: Nations are for Suckers. Those who control the United States know nothing of national borders. They operate in a globalized netherworld of immaterial monetary transactions, and it’s in bed with the financial markets that their allegiances lie. For the rich, nations died a long time ago. Unfortunately for the rest of us, the worse things became the closer we were drawn into the folds of penury and patriotism. The absurdity of the 2010 midterm and the 2012 presidential campaigns exemplifies how arbitrary America as a nation in the old sense of the word has become. A nation for those who vote to put people in power who are accountable only to the nationless.
My generation seems to me one that shed the stripes of the nation a long time ago. We've traveled, made connections across the world, paid for and reserved entire mortgages worth of higher education. We've deconstructed piety, picked the meat from the bones of war, internalized the drawbacks of the patriarchal model of authority, said hello and goodbye to the promise of middleclass life, squared off with the internal contradictions of capitalism, interrogated the assumptions of womanhood/manhood, the construction of gender, the games of sexuality, the identity referred to as the self, the I … I have an inkling that our generation's first words were je est un autre.
With otherness as an identity, we've created an "other" kind of movement. It is strange, discombobulated, and just. It is the proper response to an old system that has currency only for those who still haven't learned better, who have yet to sever their symbolic bond to the country that has abandoned its material responsibility to them.
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