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The American Accident
America loves to celebrate itself. And we love to celebrate in ways big and loud — favoring the recreation of the sounds of our country’s birth over the ideas, the promises, the writing down of powerful words. We don’t turn on the TV or unfold a chair in the park on July 4th to watch men in powdered wigs argue over some foxed paper.
The only thing America loves more than big and loud things is myth, particularly the myth of America itself. Just as we’re sure to be treated to local news stories of dads nudging hot dogs on grills while kids run through sprinklers that shoot water in gentle fans, we will have media segments on Americans’ thoughts about the country’s founding and its fathers, just regular folks talking about their favorite passages from the Declaration of Independence or whatever. Myths are, of course, just explanations by way of stories — in America’s case, how a group of brilliant and courageous men came together to pull a new country, the best in history, from the Heavens into existence. America is an ideal, and ideals are eternal, pure, even inevitable.
America’s myth has always contained a lot of slack. So many people weren’t in the room for the founding — women, slaves, the infirm, the poor, those who didn’t own land, those who owned the land before the naus and carracks hit shore. As a result, the story of America often leaves those people out, and, at its cruelest points, reminds them again and again why they don’t count. But at times more voices have become woven into America’s story, more lives and loves acknowledged, more kinds of happiness considered worthy of pursuit. My own family would not have its shape without these new voices; I’m married to an immigrant whom I wouldn’t be able to marry not that long ago, my father was handicapped, my mother and father both coming from poor rural families who somehow made it by.
We now find ourselves at a point of severe contraction, what feels like the worst in my lifetime. A very few are actively at work paring back the story of America to the powdered wigs and the myth of great (white) men with plots of land, a selective history and tradition. You know, back before racism or gay people or or ambitious women or even people for whom the world has been mean, all things created by liberals. These old ideas are wildly unpopular, which is why the Supreme Court has been…
