February 8, 2024
"The most religious among us regarded nationhood as a fiction." Marcel Theroux, Far North
Nationhood is a construct There are few base identifiers that define a nation: language, geography, race, religion, ideology or a shared history. These are but a few. Mostly it is a fable we tell our collective selves, a fiction. It can be a worthwhile endeavor, our story, used to cohere a population in order to build a shared future. Hopefully of abundance and relative safety. Other than that, it is just made up.
Language. Defining a nation by its use has resulted in some of the world's greatest human tragedies. Yet, in some nation states, even the adoption of the mother tongue is dismissed by the nativist population as insufficient. Those same forces use language as a pretext to invade other states under the guise of protecting enclaves of people who speak “our” language. Germans come to mind. Today it's the Russians. Yet, at the same time they deny the nation's imprimatur to immigrants who learn and use the mother tongue of the nation.
Geography. As though a mountain range or a river or some such, can define or protect a nation. Human populations have been on the move from the very beginning, even before we destroyed the Neanderthal, the Denisovan, or any other progenitor of our species. That movement is tracked in our DNA and the traces of both of our human cousins are evident in our genes. All of us.
Race. There is no pure race. The evidence is very clear. Not a single pure population has ever been identified, no matter how far back into the ethereal mist one goes. People have been cross pollinating from the get-go. Not always by choice; but circumstance rules. It is what it is.
Religion and ideology. It is really, really hard to separate these two. My good friend Wayne King defines a fanatic as "someone who redoubles their effort once they lose sight of the goal."
Marcel Theroux, in Far North writes "Strange how it is that men never act crueler than when they're fighting for the sake of an idea. We've been killing since Cain over who stands closer to God," Or to Lenin or to Hitler or to Mao... fill in the tyrant of your choice. Jefferson Davis? Lincoln?
Shared history. The least likely to start a nation, but it can sustain one. That is, until its population rejects the building blocks that support the ground floors. In this nation we find ourselves with a young population that only sees the weakness of the men who created it. Their strengths are obscured or obviated as never having existed, or being unnecessary, in the first instance.
It does not matter if one agrees or disagrees with the proposition. What matters is the net effect, once the view becomes predominant. The nation only exists on paper then. If it does not exist in the heart, it does not in fact exist. It is a fiction that we keep telling ourselves. Sadly, just a fairytale, our epoch’s Beowulf or the Viking sagas or the story of Roland and Charlemagne. Just fables to share that do not define or sustain us. The story of the nation ceases to be held up to us as something to revere and honor. It stops offering a shared future worth fighting for or investing with hope.
Sadly, we may be at the juncture where our national reality becomes incoherent. Where the whole is no longer greater than the sum of its constituent fragments. Where we no longer have the synergy of nationhood. We are not alone. This fermentation is a worldwide phenomenon. A great reshuffling may be taking place. Our current President has it right: we are in transition. Maybe the whole world is, too. To what we do not know. A watershed is the worst place to stand when predicting the future course of a river. Things are and will continue to upset the world’s apple cart. There are no predicting outcomes for the world or for our nation.
One thing I believe is true: history is not teleological. Nations rise and fall based on the choices that they make in real-time. We are not tethered to the past nor are we reliant on soothsayers. We make our future. Let us hope that the idea of a free people deciding their own course unencumbered by race, religion, language and all the other divisive things that people use to divide us, will prevail. It may be an apocryphal story about Ben Franklin emerging from the constitutional convention where he is hailed by Elizabeth Powell. She inquires of Franklin, "What have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" Franklin's famous reply, "A republic madam; if you can keep it."
It is up to us to make the choice. It does not matter if your first language is Hindi, Spanish or Persian. It does not matter where you came from before stepping onto these American shores. It does not matter if you have been oppressed here or there. All that matters is the idea that a free people can collectively chart their own course. A republic - if you can keep it.
Otherwise: fuck it. Let's get barbarian, like the Vandals, the Lombards or the Franks. Let us get to the fighting . . . over the scraps. Let's move on to our new reality and change the streaming service.
