Like a leaf clings
To the tree
Oh my darling,
Cling to me
For we're like creatures
In the wind
And wild is the wind
Wild is the wind— “Wild is the Wind” (Nina Simone; David Bowie)
I was born in the august days of the American Empire, in those strange long-and-yet-short years as the Soviet Union began its remarkable and precipitous decline. Their tanks would soon cross over the Amu Darya River for the last time, out of that land that forever refuses foreign conquest, out of their occupation of Afghanistan, north over the water and into the sheltering arms of Uzbekistan. It was a moment. They knew it; we knew it. At some point, it had become inevitable, a foregone conclusion, but it still had to happen all the same. They would end, they determined, with the one grace left to all dying empires: style.
The Soviet commander, Gen. Boris V. Gromov, walked alone behind the last armored column as it rumbled across and out of the country. He then declared that Russia was done with Afghanistan.
“That’s it,” General Gromov told a television crew. “Not one Soviet soldier or officer is behind my back.”
The Red Army withdrew ceremonially.
The armored vehicles rolled across over the roiling, glacier-fed river slowly and precisely, as if in a parade. On the Uzbek side, women met the soldiers with the traditional greeting of bread and salt. Soldiers were given wristwatches for their service. Television cameras filmed. (via)
And so I would come of age into a very different world than my own Baby Boomer parents, whose lives, like the lives of all American Boomers, had been entirely conducted against a backdrop of the Cold War against the Soviets, who had trained, since they were yea high, in duck-and-cover against the risk of a nuclear attack. When I was in kindergarten, one day a gaggle of high school seniors came to visit our classroom. I still recall the inner awe I felt as I beheld them from my spot on the carpet: they were eighteen years old; it scarcely seemed believable. A smiling stylish brunette among them caught my eye, with thick, well-groomed brows that framed her Audrey Hepburn-esque eyes. She wore overalls, underneath which was an immaculate white turtleneck and on her feet a set of chunky, pristine white sneakers to match. Her name was Brooke, and I was immediately possessed by a desire to be her when I grew up. But even my own upbringing would have been very different from hers; with the thirteen years and change between us, she would be a member of that thin, lonely generation, a Gen Xer, and would have had more passing familiarity with cultural anxiety about nuclear holocaust, about the Cold War. No, unlike my parents, unlike my elder muse, I would be a Millennial, arriving instead under happy stars, and nurtured with the conception that it was simply destiny that I, along with the teeming throngs of my cohorts, would march victorious into the advent of the next thousand years, which already seemed to gleam glorious and resplendent off in the distance.
Soon after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan came another historic moment, when, on the night of November 9, 1989, the citizens of the thinly-veiled Soviet puppet state that was the Deutsche Demokratische Republik seized on a chance confusion to assemble en masse at the Berlin Wall, which had separated them by force from their much wealthier and liberalized West German countrymen since 1961. None of the guards chose to open fire on the large crowd, allowing them the opportunity to climb the wall, where they were welcomed with open arms by a crowd of West Germans, where the first flames of the the Wiedervereinigung of Germany were kindled in shouts, grins, and hugs:
The Wall that symbolized the Iron Curtain which demarcated the West from Soviet Russia had been vanquished, not at all by bombs, and partially by bureaucratic error, but largely by the collective, unspoken felt sense that the imperial and even national ambitions of the Soviet experiment had entered into its latter days. On Earth as it is in Heaven, or as the charismatic Christian might put it: “You’ll see it first with your spiritual eyes before it comes to pass in the natural.” The Wall had become a formality, an afterthought like the exit from Afghanistan, a physical barrier that no longer agreed with the dimming spiritual power of the Soviet Union. And so it no longer made sense to enforce it.
Four decades before, my grandfather had seen the wall before it was a Wall, when Stalin ordered a blockade of Berlin in 1948, cutting off more than two million people from the West. In the U.S. Army Air Force, my grandfather flew his B-52 in the Berlin Airlift, even flying alongside the famous Candy Bomber, whose story he told to me in my childhood, a grin on his face, knowing my great affection for chocolate would endear me to receiving the story well — how his compatriot “Hal” Halverson, “Uncle Wiggly Wings”, had launched his own little project, Operation Vittles, to drop candy for the children of Berlin behind the blockade:
News of Operation “Little” Vittles soon reached the U.S., which sprung children and candymakers of every kind into action to contribute candy to the mission. From there, the rest is history. By the end of the Berlin Airlift in September 1949, American pilots dropped more than 250,000 parachutes and 23 tons of candy to Berlin children.
Col. Halvorsen remembers, “how grateful they [children] were to look up at the sky and see parachutes with fresh HERSHEY’S candy bars coming to them from the airplane over their head. It was a wonderful feeling to have that kind of support from The Hershey Company.” Hal concludes, “The small things you do turn into great things.” (via)
Reflecting on it years later, I wondered on one hand, if it was perhaps a kind of unspoken atonement for the Allied bombardment of Dresden, but on the other hand I saw — and still see — in Operation Vittles what I loved the most about America: we will bomb you with chocolate; we will conquer you with excess, and with lavishness; we will allure you in ways you did not know you could be allured and you will melt into our waiting arms, unable to resist what we have to offer.
I am a child of the Scots-Irish, with a twist of French Huguenot, making me always and always stubborn and rebellious, but my adoption as a spiritual child of the Wall makes me a contemplative. I cannot help but feel that one bookend of my life is framed by the collapse of the Soviet Union, her retreat from Afghanistan, the fall of the Berlin Wall and, most of all, the corresponding rise in American hegemony over the globe. And so when various adults said to me in my upbringing, You can do whatever you want — the world is your oyster, you know, they meant it with all their hearts, and yes, I knew.
The scholars say no one in the twilight days of Rome really understood that it was ending even as it did, and that the whole arc of rise, rule, and recess only becomes more readily apparent at some distance of history. Each generation is only afforded a few decades of the mental competency to fully apprehend where they stand in the grand scheme of things, especially to their own political power — which is always a touchy thing to discuss, and no one ever likes discussing it honestly because it is all tangled up with their own personal power — so it would make sense that just one generation, on its own, or even a few together, can’t quite catch the slightly changing light, the shifting shadows, the slightly different angle of the sun, and it is only at a much broader view that one is capable of seeing the full arc of a day rising and ending into night.
When I was a little girl, we moved, and the first thing I wanted to do when we parked our U-haul in the driveway of the new house, before I even stepped a toe into the new house, was to explore the new neighborhood. With my pink bike fished out of the back of the moving van, I was told I could go as far as the light post at the end of the block, and there I stopped, grinning to myself, excited for the adventure of being in a new place, of doing something different. A decade later, I would find myself in the yard of a neighbor, one similar evening, just less than even a tenth of a mile from where I had stopped on my bike that first day. So close, and yet — so far…
The across-the-street-and-change neighbors were a married couple. She bred show dogs, so she was always ripe for visits from the neighborhood kids when she had a new litter of puppies out and about. (These dogs, by the way, were responsible for the involuntary bunnyslaughter of my playmate’s long-eared rabbit some years earlier, who escaped during a cleaning of his cage into the next yard to find the honeyed gold eyes of six Shetland Sheepdogs staring curiously in his direction. Apparently, not a strand of his gray-brown fur was touched: Hoppy, we were told, died of fright alone.)
That latter evening, I was in their front yard, having stopped by to play with the latest batch of puppies as the couple looked on. The husband was a pastor in some Pentecostal-ish denomination. His silver hair was cut and swept in that very particular way, exactly like Robert Morris — all male Southern pastors seem to see the same barber — but he had these aviator-style glasses that suggested that he had been cool, once. School had just started. He asked me what grade I was in now, as I snuggled with a wriggly little ball of white-and-brown fur against my chest. “Tenth,” I responded. “Just a couple of more years before I can finally get out of here.” He gave me the slightest frown and said, “Oh, don’t wish your life away.” The pastor’s remark struck me in some way, and I studied him more closely to gauge his face. His eyes were staring off into the distance, his silhouette set against a pink-gold sky of the setting sun.
Perhaps the pastor was right. Perhaps I should not have wished away so much my life in the sunlit years of the empire.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?— W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”
A YouTuber I came across recently, another American Millennial female, said, “We used to have something called a ‘middle class’, and it was cool.” It was a safe, achingly dull life in many ways — in the suburbs I, I learned to drive… The girl down the street, who became my playmate by virtue of being of the same sex and being within both spitting distance of both my age and my house, and I would imitate Mary-Kate and Ashley Olson’s mystery series which were popular among our set at the time. We spent more than one evening on several different corners around the neighborhood, holding up signs fashioned out of copy paper we’d liberated from her dad’s home office, scrawled with black Crayola marker which read that we would “solve any crime by dinner time”, just like the slogan of our icons. No one ever took us up on the offer: presumably there were no crimes left to solve. We rode our bikes until the seats fell off; the impish neighborhood boys terrified us with stories of red-eyed wolves in the woods behind us. I laced up my shiny white roller skates with tie-dye rainbow curly laces and she and I raced each other down the nearly-always-empty street as fast as we could fly.
We were better off than our Boomer parents, we knew, because they constantly told us, “When I was your age, I didn’t get this many presents for Christmas,” that “this many” always accompanied with a wide gesture of the arm at the veritable swath of toys now strewn across the living room. It was an age of Toys ‘R Us, and ungodly amounts of toy advertising in commercials of all the shows we’d watch on Nickelodeon as we chomped down Pringles and Dunkaroos washed down with Coke. A little bit of excess was the norm, and by all trends this was expected to continue. The Boomers too knew that they themselves had grown up far wealthier than their own parents, who had known depression and war. They had eaten scraps, scrimped and saved and scraped their way through something just above poverty if they were lucky, yet their children would know the manifold luxuries of giant Buicks built like tanks, thick, creamy milkshakes at the neon-lit diner, dress shoes and poodle skirts. The Millennials grew up wealthier than even that.
There is a way one person can at least proffer some information about the course of empire, even from their own limited perspective. The Englishman George Orwell (yes, by the government name Eric Blair) was born almost right at the turn of the 20th century, in 1903, in an outpost of the British Empire in India, near Nepal. (His father, interestingly, was a drug dealer, having worked for the British Opium Department to sell opium to China.) When Orwell was born, Queen Victoria, the late Empress of India, had just passed, leaving the throne to her oldest son, Edward VII. Orwell’s mother took him back home to England shortly after, and he was functionally raised at boarding school there as was typical for the time. Shortly after the Second World War, by which time George VI was on the throne, having assumed it after the infamous abdication of his brother to marry a divorcee, and the greatest empire since Rome, the Empire upon which the sun had never set, had all but been dismantled and disintegrated, Orwell wrote his essay Such, Such Were the Joys:
“Looking back, it is astonishing how intimately, intelligently snobbish we all were, how knowledgeable about names and addresses, how swift to detect small differences in accents and manners and the cut of clothes. There were some boys who seemed to drip money from their pores even in the bleak misery of the middle of a winter term. At the beginning and end of the term, especially, there was naпvely snobbish chatter about Switzerland, and Scotland with its ghillies and grouse moors, and ‘my uncle's yacht’, and ‘our place in the country’. And ‘my pony’ and ‘my pater's touring car’. There never was, I suppose, in the history of the world a time when the sheer vulgar fatness of wealth, without any kind of aristocratic elegance to redeem it, was so obtrusive as in those years before 1914. It was the age when crazy millionaires in curly top-hats and lavender waistcoats gave champagne parties in rococo house-boats on the Thames, the age of diabolo and hobble skirts, the age of the ‘knut’ in his grey bowler and cut-away coat, the age of The Merry Widow, Saki's novels, Peter Pan and Where the Rainbow Ends, the age when people talked about chocs and cigs and ripping and topping and heavenly, when they went for divvy week-ends at Brighton and had scrumptious teas at the Troc. From the whole decade before 1914 there seems to breathe forth a smell of the more vulgar, un-grown-up kind of luxury, a smell of brilliantine and crème-de-menthe and soft-centred chocolates — an atmosphere, as it were, of eating everlasting strawberry ices on green lawns to the tune of the Eton Boating Song. The extraordinary thing was the way in which everyone took it for granted that his oozing, bulging wealth of the English upper and upper-middle classes would last for ever, and was part of the order of things. After 1918 it was never quite the same again.”
I was far from the actual events of September 11, in first period math class, which was taught by a middle-aged Pentecostal woman who had never married, and had the stern, Germanic personality only a few generations removed from the Alsace-Lorraine. The principal came on the intercom to tell us all, and there went the rest of the day. Between classes, I went into the absolutely revolting middle school girls’ bathroom. I found a spot where the sunlight from the high window hit the floor, and there I knelt and prayed, alone. I’m not sure what I prayed for, but it seemed like a time to pray. I distinctly felt, though, that everything had changed.
After that, I became incredibly impressed by neo-conservatism. I went home and downloaded as my computer background an illustration of the bald eagle shedding a tear over the Towers:
I crocheted American flag blankets while listening to President George W. Bush on the TV, discussing the next steps forward for the country: war. It made sense. In my very juvenile mind, I had pieced together an understanding of the world something like this: “People in the Middle East hurt us because they are jealous of us, because we have nice things and are successful. We have nice things and are successful because of the Enlightenment and democracy, which they never got. If the U.S. just bombs them enough, they will suddenly come to an innate understanding of the principles of Du contrat social and from there on, all will be well.” I genuinely believed that the moment “we” could depose some of these dictators — although, I was not sure who, exactly, we should depose, and I hadn’t really thought through at the time all the complicated web of networks between the various Middle Eastern countries — and some actual elections took place, that we’d be done. When I read in the newspaper in 2004 that Afghanistan had held its first election in almost 10 years, I beamed with pride at the success of the U.S. operation. They were clearly now well on their way to becoming a wealthy liberal democracy, and perhaps in one day in college I would tour Kabul.
I ended up in Germany instead, talking one day to a blonde-blue-eyed 20-year-old man about his opinion of America. He’d been, and I was eager to hear his observations and his perspective, even though he was quite full of himself — Europeans, I love them, but they do enjoy explaining things to Americans in the most condescending way imaginable, and I was no exception. “America is like Disneyworld,” he droned pretentiously, “It all looks very nice on the surface, but nothing means anything.” But didn’t René Girard say, “More than ever, I am convinced that history has meaning - and that its meaning is terrifying” ? Is meaning always so necessary, asks the American to the European? Certainly we don’t want to descend into Dadaism, but surely neither do we need to be so obsessed with things that have meaning? Can’t we build things that are utterly fake, where no one ever died, where nothing interesting ever really happened, and thus, there was no meaning? Meaning is not necessarily an unmitigated good.
When I was maybe nine or ten, I whiled away one long humid summer afternoon, the kind of tedious afternoon where minutes passed like hours, by slowly reading through the titles on my father’s bookshelf. I inched step by step across, my head crooked over my shoulder to see the spines at the right angle, every footfall I took an event in and of itself that marked off the interminable time. One particular title made me freeze as I read it, my throat seizing up. THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN, it declared. Now, at the age of nine, even as overtly precocious and well-read as I was then, I was still unfamiliar with the thesis laid out therein by Francis Fukuyama, and so it seemed unquestionably the case that this book was about the apocalypse and the end of the world, because if the supposition was that history had ended and the last person to ever exist had come to be, then it was certainly about a terrifying abyss of where we would all collectively but separately experience a kind of endless nothingness. I scurried on and tried to forget the idea.
As incorrect as my conceit was of Mr. Fukuyama’s book, I am, even as a Catholic, broadly sympathetic to those on the center-left who long for a return to the secular liberalism of the 1980s and 1990s, and want to see a telos for the whole world that looks something like the America of 1995, maybe plus or minus a few things. I loved it, and I crave it too because it was my own childhood, and it worked really, really well. However, it only worked really well until it didn’t, and why is a post for another time. But believing that Westernized secular liberal democracies is the natural end-all-be-all at the end of history is no different than believing that we’re just one communist revolution away from utopia and peace for all. Both are fictional political conceits fit only for terminally online youths and cloistered academics who don’t eat properly and never get any vitamin D from the sun. They are not political realities, and so it is not helpful to think of them that way.
By 2021, I had left the Overton window of political discourse, the Overton building even, and found myself walking about those dark woods that surround the nice, genteel, refined city of political discourse, with its TV screens full of Fox News, CNN, and MNSBC, its commentators writing in the Federalist, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Washington Examiner. My work is niche enough that readers will likely know what I mean: the kind of dark woods where The Artist Formerly Known As Kanye broods, alongside Cornel West, Marianne Williamson, and occasionally a wide-eyed forever-smiling blonde-haired agorist sweeps by offering wildflowers and a Mason jar glass full of some strangely sweet-smelling liquid. For those who don’t know, you’d be surprised what kind of strange bedfellows socialize with each other for wont of many other options. Truly, the dark woods is a place where the lion lays down with the lamb.
Here, anarchism became appealing — Christian anarchism specifically, which is a nice kind of anarchism, as opposed to the outright destructive, ripping-things-sort-of-anarchism, which is too unchill to be my vibe. (For the unfamiliar, Jacques Ellul’s short but punchy Anarchy and Christianity is a good reference.) Perhaps I could exist respectfully in society, paying my taxes, never littering, following the speed limit, and bringing new mothers an armful of hot food and a listening ear. I could contribute socially, but I didn’t need to necessarily participate directly in the political system. I knew my goal, my desired society: something like the Kingdom of Heaven. How to get there, though?
So many people I knew, however, were essentially nationalists, and the collective weight of their judgement — nationalists do not appreciate anarchism, let me tell you, even in its cutesy, non-Antifa, Christianized form — led me to think that perhaps I hadn’t given nationalism a fair shake as a concept before running headlong into that beautiful wildflower-filled sunlit meadow that is anarchism. To this end, I picked up Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism, which I found very unpersuasive. I later learned that this book was actually on Peter Thiel’s reading list for his 2019 Stanford seminar, although I am not quite sure why beyond the arguments either that the number of books arguing for nationalism seem to be quite few, and this is the best overall of a small lot, or that Dr. Hazony makes the best case that can be made for nationalism, and that best case I still find quite weak. Perhaps I will do a broader review, as there are many nits I have with the book, but for now a high-level look. The book partially, if not substantially, argues the case for nationalism by positioning it against what he sees as the only two alternatives of anarchism and imperialism, neither of which he treats on their own terms or even fairly at all.
At the time I read it, I was paying much more close attention to his rather inchoate conception of anarchism, which did not address some of the most important anarchist thinkers at all, or touch to all the different forms of anarchism that there are which might change the flavor of his argument as to why nationalism still remains preferable. But recently, I’ve realized that, as thinly as he treats anarchism, he treats imperialism far worse.
In the recent U.S. political past, nationalism became heavily associated with President Donald Trump and the “Make America Great Again” or “MAGA” movement, which seems to have since largely become rebranded into the “America First” movement. Both appellations implicitly assume that America is, at present, neither first nor great. The U.S. flag was practically President Trump’s campaign yard sign, and at some point, to simply fly an American flag — even as an American citizen — was to signal that you might be a Trump supporter, a “MAGAt”. But later, after the Trump presidency, some flags became in use political discourse that were not American flags, or even flags of a cause, but rather flags of a foreign country, largely, for the time being, that of Ukraine as it asserted its national sovereignty against the invasion of Russia. Those on the more Trump-supporting right criticize the use of the Ukraine flag and Ukraine-related discourse: for example, Trump insider U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene told 60 Minutes that “Ukraine is not the 51st state.”
Flag discourse does not surprise the symbolic thinker: we are hurtling toward the end of things much faster than we understand, and that will necessitate a final accounting of everything. A flag is nothing more than an extension of the mark of Cain, a kind of technology (as I’ve written about before in more depth here) which allows for one to not only identify oneself but also to identify what one is not. An ethnically Chinese woman wanted to go to the beach in Miami in the wake of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, and she stuck in the sand with her the flag of China, presumably so that she could be free from anger and harassment by American passersby who might mistake her for a Japanese. The flag marked her as what she was, but most importantly for her purposes of simply wanting to enjoy a day at the beach, the flag marked her as what she was not: Japanese.
One is reminded of the British comedian Eddie Izzard’s famous sketch from Dress to Kill, “Do you have a flag?”. In it, he mocks the British Empire:
“We stole countries with the cunning use of flags. Just sail around the world and stick a flag in it.
‘I claim India for Britain!’
‘No, you can't claim us. We live here; there’s five hundred million of us.’
‘Do you have a flag?’
‘We don't need a bloody flag when it’s our country, you bastard!’
‘No flag, no country. Can't have one; that's the rules that I've just made up and I'm … backing it up with this gun that was lent from the National Rifle Association.’”
But Mr. Izzard’s point is actually quite true: what is not marked off, not differentiated, not given its own distinct identity, particularly if it is structurally somehow weaker, risks being gobbled up by something that is some sort of cohesive identity. The cover of Dr. Hazony’s book itself is covered in various flags, and so flag discourse and nationalism are perceived as intrinsically linked.
Flag discourse is not exclusively the property of nationalism, however. Another way to understand flag discourse, which is more commonplace in America, is to understand it in more moral terms: that is, the purpose of flag discourse with respect to a foreign country or territory, at the highest levels of government all the way down, is to signal a moral affiliation, moral support, to make it clear which side of a conflict one finds herself on, and presumably so to signal to others and the government itself to which country the U.S. government should openly support. The purpose of the U.S. government’s role in this lens is to advance the interests of the cause that it seen as more moral. Here, flag discourse serves as another kind of dual marking: here is the cause that I am advancing (and what “we” as a society should be advancing), but there is a clear absence in the cause that I am not advancing. I have one flag that is present, but another is conspicuously absent.
That isn’t necessarily an incorrect lens, and it is functional in most cases, but I might suggest another lens which might seem strange to at least a few American nationalists, and that is, to see an American politician or prominent place inside the U.S. wear or hoist up a foreign country’s flag is not necessarily a rejection of America at all. It is, though, a rejection of the concept of America as a nation among nations in favor of the concept of America as an empire. In this frame, America has been forced to improve on the ways of its immediate predecessor that Mr. Izzard comically observed above, as in a more thoroughly explored world flags already predominate, and people have simply caught on. Therefore, to take on the flag of a foreign country is to possess it in the empire itself — that is, the principality of the other country is becoming consumed by the empire and physically and spiritually being taken into the lands that currently unequivocally belong to the U.S. empire. To fly the flag of a foreign country within the U.S., in this lens, is no different than someone else who lives outside your home putting up a photo of you on their walls at their home. It is a kind of taking possession of a particular identity into another domain. These places that require the greatest attention, in terms of flag discourse, will inevitably be at the margins of the farthest possible reach of the U.S.’s influence, where the fight for control with other rival empires is the most contentious. In this lens, it would be absolutely nonsensical for any U.S. politician or prominent place to wear or to fly the flag of Russia as opposed to Ukraine, because the continuous blob that we can readily recognize as something like “Russia” throughout history has been an imperial power of one sort or another since God was a child. But with respect to places like Ukraine, smaller, more localized principalities capable of forming their own identities differentiated from their former imperial power, and thereby receiving their own “mark”, it makes complete sense for the U.S. Empire to support the peeling off of a principality from a rival imperial power, and, under the guise of nationalism, support the expansion of its own imperial influence. Russia does not seem to understand flag discourse in the age after the British Empire, and likely would have fared better for its own stated goals in promoting a nationalist movement within the Donbas to separate from Ukraine.
I make no moral judgement on imperialism here. It’s a word that is a bit tarnished with negative undertones in American political conversation, but I am not sure that such connotations have been all that well thought out, particularly with regard to America. Certainly, in The Virtue of Nationalism, Dr. Hazony implicitly assumes that imperialist powers are, by default, totalitarian and oppressive (and he also paints the American project in strongly nationalist terms, which I obviously question) but it seems to me that a more common arrangement of empires throughout history has actually been imperial (and, granted, oppressive at times) at scale, but anarchistic in locality — two paradigms he keeps entirely separate from each other in his book. But the virtue of empires, I might tease, is that they’re quite often busy doing other things, leaving more room for anarchistic, more localized experimentation in the particularities. From a nationalist perspective, one might point to the fact that the U.S. government and American media slow-walked toward the catastrophic public health crisis in the capital city of Mississippi, a U.S. state since 1817, which cannot get out from under its troubled water system that resulted in a boil water notice for an entire month last year, is an issue, but from an imperialist perspective, it makes more sense for the U.S. government to spend its time and energy tending to those parts of the empire that are not already secured. Not a single person in Washington is worried that Mississippi will secede from the U.S. and become an outpost of Russia. In that frame, it is better for the areas already firmly established as belonging to the empire to understand themselves as somewhat left to their own devices absent doing anything that would cause the empire to have egg on its face, which will certainly result in attention, and not the positive kind. Empires have a style and a reputation to keep up.
Now, the counterargument to the imperial understanding of these United States, one that American nationalists generally explicitly or implicitly advance, is that the imperial project has become too over-extended at the expense of failing to maintain some sensible cohesive order in the empire’s main locus of power, and that if the American Empire does not retrench into a more nationalist project, the whole thing will come collapsing down like a house of cards. No empire yet has lasted forever, and we would do well to remember that, which is not a call to defeatism but to thoughtfulness.
I felt the alarm of the American nationalists when I listened to an interview that President Biden gave recently. His interlocutor asked, “Are the wars in Israel and Ukraine more than the United States can take on at the same time?” He responded, “No. We're the United States of America for God's sake, the most powerful nation in the history-- not in the world, in the history of the world. The history of the world,” he said again, accompanied by a flutter of eye blinking. “We can take care of both of these and still maintain our overall international defense.” I froze in my chair. I was now a Roman woman, suddenly stopped at my doorstep by some unknown outside force, perhaps a warning carried on the chill of the wind, filled with the sudden urge to rub at the iron keys that hung around my waist for some sense of comfort, surety, safety. The aged Emperor, the lifelong statesman, doing the fast eye blink amid a normal, even understated, blink rate at baseline: a telltale sign of deception. We may not have the capacity, I realized, and he perhaps well knows it. But one can hardly fault him. What could he say otherwise? “The Empire is coming to an end, and there is no certainty as to what comes next?” He spoke to the country like one speaks to an affected dementia patient, turning away to busy themselves with a bag as they answer the question they’ve answered hundreds of times before: No, John’s not here; he’ll be back soon, don’t worry. We allow such soothing little lies.
So what am I to do, I ask myself constantly, especially as a believer in the Kingdom of Heaven above all? I have a friend who is a geneticist, and possesses the fun cocktail party trick of being able to tell, with just a few moment’s scrutiny, one’s ethnic makeup. One day I asked him to try this on me, having never revealed anything about my background to him. I sat before him as he scrutinized me; I could see the neutral expression on my face I gave for his study reflected in his glasses as his eyes squinted behind them. Within moments he announced his determination: “You look…. 100% American. Like if someone asked me what an American woman looked like, your face would be it…. Am I right?” Outwardly, I grinned and nodded, and explained my background, but inwardly I groaned, because couldn’t I have at least had even the flimsiest excuse to belong to another, less complicated country? I’d always admired the media portrayal of life as an Italian-American in New Jersey, and relished the fantasy. I’d have a giant mansion in the Mediterranean style, a husband who vaguely worked in real estate but whose actual source of income was never quite clear, and I’d spend my time shopping and gossiping with my second cousin and baking sprinkle cookies for Natale. When American politics got complicated, I’d throw my hands up and say, “Well, that’s just not how we did it in the old country,” before returning to rolling out my tagliatelle, as if I had any meaningful connection to the “old country” beyond a visit once every other year where I vastly overestimated my proficiency in Italian as I chatted with our family’s ancient nonnas over a postprandial glass of limoncello. But I would at least have some sense of cultural identity to keep me going, without participating much in any political system or spending much time thinking about it at all.
But Our Lord saw fit to knit me together an American through and through for a reason, and who am I to question that? One is reminded of the poetry of my fellow American, Walt Whitman, in A Song for Occupations:
Will you seek afar off? you surely come back at last,
In things best known to you finding the best, or as good as the
best,In folks nearest to you finding the sweetest, strongest, lovingest,
Happiness, knowledge, not in another place but this place, not for
another hour but this hour,Man in the first you see or touch, always in friend, brother,
nighest neighbor—woman in mother, sister, wife,The popular tastes and employments taking precedence in poems
or anywhere,You workwomen and workmen of these States having your own
divine and strong life,And all else giving place to men and women like you.
And so I am bound up together with the fate of America and have some duty of care to her, because she is my own — that I cannot deny — just as St. Peter became bound up with Rome the day he received the vision of the clean and unclean foods and stepped inside the house of the centurion Cornelius. Even given that, I’d still been tempted to petulantly reside, as I do, in my political no-man’s-land until I started listening more and more to the CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp. Dr. Karp has one of the most charismatic ways of speaking about the West that I have ever heard:
“The basis of our civilization, I believe, is that the West imposed technological superiority, and through that technological superiority, garnered the rule of law, human rights. […] For all the problems we have in the West, there are no other places where you can experience as little discrimination, as little bias, as little unfairness, as in Western countries. I’m not saying we’re perfect, but we’re the best imperfect society that has ever existed.”
I began to realize that much of the internal turmoil about American politics is really a dialogue (admittedly sometimes manifesting in more emotional terms than the word “dialogue” properly encompasses) over what is the West, and how can America embody that set of values. The questions, if anyone could actually articulate them more conceptually, are something like: is it the duty of a Western society tolerate intolerance? If there are parameters, what kind of intolerance is not to be tolerated? Can a liberal society accommodate anti-liberal speech that might undermine it? How can we both maintain the Christianized values that undergird liberal secularism without imposing religiously-tinged obligations on others, or is it preferable and more liberalized to assert no values at all? Is the definition of a Westernized society one is that is inclusive, or is it exclusive, and how so for both?
For all the time and energy Americans spend screaming at each other about politics, I think they actually share largely the same norms than they realize, and I believe a vast majority of Americans deeply love the West in the same way Dr. Karp does, even if they are not able to verbalize it as such, and want to see America as whatever kind of entity it is manifest some set of purely Western values, and at least part of the emotional tenor is a sense of deep concern for the continuation of the project. As much as I am an American, I am, as Dr. Karp made me realize, above all, by blood and by covenant, a Christ-haunted Westerner.
Did the Lord Jesus see us Westerners coming, did he see the sons of Rome expanding out further? Out on the mountaintop, did He have visions of the sails of our tall ships arriving into the New World, bearing our guns, germs, and steel? Did He see the explorers gathered together in the candlelight, poring over the parchment maps, muttering to each other in the excitement of shared discovery?
Did he know it was only through the long arc of time that we would begin to unravel the mystery He’d left for us as He gasped, dying on the Cross? That it would take time, so much time, too much time, but time enough — “I have come to set the world on fire,” the Anointed One said, and one imagines His teeth almost set on edge, “and oh how I wish it were already burning!” Did He weep in the Garden of Gethsemane for the long apocalypse, the burning of the spinster at the stake in Salem, the lynching of the black man in Tennessee? On the boat as the storm raged, did His own mind rage in sleep, at how we were imprisoned by the time-space continuum that keeps everything from happening all at once but also keeps everything from happening all at once! So history becomes necessary, and there is no end to it until all the revelations have been revealed, until that day when there are no secrets left.
At the very least, from that night He set foot in the residence of Pontius Pilate and talked with him of kingdoms and truth, Christ must have known the spirit He was breathing on the West, and perhaps gazed upon Pilate with those knowing eyes of a man who has already conquered simply with presence in the room alone. Ecce homo, Pontius Pilate said, the pagan Gentile governor, perhaps in some or total amazement at the Man before him, and from that moment the West was never the same. Some tradition holds that Pilate and his wife later converted to the nascent Jesusbewegung — the Coptic Orthodox Church reveres them as saints even today. His wife had had a dream; something caught him off guard as he spoke with Jesus, because sometimes the truth sneaks up at you from behind, with a knife to your throat. Rome had lived her lies, murdering innocent victims and dressing it up in stories for the victors, but that would all change now. Ecce homo, he said, and the West was seized from then on, captivated forever by the haunting imago Dei before its eyes just as Pilate before, the imprint of God Himself on the face of every human person. We would never wash His blood out, and like Lady Macbeth, would become more and more crazed by the truth of the Innocent Victim.
Maybe there is some magic left for America to continue the spirit of the Western project in some fashion. We had friends over for dinner, a husband-and-wife couple, sometime in that strange window where nuclear holocaust by the Russians seemed slightly less likely than it had in March 2022, but before the more recent impending feeling of a third world war. Still, it remained a strange and murky time. Over tacos the conversation turned to politics and the state-and-fate-of-it-all. The man has various projects relating to cryptocurrency and software I don’t even feign to understand, and so he is more tech culture-facing, but the idiosyncratic nature of being outside the typical American political discourse had given him that strange motley crew of friends whose disposition he reported.
“The trads are all depressed,” he said.
“About what?” I asked.
“America, the end of empire, you know,” he shrugged, looking up to make eye contact and check if I knew, and I nodded my understanding. He continued. “But I tell them, it’s not about the country, really. Something else will come out of this place, something different, something new and better.”
I smiled wryly, choosing to invoke in my response the Beatitudes so prized in our shared Catholicism. “You mean the crypto-anarchists will inherit the Earth?”
“Yes,” he grinned exuberantly. “Exactly.”
The West is not a particular empire, nation, or a country, though those entities can certainly inhabit her in some form or fashion. The West is a spirit, a state of mind, a kind of magic that floats out there somewhere in the ether, the best kind of magic, like the wind, you can’t capture it, but it will instead capture you if the fancy strikes. Then, once it burrows its way inside you, it never leaves. And so I will never mourn the West, because no matter the nations that come and go, the empires that rise and fall, the real West will never die. It is too charismatic; its enchanting light will shine eternally, drawing all peoples to it. And somewhere out there, I will always be the little girl on her pink bike, riding out as far as the light post, stopping to wonder what lies before me, eager for exploration, my face set to the wild winds that welcome and beckon me out further, deeper into the West.
Well, early in the morning, about the break of day
I ask the Lord, "Help me find the way,”
Help me find the way
To the promised land— Peter, Paul & Mary, “Early in the Morning” (YT)
this was a beautiful read Kristin