We Can’t Talk About America
Medina is situated west of Akron and south of Cleveland in the northeast part of Ohio, a state that did not fight for the Confederacy. It’s three hundred miles from the southern border of Kentucky or West Virginia, the dividing line between Blue and Grey during the Civil War. I lived on the outskirts of town for a decade, from third grade until after graduating high school, and again for a strange transitional year as an adult. I never felt very comfortable here, but I don’t feel very comfortable most places, and it was home. I am back, temporarily, long enough to drive through town on a main drag, near the cemetery where friends of mine were buried, and past a house prominently flying an American flag and a Confederate flag on two separate poles out front.
Medina’s population is around 26,000, a lot more than when my family moved here in the 80s but holding steady these days. The town is over 90% white, and is the seat of a county that is even whiter, 96.1% according to the 2010 census. It’s not the regressive monolith that the media likes to present about “fly-over” states, but that electorate does vote overwhelmingly conservative. My political affiliation in senior high was that I hated politics, which mostly meant that I was an oblivious asshole who had the luxury of ignoring them. At best I was a lukewarm liberal, but by local standards that made me a bleeding-heart, and I spent at least one social studies period being yelled at by a room of classmates because I didn’t think flag burning should be illegal.
The majority of Medina County, population 178,000 or so, has voted Republican in 13 straight Presidential elections, since last favoring a Democratic candidate in Lyndon Johnson over Barry Goldwater in 1964. In 2016 they chose Donald Trump — a sociopathic nepotism case who became a public persona while running a belligerently racist business and just got more racist from there; who has been accused of serial sexual harassment and worse; and whose most prominent qualification was unintentionally playing the villain on a reality TV show — in a landslide. Trump captured 60.0% of the vote to Hillary Clinton’s 35.2%. Medina is not particularly unique, and there are cities and counties like this all over the country with similar leanings. And, yes, even in the North, especially since its resurgence the middle of the 1900’s as a rejection of the growing civil rights movement, there is the occasional Southern Cross.
Trump rode a wave of nationalist rhetoric and fascist rage that the Republican party has slightly more subtly been building for decades. Despite the best efforts of conservatism’s Civility And Decorum wing to distance themselves from the uncouth bluster, Trump is the apotheosis of their ideology. Much of his platform is in lock-step with the standard right wing playlist, just with the quiet parts yelled at a deranged volume. (And in our entrenched two-party system, the policies of the effectively center-right Third Way Democrats are more similar than most liberals are comfortable admitting.) Republican candidates had enthusiastic things to say about the future of Making America Great Again and swept the entire 2016 Medina County ballot. In this community, as in many others, the people flying the flag of an insurgency that killed hundreds of thousands in an effort to maintain white supremacist chattel slavery will probably not be shunned.
This is not to single out Medina, as the country as a whole is plagued by systemic problems. They trace back to before it was declared the United States of America and founded on land ripped from millions of murdered indigenous people by a group of exclusively white men, nearly half of whom owned slaves. These problems have never remotely been reckoned with. The fact that those statements are seen by a substantial number of Americans as “controversial” and not as “the basic, indisputable reality of our history” makes actually addressing any of these issues daunting as hell.
America is completely unequipped to talk about America. This is not a dysfunction unique to this country, but it’s magnified by the audacious degree of our crimes and our disturbing ethos of American Exceptionalism. In 1967, precious little had changed since our founding, and Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “Beyond Vietnam” address calling the US government the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” A year later he was assassinated. Precious little has changed since he was killed, and given our advanced ability to devastate ecosystems, trifle with atomic forces, and commoditize absolutely everything for the benefit of a handful of oligarchs, things feel as apocalyptic as ever.
Entirely too much time is already dedicated to dunking on bad tweets from pundits, so my apologies for this, but here is a thing that Matthew Yglesias of Vox had to say recently.
What he was talking about was “racism,” and the understanding that racism is not just when a specific person actively oppresses another specific person and announces that they did it explicitly because of the color of their skin. Racism is, more importantly, also something structural and tied to the practicalities of power. This is a very bad tweet, for a lot of reasons, but it accidentally strikes at a deeper truth. At even a simplistic, 101 level of comprehension — a level that is not remotely avant garde — many people in this country do not grasp America’s most obvious flaws. They do not comprehend what it means that we are still arguing about “Heritage, not hate,” well north of the Mason-Dixon line, let alone that The Stars and Stripes itself can also very rightly be seen as a symbol of oppression.
If you can look at the empirical history of the United States, at the systemic inequity, genocidal imperialism, and gluttonous avarice, and say that you don’t believe those problems exist, then where do we even start? Worse, what if you say you don’t care, or that you are glad that those things are features and not defects? If your baseline position, ingrained through a lifetime of conditioning and flying in the face of all readily available information, is that the bombs we are dropping worldwide are righteous? That our law enforcement, judicial system, and prison industrial complex are just? That a fantasy utopian meritocracy and benevolent market forces correctly dictate that our labor should benefit a handful of corporate emperors? That it is normal in the most medically-advanced era of one of the richest empires ever for people to be begging for basic health care and dying when they can’t get it? That racism, sexism, and the hate experienced by countless other marginalized groups were bad, sure, but we eradicated them in the olden days and everyone is just whining now? It’s hard to know where to go from there.
One of the side effects of the digital age is that the torrent of reminders that this is status quo for the Greatest Country On Earth never stops. Here is the richest man in the history of the world, in a nation where people are homeless and starving, where some cities don’t have clean water or power, saying that he has too much money to spend on anything but fucking around with space travel. Here is the US Department of Defense enthusiastically (!) remembering when we killed 1/5th of the population of North Korea. Here is one of our supposedly progressive politicians suggesting that the solution to racist child-prisons is racist child-prisons with better administrative oversight. Here is a news anchor on a major cable network jumping right past dog whistles into straight white supremacist immigration talking points. Here are the barely coherent ramblings of the extremely threatening man that Medina, and all of us, as a nation, helped elect President of the United States.
In this particular cycle, we’re arguing about whether or not Alex Jones, a hateful and dangerous conspiracy grifter who would have been rejected as the snake oil salesman in Pete’s Dragon for being “too much,” should be banned from various social media platforms. The details of what constitutes free speech or hate speech, and whether or not this creates a slippery slope to censorship are fine to debate in theory, but we generally don’t do so in good faith or reasonable context anyway, and even that obscures something else. We’ve given a handful of un-elected, largely reactionary gazillionaires the power to make those decisions on a whim, and for the most part they are siding with other reactionaries. Questioning that would require questioning our current stage of capitalism, which is beyond reproach. We also wouldn’t be talking about this at all if a large number of Americans, including the President of the United States, who told Jones “Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down,” while appearing on his show, didn’t think Alex Jones had important things to say.
This situation is certainly intractable. Whether or not it is hopeless remains to be seen. Given that the majority of us will still have to wake up tomorrow, and more than likely, the day after that, nihilism seems like a beyond lazy way out. As always, there are people fighting to make things better, and there are activists and candidates addressing topics like confronting white supremacy and providing universal health care that seem worth being optimistic about. Even when they are defanged or co-opted, people are using words like “socialism” in ways I didn’t think were possible even a few years ago. I have to believe things can improve, and that we’ve got no choice but to try, regardless. But it goes well beyond one election, or one flag in one town, and it all hinges on a lot more Americans being willing to face up to the breadth of what America is and has been. For the last two and a half centuries, the thought of that has been too avant garde.
I’m a freelance writer who has appeared at Deadspin, Kotaku, Vice Sports, and The Classical. I am available to write weird stuff for you for money.
Email: HugeMantis @ gmail.com | Twitter: @ HugeMantis
