I pretty much have only yer average layman’s knowledge to the late 18th-century independence struggle, culminating in the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, but I’m sure the few facts I know are pretty correct.
I have long given up on dutifully swallowing the myth that good, true and honest colonial British subjects – as then they still were – rebelled because they did not want ‘taxation without representation’ or some such.
Similarly, I have long stopped believing, as we are intended and expected to do, that the aim of the rebellion was to promote ‘liberty for all and universal happiness’.
From where I sit, the essence of the rebellion was a power struggle between the landowners based in ‘the American colonies’ and those landowners sitting in their estates back in ‘the old country’.
The colonial British landowners simply wanted more of the action: and they finally got it and have not relinquished their grip one little bit since. As the French so pertinently say ‘plus ça change, c’est plus la même chose’.
The ordinary ‘colonial Brits’ – the indentured folk, the servants, the labouring classes, and the otherwise disadvantaged – felt they really didn’t have a dog in that particular fight: if you are at the end of the broom being swept willy-nilly this way and that, you really don’t give a flying fuck who is doing the sweeping, whether it is a rich Brit overseas or local colonial Brit.
And they were not too keen on risking their lives in an ‘independence’ fight from which they would not at all benefit. Hence the need for the, albeit, limited conscription the rebel leaders often felt was necessary to drum up fighting men.
Granted that all nations have national myths which they cherish beyond any possible reason: we Brits do (that the world envies us and our institutions), the French do (that they are a nation of intellectuals), the Germans do (that they know best, always) and you Americans do.
So it doesn’t matter whether or not I believe the United States genesis account. It doesn’t even matter whether or not it is true, completely false, partly true and partly false or anything in between.
Only one thing matters: that it is believed. The Roman satirical poet Marcus Valerius Martialis, known as Martial hit the nail on the head when he wrote ‘It is not he who forms idols in gold or marble that makes them gods, but he who kneels before them’.
And to this day Americans whether Democrat or Republican, gay or straight, old family or immigrant-descended kneel before the myth and therey thus make it ‘real’. Shit, even black Americans, at least those with ‘aspirations’, feel obliged to ‘take the knee’ and salute the flag in spite of the unspeakable horrors afflicted their forefathers and even parents until very recent times.
How dare someone who is not American so rudely criticise the United States? Perhaps I should inform you who have so far not heard and remind you who have that no country on the planet regards itself as ‘the second-greatest nation on Earth!’
Sadly, given the irony implicit in that observation there might well be some who simply do not even understand the point it makes. And that would be an irony in itself.
I cannot square the notion that the much-vaunted ‘land of the free’ which has a total population of 335 million also has 1.8 million of its people in jail – a higher rate of incarceration than ‘Red’ China. China has a a total population at 1,400 million – four times as big – but ‘just’ 1.69 million under lock and key. Fancy.
For many Americans it would seem the ‘American Dream’ is not the usual one but simply to stay out of jail for as long as possible. And in a country where not using a designated road-crossing but ‘jay-walking’ can get you banged up, that might often be a tall order.
So far many, if not most, of you will think this is just another bloody lefty Brit on his high horse sounding off.
Well, first of all I am not ‘lefty’. Secondly, I am simply repeating a number of facts about the US which puzzle me a great deal. And one or two of those facts are really bizarre given the mythical genesis of the US, not least the US president’s right to pardon offenders.
Worse still, it seems to me to be very obvious that not all US citizens are ‘equal before the law’. That, too, is a myth.
Even those of you here who have by now come to loathe me and my ramblings above might agree that one Donald J Trump, an adjudged rapist, a convicted fraudster and a suspected insurrectionist and a man who – if the guilty
pleas of three co-conspirators are to be believed – attempted to rig the 2020 election result in Georgia and, finally, who finally stole any number of secret government documents, is now above the law.
You might disagree, but in your hearts you know he is: Trump has got away with it.
Even if he is as innocent as a newborn lamb of insurrection, alleged election rigging and theft, the American people will now no longer be able to find out: he will not come to trial.
The great United States myth you guys subscribe to includes that you were fighting to ‘free yourself from the yoke of the English crown’ and rid yourself of fealty to a king ‘who was above the law’. Well, face it, ladies and gentlemen, in the past 249 years you haven’t done that at all: all you have done is, in effect, created your bloody own ‘monarch’.
In 2024 the president can pretty much do what the fuck he likes – just as English monarchs could do what the fuck they liked until we chopped off head of one of them in January 1649, 375 years ago as a way of saying ‘not any more, matey!’
You Yanks adore our colourful pageantry at ‘royal’ weddings, trooping of the colour and state opening of Parliament. So you come up with your own ‘colourful pageantry’ – a 20-vehicle calvacade of armoured cars every time your prezzy ventures out and a pukey reverence for ‘Mr President’ that would nauseate even a hardened Brit sycophant.
What you don’t seem to realise is that we know all our pageantry is just for show, pure make-believe, pure colourful bullshit. But yours isn’t.
Face it: you have created your own king. And that process has involved the slow, slow, slow corrosion of those supposed ‘patriotic’ ideals before which you kneel and worship.
Granted that all – or perhaps only many – of you reading this wouldn’t piss on Trump if he were on fire. But you all still carry some of the blame for American creating King Donald I. Your sin: you took your eye off the ball. Your second sin? You now believe your own bullshit.
Because that corrosive process occurred of several decades, possibly over a century, it cannot and will not be rectified at all soon. And realising this, when I’ve had a couple, often about this time of day (18.02 as it happens), I become a little maudlin and believe that after almost 80 years of comparative peace and prosperity in the Western world, it will, over the coming decades, be ‘all change’.
Mass migration not experienced for centuries will be one catalyst for that change, certainly, and the impact it will have on trade relations.
But, in my cups, I also fear that after almost 400 years the ‘United States’ will gradually become rather less ‘united’, that the pressures it faces from the undemocratic inclinations of ‘King Donald I’ will be too much for some states, especially the ‘liberal ones’: why would New England any longer want to share a bed with Arizona or Texas of the loons in the North-West mountains?
On the other hand, out of my cups – so to speak – I think it’ll be fine, that that is all tosh, stuff ’n nonsense. But as someone who has increasingly read a lot of history these past few years I am these days less inclined to take much for granted, even when I suffer from a bout of optimism.
Would anyone in the mid-1980s have taken someone seriously who insisted that within four years the Soviet ‘empire’ would be no more. You get one guess, but you would be wrong. He or she would be sent off with a flea in their ear and told to stop being so silly. The US slowly fall apart? You think?
Now for another drink and hope that Donald fucking Trump really is just a bad dream.
You might disagree, but in your hearts you know he is: Trump has got away with it.
Even if he is as innocent as a newborn lamb of insurrection, alleged election rigging and theft, the American people will now no longer be able to find out: he will not come to trial.
The great United States myth you guys subscribe to includes that you were fighting to ‘free yourself from the yoke of the English crown’ and rid yourself of fealty to a king ‘who was above the law’. Well, face it, ladies and gentlemen, in the past 249 years you haven’t done that at all: all you have done is, in effect, created your bloody own ‘monarch’.
In 2024 the president can pretty much do what the fuck he likes – just as English monarchs could do what the fuck they liked until we chopped off head of one of them in January 1649, 375 years ago as a way of saying ‘not any more, matey!’
You Yanks adore our colourful pageantry at ‘royal’ weddings, trooping of the colour and state opening of Parliament. So you come up with your own ‘colourful pageantry’ – a 20-vehicle calvacade of armoured cars every time your prezzy ventures out and a pukey reverence for ‘Mr President’ that would nauseate even a hardened Brit sycophant.
What you don’t seem to realise is that we know all our pageantry is just for show, pure make-believe, pure colourful bullshit. But yours isn’t.
Face it: you have created your own king. And that process has involved the slow, slow, slow corrosion of those supposed ‘patriotic’ ideals before which you kneel and worship.
Granted that all – or perhaps only many – of you reading this wouldn’t piss on Trump if he were on fire. But you all still carry some of the blame for American creating King Donald I. Your sin: you took your eye off the ball. Your second sin? You now believe your own bullshit.
Because that corrosive process occurred of several decades, possibly over a century, it cannot and will not be rectified at all soon. And realising this, when I’ve had a couple, often about this time of day (18.02 as it happens), I become a little maudlin and believe that after almost 80 years of comparative peace and prosperity in the Western world, it will, over the coming decades, be ‘all change’.
Mass migration not experienced for centuries will be one catalyst for that change, certainly, and the impact it will have on trade relations.
On the other hand, out of my cups – so to speak – I think it’ll be fine, that that is all tosh, stuff ’n nonsense. But as someone who has increasingly read a lot of history these past few years I am these days less inclined to take much for granted, even when I suffer from a bout of optimism.
Would anyone in the mid-1980s have taken someone seriously who insisted that within four years the Soviet ‘empire’ would be no more. You get one guess, but you would be wrong. He or she would be sent off with a flea in their ear and told to stop being so silly. The US slowly fall apart? You think?
Now for another drink and hope that Donald fucking Trump really is just a bad dream.
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