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rfmcdonaldCrooked Timber's Kieran Healy links to Canadian historian Rob MacDougall's "American For A Day". MacDougall, it turns out, feels much the same way about the United States, its actual on-the-ground diversity, and Obama's presidency as--among other things--a brilliant PR move.
In exploring the question of American collective self-betterment, MacDougall comes across what he thinks is an interesting sort of historical engine driving change down south.
MacDougall cites other reformers, like anti-slavery activist Frederick Douglass and early feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to argue that the rhetorical strategy of claiming that one set of rights has always existed but has just been ... overlooked is critical to the process of American social and political reform, that "the promises made in the Declaration and the Constitution are so great that their betrayal is an inevitable part of the promise," and that the "'more perfect union' is a limit approaching infinity. As each generation discovers--inevitably!--that the promises made to them were false, they battle to make them a little more true."
Two questions.
1. Is MacDougall right? It seems to make sense from my position as a Canadian: Dialectically-driven ideological fervour of that kind does seem to fit the United States much more cleanly than it could, say, Canada. I'm just one Canadian, though. Your thoughts?
2. Are there other countries that work that way? France comes to mind as one possibility, with its own often complicated relationship to its post-revolutionary republican traditions, but does it? And are there others? Might Canada be one of those others? The Charter of Rights and Freedoms is a central document in modern Canadian history.
Feel free to participate, anonymously if you wish.
Obama’s election also offers evidence that the United States is not the amalgam of Sauron’s Mordor and Boss Hogg’s Hazzard County some of my students imagine it to be. It may seem odd that young Canadians, who consume American media as freely as air, would see the United States in this limited way. But remember: this year’s college freshmen were ten years old when Rove and Cheney took the White House. That "frog boiling in water" sensation we’ve been feeling for eight long years is life as usual for them. Many of them have grown up with a very selective definition of "America": they don’t like Sarah Palin’s "real America," but they tacitly accept her definition of it. Some imagine anyone south of the border who expresses any doubt about, say, preemptive wars, the trampling of civil rights, and free market fundamentalism to be, I don’t know, a stray Canadian or something. When I’ve tried to tie something as mainstream asThe Daily Show, which my students uniformly adore, into a longer tradition of American satire and dissent, I sometimes get puzzled looks. "I don’t really think of Jon Stewart as American," a student told me last year. Obama’s election ought to make it easier for me to depict the United States as vast and complicated and multifaceted, as a bundle of contradictions that confounds all generalizations--and perhaps even as a well-meaning nation, struggling to be better than it is.
In exploring the question of American collective self-betterment, MacDougall comes across what he thinks is an interesting sort of historical engine driving change down south.
"We’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check," said Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It was a prosaic beginning to the most beloved speech of the twentieth century, reducing American history’s greatest crime and moral dilemma to a matter of bookkeeping: “a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." King went on:When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note--a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
And here Sancho or Sacvan whispers to the guy standing next to him, "Were they? Really? If we went back in time and asked the architects of the republic--Jefferson and Madison and Washington and the rest--did you mean for this to apply to your slaves too, would they agree? And what about women? And the Sioux and Apache, and Chinese railroad laborers, and Jews from eastern Europe, and Mexican migrant laborers, and detainees at Guantanamo, and gay couples in California that want to get married, if we asked the founding fathers, they’d agree that they want all these inalienable rights to apply to them too, right? Because it would have saved a lot of trouble if they’d spelled all this out in 1789."
The black belt rhetorical jiu jitsu of the "I Have A Dream" speech is that King pulls it off. He convinced the better part of a nation that dismantling segregation was not so scary, not so radical, but really what they’d all meant to do all along. They just hadn’t gotten around to it, like the laundry I need to sort, or those slaves Jefferson never quite got to freeing. You can fault King for making it sound too easy, for not holding anyone’s feet to the fire, but that was a tactic, and (for a time) it worked.
MacDougall cites other reformers, like anti-slavery activist Frederick Douglass and early feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to argue that the rhetorical strategy of claiming that one set of rights has always existed but has just been ... overlooked is critical to the process of American social and political reform, that "the promises made in the Declaration and the Constitution are so great that their betrayal is an inevitable part of the promise," and that the "'more perfect union' is a limit approaching infinity. As each generation discovers--inevitably!--that the promises made to them were false, they battle to make them a little more true."
Two questions.
1. Is MacDougall right? It seems to make sense from my position as a Canadian: Dialectically-driven ideological fervour of that kind does seem to fit the United States much more cleanly than it could, say, Canada. I'm just one Canadian, though. Your thoughts?
2. Are there other countries that work that way? France comes to mind as one possibility, with its own often complicated relationship to its post-revolutionary republican traditions, but does it? And are there others? Might Canada be one of those others? The Charter of Rights and Freedoms is a central document in modern Canadian history.
Feel free to participate, anonymously if you wish.
