Aestheism
Where are the bonfires? What we should see around the country these days are crowds of thousands, flinging their U.S. passports into soaring fires, renouncing their citizenship and their allegiance to a country that proves itself, endlessly, a shame and a disgrace.
The Shining City on a Hill that we call the United States of America enslaved a population for centuries, then freed that population to a century of murder as the consequence of claiming its unalienable rights, and continues to oppress that population violently from behind the careful protection of the law.
We also find confirmed in recent days that this Christian Nation just loves to torture people. Hoping that something we could call “intelligence” would emerge to justify the enterprise, the agents of our representative government carried out a formal program of deliberately inflicting injuries and suffering on individuals deemed enemies.
Not to mention drones.
It isn’t simply that the country is broken. We find today and across the whole history of this mad experiment with democracy that the leaders we have ordained routinely ignore, undermine, and abrogate the principles of liberty and access to happiness upon which the country was, ostensibly, built.
We know what people are supposed to do when their religion is proved a fraud.
What we should see, then, as a consequence of the undeniable fact not only of America’s repetitive failure to realize its high ideals, but also of its repeatedly demonstrated determination to make those ideals meaningless, is a mass exodus. Because the United States is a corrupt, morally bankrupt, exploitative, oppressive, murderous, socio-economic disaster, its good-but-naive citizens ought to have abandoned it long ago.
But we don’t see Americans standing up for truth, justice, and the American way by chanting over the flames of their burning birth certificates, “Hey, Ho! This former American is gonna go!”
There’s something very religious about the way we Americans live in denial. The character of American patriotism is a religious devotion that clings to a constitutional promise that was a lie from the moment that the racist Thomas Jefferson signed the document. We’re wrapped up in what we might as well call Americanism. And—take it from someone who still affiliates with Mormonism—Americanism has all the trappings of a religious cult.
When confronted by the evidence of our government’s crimes, rather than running, pell-mell, towards Canada, or Denmark, or some other less odious national option, we gnash our teeth and stay, right here, in this place that only faith convinces us can be better.
Whether we’re too scared to try something else, or the mountain of evidence is too overwhelming or too painful to acknowledge, or we’re committed to family, or we’re brainwashed, we kneel here in the pews of the Federal Republic Church in an adoration that is every bit as delusional as we find in theism.
If there’s an alternate reading of our sad, American situation, it might be that all of us—conservatives, radicals, revolutionaries, and reactionaries, those who stop traffic and those who find themselves stopped—are all willing, tenacious, dogmatic idealists. Embedded deeply, perhaps fundamentally, in the American phenomenon of which we are all a part is a hunger for apotheosis—a perfection fantasy that we know cannot appear but cannot be compromised, lest the souls that we have given to the dream be damned. We don’t renounce the country, however our government disgraces it, because the ideal is one, whole, perfect, and, yes, indivisible, insofar as the impossible has no parts, and so eludes division between all of us the same.
Religious fanatics who find a way to stay with their sect no matter how it behaves, we stay American because we insist that this American spirituality does not pack down into particular governments, municipalities, people, corporations and armies, nor even into the neighborhoods that close around us, individually, to be rejected with all those things that fail so badly.
The religion we will not abandon is itself the refusal to see a democratic fantasy reduced to any particular, painful implementation. Even when we reject the government entrusted to manifest the fantasy, when we say a great loud no to the evil that our government wreaks and to the violence that it has tried so hard to protect for so long, we find ourselves worshiping in the American shrine that harbors all hopeful, hopeless longing for happiness.
We Americans know religion. The very outrage that we exercise in our despair over our country’s crimes confirms our belief—belief that is as religious as any belief ever was—that triumph was an option.
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