(by Madan Mohan)
Don McLean wrote the iconic American Pie as a lament addressed to the events at Altamont, where pandemonium broke out between fans and Hell’s Angels (private bodyguards of sorts) as Rolling Stones performed their set at a music festival and also as a general critique of what he saw as accelerating cultural decline in the US in those years. The song’s leitmotif is the line, “This will be the day that I died”. Given that McLean is still alive, perhaps it’s time for a 2021 update for the song.
I’ve at one and the same time a strong connection to the United States and a (hopefully) healthy skepticism towards its exceptionalist rhetoric. I have relatives over there, relatives who’ve been living there for decades now. I have friends who moved over to the US and, via the internet, I have befriended Americans, including white people. But I am also the guy who, when my 11th standard classmate recounted the 9/11 news the day after with the appropriate tone of horror, offered an unsympathetic “Well, they shouldn’t have been messing around in the Middle East” riposte. I swear he thought I must be crazy.
Unsurprisingly, I heartily loathed George W Bush Jr and when a lecturer was sharp enough to question why Obama had been given the Peace Prize even before he had actually accomplished anything, I was one of the few in the classroom who approved with a chuckle.
Was there a measure of schadenfreude I derived from watching the US trip heavily and fail miserably in living up to its lofty ideals and being patently unable to preach “Do as I do” to supposedly less civilized third world countries (like ours)? Yes.
At the same time, as I got to know more and more Americans online, I found them to be also the harshest critics of their own land, the most likely among all nationalities to unsparingly take down their leaders for their follies without feeling compelled to sound ‘patriotic’. That they did so in the face of a large contingent that regarded such criticism as ‘unAmerican’ and let them know this as loudly as possible made their candour even more admirable. If I know about the Civil War, Tulsa Massacre or Birth of a Nation, it is only because Americans told me all about it.
I know that right now, many Americans are angrier than you could possibly imagine at Donald J Trump and the Republican Party. And they aren’t all liberals. Even popular Quoran conservative Anthony Zarella has demanded that the twenty fifth amendment be invoked to remove Trump from office.
But I wonder whether that will be enough now.
This has always been a peculiar dynamic in the United States. Every time the United States lurched into unforgivable injustice, either to its own citizens (such as slavery) or to others (Vietnam, Iraq), a very vocal contingent rose up to protest these acts of injustice. And they protested over and over until those in power had no choice but to take heed. The United States has produced many fraudsters like Bernie Madoff or Elizabeth Holmes but, equally too, brave whistleblowers who risked their meagre position and belongings for a greater cause. The exceptionalists of the United States, then, have been the ones who have not been afraid to call out its bluff and demand that it at least attempt to live up to its high and mighty ideals.
However, there was a line that had not been crossed before January 6, 2021. On January 6, a mob of angry Trump supporters stormed Capitol Hill and ransacked its premises. We now know that the Capitol police had inadequately manned the location in spite of receiving warnings from the FBI. They also refused offers of help from the National Guard and the FBI. I wonder why. The charitable conclusion is that they were sucked into the same complacency that led many on the Right to insist that they would take a Biden victory well “unlike Clinton voters in 2016” even though the rest could clearly see this was not going to be the case. The bleaker possibility is that they shared the views and political affiliation of these crazed mobsters. Unfortunately, it is difficult to entirely rule out the latter possibility.
Which leads us to the inference that one side of the aisle now only reluctantly and grudgingly does its part in the democratic process. That this side would rather attempt to take over Capitol Hill and threaten Congress into submission than accept the verdict delivered by a democratic electoral process. A process, by the way, that is already skewed towards the Right. Even so.
When a major party (and, by implication, roughly half of the electorate) decides it will remain in hostile and even violent opposition to the other side no matter what and with no basis in reality or facts, it is difficult to see how this would work out. One hopes that it would, somehow. I certainly do.
Where I have always regarded the American State with at least some suspicion and never been a full blooded Americophile in the way some of my acquaintances are, I have been an unabashed consumer of its cultural products. I count many, many American musicians among my favourites and so too many American filmmakers (with my absolute favourite being Scorsese). While not all art is political, American art was shaped by this hopeful if not always jingoistic halo that enveloped the US. What happens to all of that now? Is the innocence of this bright and shiny art going to look as hopelessly naive as America did to Don McLean back in 1971?
Is it fitting that the products of American enterprise, the ‘genius’ of creative disruption, had led Bob Dylan to turn over his music masters and collect a sizable retirement fund just weeks before Jan 6, 2021? Maybe. This is an America that does not pay enough to Dylan to see merit in holding onto ownership of his musical creations. It is also an America that is prepared to forgive Trump even after he has gone where perhaps many third world politicians wouldn’t have. Bye Bye Miss American Pie. Fare Thee Well.
Yajiv
January 11, 2021
Great article, Madan!
Perhaps, Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire needs an update as well!
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Aman Basha
January 11, 2021
The more and more I think about the Republican Party, the more and more these snivelling, callous Southern cowards infuriate me. The Democrats may have their problems, but they are simply not a living threat to democracy as the GOP has become. The arguments in support of this party are so disingenuous that they fall apart like a pack of cards on examination.
*That impeachment doesn’t have Republican base support and could further divide the country: Yes, and who knows what it is to grapple with moral issues and popular opinion better than the Party of Lincoln, that fought a civil war against slaveowners to rid slavery. Oh shit, right, now the GOP is the party of the Lost Cause. When Alex fucking Jones is the voice of reason, your party is fucked beyond relief.
*The only argument they could muster against Biden was that he’d offer no real change and is the same old. Well, your alternative to anything from Obamacare to a president is horrifying.
*They keep complaining about Big Tech censoring them, when the left and even Biden is planning on repealing section 230 and introduce oversight on social media, who famously sold user information to Republican campaigns. Anyhow, sedition and death threats are a criminal offence.
*For all the hoopla and hype about American exceptionalism, they have forgotten that the US is exceptional, because it was one of the first republican representative democracies, influencing everything from the French Revolution to the Indian Constitution. Trump’s example has set a dangerous international precedent, everyone from Bolsanaro to Orban to Salzini are taking notes of this. His punishment will be a precedent too. Why not end the death penalty with him?
*There is, of course, this fringe argument that Biden is bought by China, and will be soft on them. Bullshit. China has its tentacles everywhere, including establishment GOP. If the Democrats were a pawn, why did they support Hong Kong? If the Republican establishment was bought, why did they normalize relations with Taiwan? The political consensus took time, but has changed and Trump was simply a co-incidence. With his vulgar (and useless) rhetoric, he only made it more open and also drove away potential allies. To think that this reality TV buffoon has the mental acuity to think out strategy makes me question their IQ.
There are structural problems in the US but the majority of the blame falls heavily on the Republican Party, there is no “both sides” crap here.
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Madan
January 12, 2021
Thanks Yajiv. Yes, that’s another one that needs an update.
Aman: Yup, you have said it better than I could. The issue is not that you or I completely don’t get the GOP critique. Yes, I get Dems this Dems that even if I don’t completely agree. But what is the governance model of the GOP? It’s either non existent or horrifying as above.
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