Looking to verify the subtitle of Kathleen Norris’s Dakota a couple of weeks ago, I ran into a quotation from that book – picked up several years ago in O magazine and attached to various other Quotation websites as well:
“Disconnecting from change does not recapture the past. It loses the future.”
While Norris is talking about how Dakota residents responded to the farm crisis of the 80’s, what she observes – blaming the victims, conspiracy theories, willful intellectual blindness, increasing xenophobia as former neighbors and friends become dangerous “outsiders,” and a desire to retreat to some idyllic past –seems particularly apt in the current political climate.
Some of us want to “take the country back,” which looks like the way to “disconnect from change.”
Whenever I hear anyone wanting to take the country back, I always want to ask “from whom?” and “for whom”? For the sake of some heretofore invisible majority that didn’t vote in the last election? From me and people like me? (If so, I’m not giving up that easily!)
The recent concern about immigration looks like an attempt to “take the country back.” Immigration is a real issue, but it suddenly exercises people who are not affected by it, are nowhere near our borders, and know not one single illegal immigrant. The dangerous outsiders: illegal aliens, Muslims wanting a community center several blocks from ground zero, terrorist babies, Kenyans pretending to be Hawaiians, or other more fantastical political conspirators, are everywhere. Fortunately, the UFOs seem to be off visiting some other planet, but there’s plenty of paranoia to go around.
Sometimes “taking the country back” seems to mean retreating into the past. (Hence the nifty quotation from Norris.) How far back do we go? 20 years? 50 years? 250 years? It’s as if Eden is only around the corner, either just back in the recapturable past, or in an alternate historical universe where changing the single element will turn this hell into Heaven . . . if we could deport all the aliens . . . repeal every recent piece of legislation . . . or reincarnate Ronald Reagan, as long as he does not come back as an “anchor baby.”
Since even most of the obtuse seem to have a prickly awareness that it’s not good form to want to enslave another race of people, however nice it might be for some of us, we don’t publicly fantasize too much about the antebellum South, but the American Revolution and the founding fathers seem to be resurgent in our mythologizing. With much flag waving, the Constitution is invoked – with very little analysis – and the founding fathers are dragged by their dead hair into the 21st century and show up as simple-minded shills for some politician’s argument or TV ad.
Such easy patriotism turns America into a cardboard parody of itself, as if we can only love the Barbie version, not the difficult, imperfect, complex, infinitely more interesting and valuable reality.
However wonderful the creation of America, it was not Eden that was created here. However brilliant, the founding fathers need not be our holy icons – or our advertising icons either. They were not saints. They were not perfect. They owned slaves. They completely missed the boat on women’s suffrage, and they didn’t know how to tweet.
So I am not rallying around with teabags hanging from my hat.
And today when I find the current political discourse too shrill, acrimonious, and divisive, all creative thought and tolerance squashed, all political choices reduced to fight or flight, I keep re-reading Dakota, finding some peace with Kathleen Norris among the Benedictines on the prairie. I recommend it for anyone wanting a poet’s take on the spiritual life, or a reprieve from the national loopiness that seems to have seized us.
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