Archives for September 2018

To step back is to see through a wider scope and with history as our guide the issue gripping the country’s attention today. As though it requires my saying, the very issue of which I speak is that of Brett Kavanaugh’s now increasingly uncertain Supreme Court confirmation. Thought once a shoe-in of a pick, a consummate conservative to whom all future nominees would be made to measure up, Kavanaugh, his future, and the make-up of the Court for decades to come are now very much at stake.

The fifty-three-year-old U.S. Court of Appeals judge has been accused, hazily but seriously, of having committed an unpardonable crime at the age of seventeen. A professor of psychology at Palo Alto University, Dr. Catherine Blasey Ford, has come forth publicly, albeit somewhat hesitantly, to tell of an incendiary account from her past.

Aged fifteen and at the time attending an “all-girls” religious school somewhere around Maryland, Dr. Blasey Ford went to a house party at which Brett Kavanaugh was present. In that all-too familiar miasma of cheap alcohol, overwrought libido, and dissolute youth, things became touchy, and aggressively so. While all of the other party-goers reveled downstairs, Dr. Blasey Ford found herself alone in an upstairs room with the future D.C. circuit judge and Supreme Court nominee. Indeed, no sooner was it that she found herself smothered beneath Kavanaugh’s body. According to her, every pound of the callow, drunken, college-bound hotshot from down the street laid atop her with all his might.

So positioned and so imperiled, she was unable to break free. Kavanaugh groped her, silenced her, and attempted to remove from her a one-piece bathing suit and blouse. Drunk, bumbling, and ultimately failing at his unrequited pursuit, Kavanaugh’s best efforts were thwarted by his pal, Mark Judge—himself a middling, conservative author thirty years hence. However, lest you think Judge (Mark, that is, and not Kavanaugh) the hero in this sexually traumatic series of events, he leapt upon his buddy Brett in a playful, fraternal, even teasing way. He seemed every bit wanting to be a party to the debauchery. Nevertheless, it came to pass that Judge was the unwitting interruptus before the coitus could get underway. Now liberated and now scarred, Dr. Blasey Ford was sprung loose and able to scamper away.

Though cringe-inducing and poignant in its retelling, it’s impossible to know if the story above is in any way true. None present at the party has come forth to corroborate Dr. Blasey Ford’s harrowing tale. No contemporaneous notes were made in regard to the night, no intimate confessions received the morning next. Not until three and half decades later was the issue raised, and even then, it was done in somewhat obscure a way. While it may have been “lived” reality for Dr. Blasey Ford as the victim so many years ago, today what matters most is a combination of veracity (on the part of the accuser) and verifiability (on that of the circumstance). And, so far as this case is concerned, those two most essential ingredients for a criminal accusation lack.

It’s odd, then, in acknowledgement of that, that so many are looking for what’s not there. Democrats are looking for invisible incriminations, Republicans for a Catholic saint. One sees a sexual predator incapable of wielding the gavel. The other sees a conservative justice impugned without an iota of truth. In their illusions, both miss the grander point.

For all that abounds in the empty spaces that engulf this controversy, there’s something hidden in plain view. It’s the subtle recognition that this is all a political game. A shocker, no doubt, is the fact that this is about left and right. It’s about judicial activism and strict originalism—about a Constitution that’s living versus one that’s dead. For the former to be preserved (as it’s been for the past twenty-some odd years), the latter mustn’t breathe.

This moment of “Kavanaugh chaos” obscures the deeper question that this country must ultimately face. Simply put, it reads as follows: is our Constitution dead or does it live? Is it pliant or is it settled, is it fluid or concrete? Ought we have the ability to manipulate and re-interpret that hoary eighteenth-century document at will, or should we defer to its thoughtful prescience written by the New World’s greatest sages all those centuries ago? The accusations of fornication can be put aside—at least until their feasibility gains and their strength builds. The real scandal and the underlying question is what the new group of Supreme Court justices will do. Will it choose a path of enlivening the Constitution or letting it remain settled as it’s been?

Thomas Jefferson was, though perhaps at times unwillingly, a man of such an enlivened spirit and of restless life. Of many lives, really, as he seems never to have died. One need only look about herself today, and she’ll see that his memory yet pervades; his genius still enlightens us, his eloquence still inspires us, and his faults continue to remind us that even a philosopher can sin. Nevertheless, Jefferson seems to have warmed up to the idea, however late in life, that, like him, the Constitution should be restive, responsive, and alive. His understanding of the Constitution’s relevance in the changing tide of the nineteenth century is worth quoting at length.

In the inimitable words of Jefferson:

“Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the Ark of the Covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical means of correcting their ill effects. But I know also that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”

In many ways, Jefferson’s remark (written in the year 1816 to the Virginia author and lawyer, Samuel Kercheval) is profound. It shows a sort of high-minded ambivalence, a man torn between fine ideas and the crude necessities of political life. Really though, what else should one expect from that wisest and most learned of American statesmen? Though one is apt to find oneself lost in his thought, not much digging is needed to reach Jefferson’s point on this occasion.

Ever the radical (a paradox of his personality in and of itself and of which there were many more: he was an aristocrat who wanted democracy, a farmer who wanted the city life, a slave-holding abolitionist who couldn’t reconcile human freedom and personal debt) Jefferson anticipated the modern liberal’s view as it relates to the Constitution. In the italicized lines, we recognize his incipient, progressive bent. Jefferson, or at least the Jefferson seen in this light, appears to come down on the side of the judicial activist rather than the originalist.

Perhaps it’s for his not having had a say in the making of the Constitution that lands him on this side of the fence. During its construction in the late 1780’s, the cosmopolitan Jefferson was on business in France and far away from what would become the world’s greatest modern political document. Business with a touch of pleasure, one might add, as it was at that time he encountered the charming but spoken for Maria Cosway. Hers, and not that of Sally Hemings, is the name we forget. Through a short-lived dalliance with the married artist, however, Jefferson proved himself yet again to be the man of not only belles lettres but of lust and romance as well. Smitten though he was, with both Paris and paramour, Jefferson missed the drafting of the nation’s second most important document—the first being, of course, his Declaration. One can imagine the torment this roiled in him.

It’s for this reason that he may not have had a strong allegiance to the Constitution once it was made public for ratification. He certainly didn’t appreciate the way his friend and fellow Virginian, James Madison, shielded from him its true contents until just before they were released. By the time Jefferson could object to them from abroad, it was too late; a fait accompli, as his genteel hosts in France might say, the Constitution was finished and readied for at least nine of the states.

One could, if so salaciously inclined, go off and compare Jefferson’s and Kavanaugh’s sexual pasts. There’s at least some evidence that the former president fathered six children by Sally Hemings; a 1998 genetic sleuthing of the family tree reveals as much. On the other hand, one would be harder-pressed to find any evidence to that end as it pertains to Kavanaugh and Dr. Blasey Ford. What is knowable is not how each would treat the help and teen-aged girls, but how each would treat the Constitution if given the chance. Jefferson would bring it to life, while Kavanaugh would let it be. These next few weeks will determine in which direction that hallowed document goes.

How do we get back to we? In its asking, this question isn’t meant to be clever. It’s not intended to obscure some deeper, subliminal, rhetorical meaning nor is it meant to beguile the listener who might hazard some response. Rather, I ask it sincerely—and, at least on some days, desperately—yet always in hope of an answer from any who might profess to know.

How do we, America writ-large, a country and a people incomparably energetic, industrious, daring, liberal, and proud, get back to ourselves? Through what crawling undergrowth must we retrace our steps so that we might rediscover our antiquated unity? In what mountain hamlet will we find our shared fate? To what untrodden paths must we return if community is our aim? Upon what grass-laden trails shall we trek to reach solidarity, long-lost fraternity, and our misplaced sense of patriotic love? Do we even know where this previously distinctive path lies? If not, have we led ourselves so far adrift as to be in need of navigators, or of compasses, or of grand celestial designers who might intercede on our behalf? In unison and with magnanimity, they’ll join in guiding us home. Or, should we prove needless of their help, is the way yet inscribed on our skin and etched atop our bones, guiding us through our veins to every heart by every beat?

I like to think the sentiments of “we” do in fact run that deep. I often picture them animating every American at her core and stirring him in the plunging depths of his soul. My dream, increasingly delusive though it may feel, is that we’ll soon rediscover our forgotten sense of we.

The factions will cease to be so ungenially divided, the rhetoric so vituperative and mean. The fringes will emigrate somewhat closer together, their antipathies further apart. Only then can one hope to see the foreign ideological terrain from which the other comes and lend sympathy her way. Common cause and its ever-vulnerable child, progress, might then be established and sustained. Rational arguments will end where ad hominem attacks begin, and all will be sufficiently wise and temperate to avoid engaging the man rather than his idea. Disputes will remain, as without contention, no progression will there be, but at the very least, they’ll be decorous and thoughtful and nobly considered and even better said.

It’s not a world inhabited by Houyhnhnms that I think would be best. That race of erudite equines written into our fantasies by the now little, now large Mr. Gulliver and his inventor, Jonathan Swift surely wouldn’t do. Scribbled in contrast to the base and all-too anthropomorphic Yahoos for whom Gulliver cared not a whit, the Houyhnhnms were far too philosophical and insensate to be real. They were enlightened, dispassionate, and incredibly reasonable—not unlike a modern totalitarian leader and his state. They even advanced an incipient form of eugenics, barring particular coat colors and genders for one brood.

But we cannot strive toward the level of horses, nor—if given the chance—would they likely deign to become men. The lustrous glow of the mane is far more enticing than the pockmarked skin—the oats more nutritious than the fries. We’re thus restrained by our human foibles, and they by their quiet animal grace. We therefore must seek within ourselves, within our species, within our country a reasonable, an intelligent and a unified we.

Yet this political climate appears wholly inconsistent with the notion of we. The pronoun has become poisoned and those to whom it referred, unreal. Now, the only two words that matter are us and them. This, in essence, is the language of the tribesman. It’s the vernacular of the brute, the tongue of the troglodyte. Is this what we’ve become? Not enviable Americans, whose shared history and current strength the entire world hopes to reproduce in its own image, but atavistic, paint-wearing, chest-thumping, spittle-producing, bile-swallowing, spear-throwing rubes.

That’s not who we’re destined to be. We, so far as I’m still convinced, are far better than that. We won’t be a casualty in this interminably ugly battle of “us” against “them”. We’ll stand atop the rubble and help one another to his feet. We’ll build ourselves from a shared foundation, and we’ll surely get back to we.

Lest we be deceived, this Supreme Court confirmation process has little to do with the character of the man who’s being judged so that he might one day judge. The veil has been cast before our eyes, but as it turns out, its fabric is remarkably light. And, as the days wear on and our patience thin, we’re beginning to see through it with eyes increasingly acclimated to the fog. We’ve pulled the curtain to see beyond the gossamer accusations and the hazy recollections that Brett Kavanaugh’s personality is in fact a secondary matter in this sordid affair. Recognizing this seemingly faux-“Me-Too” moment for what it is, we see it’s primarily concerned with politics rather than personalities, with procrastination rather than fornication, with chicanery rather than lechery, with slander rather than substance.

If it weren’t solely about politics, and if the best interest of the victimized woman at the center of this controversy were at the heart of it all, Senator Diane Feinstein wouldn’t have sat on the information she’d gathered for so long a time. First made aware of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation of Brett Kavanaugh’s sexually mischievous advances made against her in high school in the early 1980’s in the middle of July of this year, Feinstein responded by not responding. In a word, she was inert—all mum’s the word was she as her opportunity to address this potential crime flitted away.

Feminism, as a movement, does many things well. Above all else, though, is the fact that it moves. It’s the urgency of action by which it conducts itself that makes Feminism so impressive and startling and momentous a phenomenon. Yet Feinstein—an avowed, if not aged feminist at least once every six years—sat on the damning tale that Dr. Blasey Ford had to tell. For seven long weeks, a great deal of time after the Senate Judiciary Committee (over which she, as the ranking Democrat in the bipartisan group, presides) held its public hearing over Kavanaugh’s fitness to serve as the next Justice on the Supreme Court, she held Dr. Blasey Ford’s allegations remarkably close to her chest. She revealed it not to colleagues in her own party, nor to Republicans in that of her opposition. None but she was privy to their existence and the potential fallout they might cause.

In hindsight, should Feinstein have brought up the allegation of Kavanaugh’s sexual misconduct during the proceeding, it wouldn’t have been too extraordinary a thing. Strange though it is to say, nearly more male justices than not have been accused of sexual indecency at one time or another. As of now, the number is two out of five—very nearly half. A precedent initiated with Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas, to accuse a potential Supreme Court justice of sexual impropriety seems now to have become standard course. It’s for this reason that Feinstein would’ve been operating well within the strange bounds of normality if she had brought the matter to light and imputed another right-leaning Supreme Court justice nominee of having engaged in sexual harassment.

She instead opted to keep the information in the dark where it could acidify and turn politically explosive. Nevertheless, even without Feinstein’s pending bombshell that would eventually come to be, the week-long confirmation process devolved into a highly-politicized and, at times, histrionic and debased affair. Kavanaugh was accused of everything from misogyny (in light of his still obscure and equivocating position on Roe v. Wade) to venality (as it pertains to his camaraderie with President Trump, against whose patronage he’d likely not turn should Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation unearth information that would be deemed sufficiently damning to lead to a Supreme Court vote as to whether or not he’d be impeached).

To inaugurate the proceedings, a gaggle of impudent, mainly female protestors gathered on the periphery of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s room to voice its displeasure with Kavanaugh, President Trump’s most recent nominee. Once nestled in, the group wasted little time in causing a scene. Not long after Kavanaugh had been seated and chairman Chuck Grassley delved into his opening remarks, the group erupted into indignant and gratingly inarticulate chants. With the shrill cries of “travesties” and “injustice” and the forewarnings of a handmaid’s tale state, the protestors set in motion a most extraordinary and indecent act, the likes of which the Senate rarely sees. To think of a comparably aggressive and tense moment in the history of the Senate, one is made to journey back to the mid-nineteenth century. There, one would witness firsthand a certain Thaddeus Stevens bludgeoning an unfortunate Charles Sumner with his furious cane. Not since then has a moment in Congress been so considerably pugnacious and fraught.

Senator Kamala Harris—Feinstein’s junior colleague from their shared state of California—isn’t known to hold her punches, erratic though they’re often aimed. Regardless, she donned her gloves and threw her sanctimony in the ring. Wasting no time, she tried to adjourn the proceedings before they could even begin. Having failed at that, she grilled Kavanaugh about his positions on Robert Mueller, the Russian campaign meddling investigation, and Roe v. Wade. Senator Cory Booker, a self-stylized fighter in his own right (and never one to be one-upped) chose a path including both sanctimony and history. Voice atremble and nerves on edge, Booker announced his “Spartacus” moment, as if the New Jersey senator were laying down his political life, if only to stanch Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Confusing a martyr for a rebel, Booker apparently didn’t realize that Spartacus—now liberated of his servility and an enemy of the Roman state—was crucified along the bloody road to that ancient capital of the world.

Yet even in the midst of all this gratuitous posturing and hullabaloo, Feinstein said not a word about Dr. Blasey Ford’s accusation. Instead, two weeks following the proceeding’s conclusion, she let it be known that the allegation existed at all.

Shamelessly apparent to us now is the fact that Feinstein, canny a senator she is, was simply playing for time. She recommended that a team of FBI agents be convoked to further probe the matter, which—one must add—took place at an unknown and probably unknowable location over three decades ago. Being that such investigations into old, un-corroborated, and wholly uncertain crimes take a fair bit of time to conduct, she also recommended that the senate not vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination until all could be laid bare. If Feinstein’s proposed course of action were to be pursued, the senate vote would never transpire—and that’s exactly the idea.

None of this is to diminish the veracity of Dr. Blasey Ford’s tale. It’s possible, though not likely verifiable, that she was indeed sexually exploited as a fifteen-year-old girl. She very well may have been at a party—a prep-school bash during whose inebriated mischief a seventeen-year-old Brett Kavanaugh smothered and groped an innocent girl. It’s also possible and, at least in this instance, probably likely that her memories of this experience have wounded her deeply and psychologically and have never retreated from her troubled mind. Like too many sexually victimized adolescents and kids, she may have struggled with this ineffaceable scar of her past, a now public cause célèbre from which she’ll never again be free. It’s also possible she’s misremembering important aspects of the night and grounding her accusations in the sands of a flimsy memory. Such is the unsteadiness of anno domini.

But those concerns don’t align with the umbrage Feinstein and her fellow Democrats now feel. The mental and emotional and sexual well-being of Dr. Blasey Ford have become ancillary considerations when there are political battles that need to be waged. And thus, onward the left will march until it achieves its goal of stopping Brett Kavanaugh’s ascension to the Supreme Court at Dr. Blasey Ford’s expense. It’ll stop at no end, but we’ll do well to watch what comes next with a sharper eye and a soberer field of view. This confirmation process isn’t about the sexual predation of a teen-aged girl and alleviating her trauma and getting to the truth. It’s about the potential of a lifetime of conservative adjudication on the highest court in the land. The public sees this for what truly it is.

Boys of a certain age—of my young nephew’s age, of my teen-aged brother’s age, of any age for that matter—are now more than ever in need of role models. So too, of course, are girls, but I think their need is less desperate and acute than is ours. Before I submit to the pillorying by those around me who are so secure in their bona fides of being “politically correct”, I need to explain myself; I recognize just how sexist the aforementioned sounds. To say that boys more than girls are in need of role models at this moment in time is to make a grating and provocative assertion. It’s to press and drag the fingernail on our sensitive chalkboard’s status quo. In making my claim, I appear to be diminishing the plight of the woman and dancing to the world’s smallest violin.

One would think that the sexes and their respective degrees of yearning for heroes ought to be reversed. Undoubtedly, in their want of them, girls would be expected to far surpass the boys. After all, one need only briefly scan the pages of history or mythology or theology or any other study of any other time to learn that the hero’s predominant form has traditionally been that of man.

Viewed through that lens, every study can be summed up in the following way: history becomes a lesson in the glories and the triumphs of a daring masculinity. Try if you can to identify from each century since Christ more than three female names. I daresay you can’t, or you’ll need more time. Mythology becomes a record of the earthly interventions of a lusting and pagan virility. Zeus was profligate in his capacity to rape and Achilles in his penchant to slaughter. And theology, the most refined of the three, reads as the gospel of a bearded father and a tortured son, between whom a gentlemanly, ghostly spirit floats. And though we haven’t a clue as to the pubic endowment of that numinous intermediary between God and man, one can only assume it reflects that of the first created man. I can’t imagine the Holy Ghost being other than male if ever He’s to be caught flying about town sans a fig leaf in his gossamer nude.

That being said, how can it be claimed that boys are suffering from a crisis of absentee idols? Can it really be that there isn’t a single exemplar among our timeworn ancestors and our cherished, fabled idols and our resurrected saviors whose essence they can’t emulate and at whose feet they can’t pray? All they would need to do, if it’s a remedy to their illness they seek, would be to look back into the great books and at the great men who inhabit their every page. There, they’ll find countless heroes who’ve enlivened their ink and burst their seams.

Dive into the original, classical historians—of whom we count Herodotus, Homer, Tacitus, and Thucydides—and learn through their ancient and yet somehow still unsurpassed wisdom the great triumphs of men. Pick up Gibbon and learn from that hearty and round Englishman what the austere and lithe Romans originally intended by the word virtue. Move next to writers like Carlyle or Durant or Toynbee or Wood and see by their Anglo-American slant the varied and soaring accomplishments of man at his most revolutionary and best. Scamper past these secularists and continue on toward religion—ending where you should begin. Transcend the anti-ecclesiastical and the academic, if only for a moment, and land yourself in the tales of the trinity and the Hebrew prophets, of whom all were admirable and impressive men.

You’ll soon notice hardly a shortage in the availability of male heroes throughout history; the past is rife with inimitable scribes writing of their deeds. The Greeks, Romans, and Anglo-Americans, all wove their stories with an eloquence that still arrests the soul. They excite the literary nerves and strengthen the bones. Their tales of men and gods like Solon, Alexander, Jesus, Moses, Caesar, Shakespeare and Mohammed—the lot of these names barely scratches the surface of the trove of men from which to choose an idol. Read of Newton, Einstein, Copernicus, Democritus, Confucius, or Gautama and you’ve now succeeded in linking science and psychology with the Merchant of Venice and the Sermon on the Mount.

It’s clear to see, the past is well furnished with heroes of whom a great majority were men. But still, boys of our age feel themselves yearning and lost. Retreating from the horizons by whose exploration they’d benefit, grow, and learn, they’ve become stunted and myopic; the edifying chunks of history and religion are far too distant for their sight. The men who composed their stories are too foreign from their touch. It’s for this reason that the absence of male role models in the present is what concerns me.

Today, it seems as if the once-venerated position of “male role model” has seen its allure and its membership sharply decline. Many of the culture’s more visible idols have entirely lost their appeal to an upcoming generation of young adults and boys. Male actors have become insatiable molesters of vulnerable women on and off their Hollywood sets. Church fathers have lapsed into becoming pedophiliac pursuers of boys from the Vatican on down. Athletes have become politically-conscious though ill-informed acrobats while politicians have taken to the ring. Hands within gloves and mouth guards upon teeth, our leaders of government have begun attacking one another until each renders his adversary into a faceless pulp.

What, then, can be said about fathers? Surely their place of significance remains. Alas, that last bastion of a boy’s ideals has been tossed aside. Fatherhood, now agreed to be a dirty word, has been emasculated by a society whose mantra rings with the admonishment that the patriarchy is dead.

If not in family, nor modernity, nor celebrity, nor history, nor religion, nor politics, where is the male role model to be found? The issue is in the looking. The prevailing opinion in the culture is that the search for the male role model is misguided. Sex, they’ll say, is a fiction. It hasn’t a practical use, aside from oppressing those who’ve doubled their “X’s” and negated a “Y”.

But this can never be so. Boys need role models who are men. Not adults with the ostensible appearances of men, nor ladies playing the parts of guys, but actual, reputable men. The worship of male heroes by boys shouldn’t be a heresy—a thing practiced at the fringes of society and in the dead of night. We should instead make boys feel comfortable in discovering and celebrating the greatest men of our past. They ought to be led, actively and by the hand, to the hero’s victories and the lessons that his travails in their winning will undoubtedly impart. That is the antidote that this generation of desperate boyhood needs. Heroes who are men, in whose image they can shape their own.

Seldom is an American found to be toting a mirror by his side. He’s rarely so vainly adorned—never so narcissistically dressed. That’s not to say, though, that he’s some kind of unkempt recluse, scornful of a polite appearance and a cared-for face. Heaven forbid it! No, he shares nothing in the likeness of the pockmarked brute, one ugly and unworthy of an Instagram shot. He doesn’t lumber about on all fours like some knuckle-dragging ape, nor does he strut liked an atavist with a hunched gait. At least to some extent, he does indeed mind his mug before stepping outside and into the world.

It is to say, though, that he’s never in need of a mirror to reveal to him what already he knows. He doesn’t need an object in whose reflection he can see his own greatness returning his gaze. To him, to his all-American pride and his soaring blue-blooded self-esteem, such a device will always obscure more than it can reveal.

Greatness isn’t to be found in the countenance; such a canvas is too superficial and its fabric too thin. Nor, for that matter, is exceptionalism—the concomitant to greatness—to be found written upon the face. Search as you may and you’ll find neither written there. Between the lineaments of the brow and the emotions that so animate the lip, you’ll seek and find them not. Beneath the furrows and the wrinkles and the sunburns and the steel chins, greatness plunges ever deeper from view and toward the American soul. So too does exceptionalism, and not all-that far behind. What you’re left with is a face, a changing tapestry, a mask that’s weaved from one moment to the next by its own caprice. In that way, it’s a transitory thing; it’s beholden to emotion, sentiment, and thought.

Greatness, then, and its associated sense of exceptionalism are to be found not on the skin, but in the soul. They’re not external imprints, but internal tattoos. Like a genetic mark, the two are etched into the marrow of every American’s bones. As if evolutionarily inscribed from one generation to the next, from the fathers of the Revolution to the children of the New Deal, greatness and exceptionalism anchor our every sinew and fill our spirit to the brim.

To greatness, we Americans are inherently and inextricably bound. How could we not be? The greatest accumulation of political thinkers and philosophers course through our veins. The manifestation of their ideas constitute the scaffolding of our hearts. We hear with our ventricles’ every beat the pulse of Aristotle and Cicero and Montesquieu and Locke. We feel with every sensation the eloquent prick of Jefferson and Madison and Hamilton and Paine. Taken together, plus a few voices more, our nation became and continues to be the embodiment of the Enlightenment. For centuries and, in many ways, persisting right along up till this very day, ours was the government to which all others aspired. Ours was the summary of man’s unalienable place in a world that we were first to christen as radically different and new.

To hear it said, then, of an American, by an American, and to a group of Americans that this peculiar and inimitable country was never really all that great is to swallow an unnatural pill. It’s to occlude the nose and ingest the inedible, to knowingly choke down a poison noxious and foreign to the throat. It’s so unnatural a gulp, in fact, that it’s almost immediately retched upon its passage through the lips. The patriot’s tongue simply won’t tolerate the smallest taste. Yes, he’ll endure most hardships and suffer many toils, but the proud American won’t comfortably withstand being told he and his country aren’t great. It’s not that his hubris wouldn’t allow it to be so, but that his history would intervene on his behalf.

Yet hardly a belch was heard when a few weeks ago, New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo proclaimed that “America was never that great”. Upon hearing such an inane utterance, my stomach immediately turned. My insides rankled sour as if two trimesters pregnant on a bumpy cruise. Surprisingly, though, my symptoms were unique. I asked myself, how could Cuomo, an incumbent and long-successful politician representing one of the oldest and grandest American states, say so offensive a thing? Better yet, how could he say what he did and still remain a viable political candidate? Surely the admonishments from within and without his party would do him in.

That wasn’t the case. Democrats (with whom Cuomo is aligned) and Republicans responded as anticipated to what the governor had to say, but the effect was a wash. The left-wing media’s coverage of his comment was tepid, but such a failure to move toward open criticism was to be expected. New York is a state liberals must win. The right-wing responded more passionately, but only slightly so. Both failed to reach an appropriate fever pitch. Worse still, in light of Cuomo’s recent electoral success (he emphatically beat his challenger, the former actress and current activist Cynthia Nixon, by whose role as Miranda Hobbes on Sex and the City she’s best known), one must conclude that his message of self-loathing and American-effacement had some kind of resonance in the minds of those to whom he appealed. His “America was never that great” statement might’ve rather helped than injured his gubernatorial chances among those unimaginative enough to call themselves his constituency.

Yet of whom said constituency might be composed, I haven’t an exact idea; I hesitate to imagine a group of Americans so patriotically disinclined. But those constituting it certainly exist and—as evidenced by Cuomo’s success—their numbers aren’t few. Had they been, the governor wouldn’t have raced so easily through his primary and onward to a likely third term.

In my nearly involuntary repudiation of Cuomo’s statement, as if a knee by a hammer struck, I feel as if I’ve become a member of a dying breed. Like an old religious group buried in time and earth, our mantra has the sound of a shamanistic cry, our holy ideals the incredulity of an ancient and silly myth. Our primitive profession is this: America is and was great.

The youngest politically-conscious amongst us (by which I mean to say millennials) no longer subscribe to this point of view. In the Howard Zinn, Andrew Cuomo, relativistic, multicultural milieu within which we now live, it’s unacceptable to ascribe to one’s thinking such a haughty, Tory, solipsistic belief. America, in the opinions of those various and overlapping actors listed above, is an irredeemably ugly place. It bears the indelible markings of an ineradicable sin. It’s a bedraggled experiment in “liberty” that’s stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast with too many casualties along the way. This strange vision of a country we once loved has gained traction in the universities of our day, and no amount of historical perspective seems capable of loosening its grip.

As we’ve been divested of our historical perspective, so too have we waved our gratitude farewell. Following Cuomo’s path, there’s very little about America we ought to venerate or for which we should give thanks. To do so would be useless and downright offensive to the multifarious “oppressed” inter-sectional groups that recently and viciously have been marginalized. In place of thanks, Cuomo and his followers have adopted what the Germans call selbsthass, or “self-hate”. As so often those Prussians do, they capture the self-loathing essence of America’s sentiments. Like schadenfreude, we here in America west of the Rhine drown ourselves in the feeling but lack the word. To reject as indecent and oppressive the foundations upon which this nation was built is to hate oneself—to live under the shroud of selbsthass. And this, be he of German extraction or American birth, no healthy person should do.

But maybe, at just this moment, a healthy look into the mirror is what we all need. For once, we might need to look a bit deeper into the unfamiliar eyes that return our stare. In them and then through them, we navigate to the atrium of the soul. It’s there, deep beneath the surface and in our patriotic core, we’ll recognize that America was, is, and shall remain great—so long as we want it to be.