The Curse of a Promised Land
Wednesday, October 10, 2018 17:49
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“The Curse of a Promised Land”
by Umair Haque
“In recent essays, I’ve advanced a strange, bizarre, and foolish notion. That America labors under something like a curse. The curse of a promised land. What a funny and odd thing to say, I know. And yet how many promised lands do you see over which the specters of violence, ruin, and hate don’t seem to perpetually hang, like a funeral shroud? Over which the very same tribes seem doomed to fight over and over again, acting out something like an endless, perpetual, recurring tragedy? And isn’t all that precisely what America seems trapped by?
Now, this is going to be a jarring and dark essay. I recommend you don’t read it at all, in fact. Go watch Anderson Cooper or the latest sitcom. Do something acceptable. And if you still want to think about this strange and grim question – why is America collapsing before it became a civilized society? – with me, then come back. But in a while – if you really want to.
If you want me to put in that question in the terms of American discourse, it goes like this. America is a uniquely backwards place, an outlier among nations, a place that “grew” economically but never really progressed much socially, it always has been, and it seems unable, ever, really, to shake off the crushing weight of its past – why is that? But I don’t want to speak to you like a pundit in this essay – with the stilted language of neoliberal quasi-statistical pseudoscience. Just as one tiny and mortal human being to another, I suppose, starting here. It is as if America’s soul is broken by some kind of terrible curse. But why? And who cursed it, anyways?
The curse of a promised land is this. It is a place – a dream, maybe – which can only belong to the true and pure. Ah, but then how can a promised land ever become a democracy? How will the true and pure prove who is untrue and impure – except with violence, cruelty, and dehumanization? So a promised land is a place which the chosen people must fight viciously for supremacy, for absolute domination, for total elimination, no compromises allowed, not just for limited victory – in just the same way that if the Garden of Eden was before you, you’d probably greedily, hungrily need to have it all to yourself. And yet isn’t all that just the tragedy America seems doomed to endlessly repeat, from the day it was made, right down to this one? How funny. How strange. How sad.
Let’s start with the land, and come back to the promise. Now, nations and peoples have always fought over land – which is a symbol as much as it is a material reality – with wars of all kinds, you are very correct to point out. And yet in America, that struggle was played out in an especially weird and terrible way. The land was only to belong to one tribe – whites, because they were the superior ones: supremacy. Among them, only to one kind of person — men: patriarchy. And those people, who were the only real ones at all, were to own everything on the land – not just crops and rivers and cattle, but human beings, too: capitalism, which was indistinguishable, really, from slavery, and then from segregation. So the idea of a promised land shaped the three systems – capitalism, supremacy, and patriarchy – which were to one day cause America to collapse, from the very day it was born.
You are correct to note that Europeans, for example, fought endless wars over which nation would possess which region. But you are incorrect to equate those wars with the terrible and unforgivable crimes America committed upon itself. Europeans did not want to wholly eradicate and enslave and genocide one another – only Americans did, for centuries (and actually did). Americans were born contesting the promised land, and so they came to see one another as something like bitter, existential adversaries, enemies, antagonists – no coexistence was possible, only a kind of false, uneasy peace between tribes, which masked a wish for absolute destruction and total domination.
Hence, from the very beginning of American history – unlike we are told – it was hardly the home of the brave and the land of the free: in fact, any kind of depraved cruelty, any kind of violent and insane inhumanity – maiming slaves, for example – was perfectly justifiable, morally, ethically, socially, and culturally. But that is what continues to be true today, more or less – where else do you see being massacred at school? People crowdfunding insulin? – because the inescapable curse the fates cast upon a promised land, laughing, is savagery, brutality, and cruelty. That is all that such a people come to know, cherish, prize, admire, and desire. Value become perverted, and good becomes bad, while bad becomes good.
But then how can such a place ever really become a democracy? A civilized society? A nation capable of progress? How can norms, rules, codes or values of decency ever really develop? Perhaps you are beginning to see the problem. But isn’t America playing out just the same tribal battles all over again today – superiority was promised to my tribe!! You don’t matter, only I do! – and has it ever not been reenacting just that tragedy? Yet don’t we call people doomed to enact a tragedy…cursed? Let us come back to those strange and absurd questions.
The promised land, of course, later became the American Dream – it wore a suit and held a briefcase now, instead of carrying a whip and a gun – but the idea remained just the same. The Dream was promised to a chosen few – do I really need to spell out who? – and it was inherent virtue, hard work, responsibility, and so on, of course, which earned it. The lazy, sinful, shiftless rest – inherently, naturally so – they didn’t deserve it, so why bother giving it to them? Hence, America never really invested in itself as a society at all – the same old systems, capitalism, patriarchy, and supremacy, were used, in much the same ways, as tools of exploitation, only perhaps with a little less overt brutality. But that is not progress, really – so much as an inability to change. So let us dig a little deeper, into the logic behind all this.
Who was it that promised this land, this dream – a kind of garden of Eden – to the chosen people, then? Well, people do not make such promises to one another – they are just mortal things. Only the gods can promise that a land is a place which belongs, for no reason whatsoever, in perpetuity, to the chosen few. Who else does the choosing? And so from the very beginning, America came to think of itself as a place especially dear to sacred and holy privilege, a place held right there in the bosom of the divine. Hence, manifest destiny, every kind of god-bothering imaginable, pledging allegiance to one nation under God, and so forth. Hence, also, that special kind of American foolishness – exceptionalism: we’re the chosen few, the land of the free, the home of the brave (just don’t look too hard at the fact that we don’t allow people of different races to love one another. God loves us all, though.)
That fatal, foolish, bizarre idea – that the land was promised to the chosen people, as an indisputable fact, was going to go on warp American in ways which no one could really see. America began inventing all kinds of strange theories which are still with it today – and doom it, really, never to make progress. One such theory is “natural rights”, aka, rights are God-given. But if rights are God-given, then human beings can never expand them. Hence, Europeans have rights to healthcare and retirement and childcare – but Americans never, it seems, will. How could they? When rights come from God, that also means that societies can never move an inch – they are as immovable as mountains. But this laughable theory of rights is just a small example – America is collapsing into, among other things, at least in places, a kind of bizarre patriarchal theocracy, the Texas Taliban, which is a perfectly logical result of being a promised land, too.
Hence, Americans play out a strange kind of ritual. Instead of really making any kind of political, social, or economic progress – they send each other (LOL) hopes and prayers. Trapped trying to climb up the immovable systems of supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy, Americans abuse one another serially, then go to church like no one else in the world, where they pray mightily for forgiveness or hope (which are more or less the same thing). But they’re not praying to the same God, really. Some of them are praying to a God who smiles when predator drones burn babies alive, some of them are praying to a God who cries “hallelujah!” when little children are put in concentration camps, and some of them are praying to a God who has a plan for them to get rich. Nietzsche was wrong. God isn’t dead. In America, God is whoever anyone needs him to be. A flimflam man? A billionaire wearing a toga? A commando wielding a missile launcher? Sure. So sorry your kid got shot at school – hopes and prayers.
Americans are still where they have always been. Fighting desperately to be the chosen people – but not to make progress with and for one another. But why should they bother with that? That, too, is the curse of a promised land – people compete to be chosen by gods not even worth praying to, instead of cooperating, here and now, in the few brief moments they have on this earth, to create lives worth living.
And yet the land, which became the dream, wasn’t promised to everyone, or even anyone – only those who were inherently worthy, pure, true. But how do we prove that we are the inherently worthy ones – and they are not – apart from praying harder? Well, one must prove that one is superior, above the rest, that they are less than human. Every promised land soon enough becomes a place where human beings separate themselves into the human and nonhuman. Norms and codes and laws of dehumanization develop. Isn’t that just where America was – and finds itself all over again today?
You see, when a land is promised to people – there is no need for any kind of social, political, or economic change, in the direction of greater equality, freedom, or justice, to really ever happen. Only to contest who “people” really are. Why should there be any progress? All we are really here to do, in that case, is to show that we are the chosen ones – and that everyone else is below us, beneath us. Isn’t that what American life is — and always has been, really? Vying for superiority, buying a sense of status, preening ourselves as better than the next person – hey! I’m one of the chosen ones. You – you’re nobody. Nothing. I’ll drag you down, to prove it. Bang! There goes a society. Norms of cruelty, callous indifference, falsity, and rage emerge – not those of gentleness and wisdom and truth. Trumps and Kavanaughs soon enough rise to the top, bellowing and mocking and taunting.
So Americans go on and on, repeating the necessary tragedy that is the price of a promised land – an endless battle for supremacy, in which people compete to debase and demean one another, to take away one another’s humanity and personhood, in which people stoop to pull each other down lower and lower, but never, ever lift each other up. Who will prove themselves the most cruel, the most indifferent, the most brutal and angry and violent – thus, superior, and therefore inherently worthy?
That too is why we see waves of entitlement and bitter resentment rolling across America – just like they always have – spilling over into dark and violent sentiments, just as they always have. All this was promised to me! Wait — what was? Superiority over you! The soil, and everything on it. The dream! You don’t belong here, you dirty Mexican, immigrant, foreigner, Jew, you slut, you whore, you nobody – you asked for it. If I don’t get what’s mine, well, I’ll burn everything down – beginning with you. When a land is a promised place, then there is a steep price to pay, too. The people to whom it was promised never really become anything like remotely capable of genuine democracy, equality, or freedom – they are just thwarted masters and lords waiting their turn to do their worst.
I have tried – and I think failed – to express in too many words a strange and baffling idea. Every promised land is an accursed place – because now it is only for the chosen few, the true and pure. It can never be a place of common wealth, public good, or shared investment, to use those stale old terms. And America, unfortunately, is one such land. The promise itself justifies brutality, violence, cunning, greed, ruthlessness – all the forms of ignorance and ugliness known to humankind – as tribes compete for dominion over it, by proving their inherent superiority. And then people within those tribes must compete, all over again, for position in them, too.
In that way, the curse of a promised land is that it will never really be a democracy, a civilized society, or a place of happiness, trust, belonging, and sanity. It will be something like a battlefield, haunted by old ghosts, goading the living to do battle with each other for the sake of the laughing, vengeful, insatiable dead. A promised land is a house with a curse upon it. It will be doomed to forever play out the very same tragedy, over and over again – actors on a stage – who never quite understand the meaning or purpose of their words and motions.
So a promised land is also a place which will never transcend its history, because it can never reckon with its truth. That truth, which is too painful to admit, too terrible to bear, is this. Nobody was chosen, and nothing was promised. No gods gave this land to anyone, and no people are better than any others. Everything was a lie. All of it – the violence, brutality, cruelty, hate, greed. None of those lies were worth any of the lives they took. It was all folly, ignorance, stupidity – which led to nothing but ruin, over and over again. And yet how can a nation let go of the only thing it has ever really been, known, done, or desired? The tragedy repeats itself. Don’t we still tell the pleasing, comforting lies – and avoid the bitter, painful truths?
Perhaps you see the problem now. Or perhaps you don’t. That is for you to judge.”
○
Justin Hayward, “The Promised Land”
Source: http://coyoteprime-runningcauseicantfly.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-curse-of-promised-land.html
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