Photo © Alexander Missen
Photo © Alexander Missen
The United States is built on myth, dating back to the earliest days of the republic, when Thomas Jefferson wrote, “All men are created equal,” without any self-awareness. A slaveholder claiming equality — what kind of world could spawn such profoundly pathological cognitive dissonance?
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It is “self-evident” as Jefferson would say: one that considered itself “enlightened” enough to use reason and logic to uphold irrational beliefs; to craft holidays like “Thanksgiving” that celebrated the wholesale slaughter of Native Americans and whitewash history; to name cities, towns, and counties after Christopher Columbus, the architect of the Transatlantic Slave Trade — to do all these things and play innocent.
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The myth of “America” has appealed for hundreds of years. “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore” wrote poet Emma Lazarus, whose words were placed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in 1903. “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me.”
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Maybe they’ll make the cut, maybe not. Maybe boats filled with fleeing Jewish refugees will be turned around and set back to Nazi Germany; maybe their rafts filled with Haitian boat people fleeing Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier were deported upon arrival throughout the 1980s. How sonnets written in their name have school children memorized?
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Photo © Alexander Missen