Evaporating Whiteness


EVAPORATING WHITENESS AND DEMOCRACY, PART ONE



Reading the historian Carl Lotus Becker's Freedom and Responsibility in the American Way of Life (1944) uncovers tiny grains of insight about the nature of chaos. "The method of electing the president," in Becker's opinion," has been by common consent so far changed that the procedure now followed is, in spirit if not in form, a violation of the Constitution.  But in its structure and operation the American system of federated governments is essentially what the founding fathers made it…..Nevertheless, admirable as the American system of government is, and partly because it is so admirable, we need to be reminded that a system of government designed to meet the problems of the eighteenth century is not necessarily in all respects suited to meet the problems of the twentieth" (Vintage, pp. 83-84).



Right, Dr. Becker.  Were you alive in 2018, you'd probably claim the system fails to meet the most urgent needs of the twenty-first.



When in an allegory of world histories, the Tribe of Trump elected (according to the Electoral College) a wealthy barbarian of great ego and small intellect to be president in 2016, Heaven closed its eyes and Hell belched with glee.  The fiction of justice fathered the dystopian dream Americans currently  inhabit, and the dream dared not utter its mother's name.  



The birth of the dream was as predictable as the birth of Christ, because myth has absolute power in its construction of self.  Afflicted with greed, a seemingly bottomless desire for death, and hatred of self and others, a tribe commits rash acts. Some call the acts irrational, even insane.  The tribe doesn't see it that way.  The tribe believes itself to be normal, patriotic, Jesus-loving and God-fearing; the tribe is convinced it has been chosen to bring urban renewal to Jerusalem and the Last Judgment to the planet with toxic narratives more deadly than the venom of a tiapan.  It is baffled that the wretched of the earth refuse to embrace such pristine theology and to recognize how sublime that democratic /republican  theology is.  It resorts to all means necessary to make the world safe for the dream and its evaporating whiteness.



to be continued…..



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            July 14, 2018

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