Land of the Free, Home of the Brave

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s op-ed notes that our nation’s failed response to COVID-19 should puncture the myth that the U.S. is the world’s greatest nation, or at least that’s how the headline frames it. Nguyen goes into detail on the horribleness of our nation:

America has a history of settler colonization and capitalism that ruthlessly exploited natural resources and people, typically the poor, the migratory, the black and the brown. That history manifests today in our impulse to hoard, knowing that we live in an economy of self-reliance and scarcity; in our dependence on the cheap labor of women and racial minorities; and in our lack of sufficient systems of health care, welfare, universal basic income and education to take care of the neediest among us.

What this crisis has revealed is that, while almost all of us can become vulnerable — even corporations and the wealthy — our government prioritizes the protection of the least vulnerable.

If this was a classic Hollywood narrative, the exceptionally American superhero, reluctant and wavering in the first act, would make the right choice at this turning point. The evil Covid-19 would be conquered, and order would be restored to a society that would look just as it did before the villain emerged.

But if our society looks the same after the defeat of Covid-19, it will be a Pyrrhic victory. We can expect a sequel, and not just one sequel, but many, until we reach the finale: climate catastrophe. If our fumbling of the coronavirus is a preview of how the United States will handle that disaster, then we are doomed.

What’s more interesting though is this idea that America is the greatest nation in the world and/or the greatest nation in history. By what possible metric? It’s a complete joke. For all the money our nation has, we really suck in how we treat our own citizens, not to mention the rest of the world. It’s the most unserious argument possible, and yet it is almost ubiquitous in politics.

I know that Americans have had their messianic side from the time of John Winthrop’s City Upon a Hill speech to Bush administration lackeys thinking that imposing an extremist version free market capitalism upon post-Saddam Iraq would lead to utopia. But in the current context, this narrative of American being the most awesome ever I think is a post-Vietnam thing about reclaiming the American narrative from Jane Fonda/the longhairs/the communists/the blacks/the media/everyone else who cost us the war. I think it’s part and parcel of the society that creates myths about Vietnam-era soldiers being spat upon by antiwar protestors, which never happened, or the popularity of John Rambo and Ronald Reagan as cultural/political figures. It’s a nation projecting its own desire to believe something about itself that is self-evidently not real, but with a population that simply can’t face the alternative, because that would look like Jimmy Carter giving a White House speech wearing a sweater and telling them to turn the heat down instead of Reagan kicking some Grenadan ass. It’s a self-mythology of a broken and racist nation.

A totally different topic, but I also very much appreciated Nguyen’s description of writing that begins the essay:

Sometimes people ask me what it takes to be a writer. The only things you have to do, I tell them, are read constantly; write for thousands of hours; and have the masochistic ability to absorb a great deal of rejection and isolation.

That’s the truth. Writing is horrible. But what else am I going to do?