The Myth Of America Must Die
Original (bad) art.
I don’t hate America. I hate its myth. So much of our society twists and contorts itself to purposefully perpetuate a lie that inflicts pain and suffering on our most disenfranchised. And much of the distortion is a choice, a conscious one, which makes it all the more revolting.
The Founding Fathers birthed a nation blessed in bigotry, racism, and hatred. In 1776, they had the opportunity to change the world. Instead, they chose to lie, writing, “All men are created equal,” with their fingers crossed behind their backs.
It’s the lie we continue to tell ourselves today, preventing us from seeing our truth.
There’s an argument tossed around that the Founders can’t be faulted for being men of their time—exonerating them for their capitulation to perpetuate human bondage for profit. It’s a tenuous, absurd argument because, if true, then these wealthy men knowingly overthrew their government to lower their taxes while also intentionally codifying a legally protected pipeline of enslaved labor vital to a functioning America into our founding documents.
Our first contradictory choice.
These were rich men, angry at taxes, and jettisoned to power and prominence by the business-minded bourgeoisie. The Founding Fathers didn’t invent a new form of government 240 years ago. America had subjects called slaves, and elites profited off the backs of Black Americans with glee. In 1776, our Founders squandered the opportunity to do something radical—something exceptional—to change the world and creat a nation of truly free people.
Instead, they chose to invent a myth. Who is George Washington but a king by another name, fed, housed, clothed, and brought to power on the backs of those he enslaved?
But there’s a problem with repeating a lie over, and over, and over again – the people think it true. Our country’s most downtrodden—labeled property less than a full person in our founding documents—began believing in the idea that “All men are created equal”, dreaming, thinking, knowing that it included them, too—and that their exclusion was a choice.
That is a bridge too far for those Americans who stormed the Capitol on January 6, the men and women—CEOs, jet-setting real estate agents, the children of judges—draped in Nazi flags, Trump regalia, and Confederate cosplay—that the ones our Founders explicitly subjugated would dare believe that the myth could, would, include them, too.
Look at their anger. Their frothing. The rage of White Supremacy walked into our hallowed halls of Democracy parroting the same racist rhetoric espoused since our founding to delegitimize and disenfranchise Black Americans and any power they wielded. Their hatred and disgust aren’t new; it’s engrained, embedded into the nation’s fabric, a thread that knits America’s myth together—and it’s unraveling.
But this is who we are, a nation of lies and myths, corrupted and twisted by those trying to cling to power by any means necessary, even if it means lying to toss out votes for no reason other than that wrong people voted. In the election’s aftermath, Republicans have rushed to their state legislatures, eager to introduce new forms of voter suppression with the explicit goal of making it harder to vote for those the insurrectionists wanted silenced.
That, too, for Republican lawmakers, is a deliberate choice, a disgustingly American one.
Irate racist insurrections stormed the Capitol in January because they believed the Black American vote was illegitimate, and they were enraged that their KKK-endorsed white supremacist-loving god-king couldn’t get four more years destroying the idea of American in hopes of creating some Whtie Jesusland of racism and hatred.
The sooner we destroy our mythical past, the sooner we can reconcile with the truth.
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