Americaniosity.
The Adolescent Misapprobation of Identity in the Archeology of Nationhood.
Disclaimer
This essay has been several years in its gestation and writing. I come to it from a personal background of being raised under a systemically racist ideology, implemented increasingly, in its early manifestations, by measures eventually enabling a police state of surveillance and subversive control. Like many others, I became more than just a witness to a nation subjected to political tyranny. I grew up during the ‘golden age’ of Apartheid in South Africa; itself a theocratic based ideology. Its appropriated biblical tenets would that the ‘white men’ be the guardians of their lesser black brethren’. It is the country from which, under extreme political pressure, I was forcibly exiled in 1993. I am aware that my experience serves, in part, as a point of departure for the essay/critical commentary. At the time of commencing this between 2021 and 2023, neither the United Kingdom or the USA had experienced anything like totalitarianism. Neither country had, nor has yet tasted, or experienced, the daily hellfire of political tyranny, the likes of which much of South America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and many other countries across the world have experienced.
Back in 1986 Frank Zappa, on Crossfire, ‘infamously’ - depending on whom you might ask - in defense of his contentious lyrics, in a debate on censorship, forecast ‘a fascist theocracy’ as the greater threat to America, than Communism.
“The biggest threat to America today is not communism. It’s moving America towards a fascist theocracy. Everything that’s happened under the Reagan Administration is steering us right down that pipe … When you have a government that prefers a certain moral code derived from a certain religion, and that moral code turns into legislation to suit one certain religious point of view, and if that code happens to be very very right wing, almost to Attilla the Hun . . .”
Myth versus Reality
In 2021, thirty five years later, as Nancy Pelosi brought down the hammer on an unprecedented second impeachment of a President in his first term of office, a populist victimology of the ‘unheard & unseen’ claimed ownership of “America and Americanism”. In a broader scope of sociographic self-profiling, this is nothing new in ambit of ideologues. Whether home-grown grass root activism rising to the occasion, with a sense of self-congratulatory entitlement, or other manipulative architects of a more ambitious and grandiose ideological illusion, there is always a tipping point.
Watching the drama of the January 6th insurrection unfold, a glaring aspect of this victimology struck me: I can only describe it as American 'political adolescence’. An adolescence partly derived from the youth of its republic, partly from an unresolved historical complex about the civil war, particularly in terms of an ingrained idealist sense of Americana and what it means to be American, and partly from a religious orthodoxy of righteousness; of white being right and the only legitimate claimant to any kind of true blue Americanism.
The impact wrought by failure to ‘overthrow’ in the aftermath of January 6th, was bound to feel injurious in the extreme; from the First Lady who, in the midst of momentary anarchy, lamented being lambasted by the press, while removed enough from real events, to be arranging a photo shoot of her rug collection - to hardcore presidential followers loudly threatening to ‘up the ante’, oblivious to the fact that hot air rises. Subsequently, arrests of the January 6th offenders led to convictions and sentencing. Nothing of this however really shifted the political lay of the land; why should it? Nothing of the status quo has been seriously undermined.
Generally speaking, violence always arises out of impotence. It is the expression of a vacuous hope held by those who have no power, as distinct from state aggression. Was the Capitol Hill insurrection the wake up call the political system needed? - which is not to imply they ( the insurgents), had or have a clue how to remedy any damage, or how to regain anything like political integrity. Hardly. If it was anything, it was an ‘inconsequential’ pressure burst in the context of what Trump claimed it symbolised.
In mid-October 2023, thirty-three months since Jan 13th 2021, early US political polls suggested that if the impeachment trial found the then-encumbent president guilty, it might go some way to reversing their (the Republican Party) image as a hollowed out shell of political ambition and scant leadership. In the face of it all, it revealed the extent of party political impotence across the political spectrum. If Democracy, especially in America, stood a hope, much political growing up was required on both sides of the political party isle. From the outside it looked and felt as if the ‘American psyche’ has never moved on from the civil war and that ‘wound’ glared openly in front of the whole world, revealing that in fact there was nothing really great of America to make ‘great again’ - if not just another resurrection of that same myth. It all pointed to what could only perpetuate the cycle of racism, despite the emotionally charged momentum of ‘Black Lives Matter’.
At the time I wrote a note to myself:
I don’t think any reversal or change is possible until they deal with the confederacy issue: The Americans need to face the hypocrisy of what the idea of being American means, versus how the world experiences what being American is - that myth has to burn, shatter and be irreversibly broken before the country can begin any kind of serious move forward - Europe and Asia have gone through countless insurrections, invasions and styles of tyrannical dictatorships - America to date has behaved more like an arrogant belligerent teenager.
Against History in the Name of Self-interest.
In the absence of true Statesmanship, what the rest of the world saw was political immersion in a deeply problematic two party system, underpinned by undemocratic voting laws, which change constantly; a political spectrum seemingly defined by denial and hypocrisy, systemic racism, police violence etc, and the impact this had in the evocation of an unsustainable, apparently irresolvable historical ideal. In its stead has been this encompassing belief that power and greatness constitutes America- Americanism, when really it has neither.
Here I draw from something Hannah Arendt writes about the relationship between violence and power:
“Power and violence are opposites; where one rules absolutely the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course, it ends in power’s disappearance.”
I could dissect the nuances between the different kinds of dictatorships and how they come to power, however that is a different kind of topic. I feel it fair thought to describe Trump as a pseudo-revolutionary; he offered his core MAGA-followers an invitation to participate in an illusory revolution - there was never an intention for a real one and in so doing, he engineered enough of an emotionally charged diversion, creating a participatory deflection, which gave him the necessary freedom in his second term of office (regardless of how that came about), to instigate the ‘invisible revolution’ in plain sight, while explicitly exploiting the ‘drainage of the swamp’ for personal gain.
As the 2021 presidential double impeachment drama unfolded and the Capitol insurrection followed, all that confederacy symbolism and nationalist rhetoric had me thinking about a notion historically attributed in musicology. There is a descriptive attribute given in particular, to the seemingly characteristic elements of music from a particular region or country that makes it instantly recognisable. In the late 18th and early 19th century, a Spanish style of composition became popular, employed by mainly non-Spanish composers.
Works include Jota Aragonesa by Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka, Capricho Espanol, Op. 34 by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Iberia by Claude Debussy, Rapsodia Espanol, Pavana Para Una Infanta Difuntay and most famously, Bolero by Maurice Ravel, among others.
This was the stylised cultural appropriation of an idea of what made a country/ nationhood culturally ‘recognisable’; specifically the notion of composing in the style of Spain, which gave rise to the musicologist characterisation of 'Spaniosity'. More recently it was used in reference to Africa; Africaniosity, in the context of 'world contemporary composition’ that sounds emblematically African. Paul Simon’s Graceland is perhaps the most recognisable of this concept.
In all this internalised irresolution, America finds expression in deflection; violence and prejudice, aggressive foreign policy, in identifying with its military industrial complex, in its extreme reliance on surveillance, in over-wrought consumerism - all of which shapes Americanism as a form 'victimology' manifested as a delusory belief that is 'something' concrete, of value, of greatness, when really it is still only an idea of itself. And consequently, arguably, in the continued glaring absence of political Statemanship / leadership, the only thing that constitutes this notion of nationhood is a mistaken approbation of itself as an idea, that which amounts, similarly to Spaniosity, to an essence of a contrived notion of itself - a form of political kitsch. Americaniosity is effectively what constituted the imperialistic ideal America sold to the world as ‘The American Dream’ - and to itself. ‘Americaniosity’ still feels an appropriate descriptor for the deepening American identity crisis, as well as having been the expansionist essence of its anti- communist foreign policy. The most troubling irony of it, is that it is what so successfully opened the door to the currently unfolding of domestic tyranny.
Self Identifiers: A Dilemma of Naming Itself.
Fast forward to Donald Trump’s second presidential term. If anything would embody the criticality of a national identity crisis, held in the palm of political adolescence, the blatant way in which Musk-Trump bromance hijacked the electoral process and held the American public to ransom, was the perfect storm from which the current of Authoritarianism would emerge. As if a character in an absurd play, the discourse of what it means to be a Democracy or Republic, in the American context, can sound like that relative at family lunches whose endless rant is nothing more than an insistence on being the more correct version of any one else’s opinion. Here is a summation on the nature of that very topic by Robert Arnold on Instagram from his tiktok clip, who very kindly allows me to quote it in full here …
Divinity of Purpose
The first dilemma in the notion of ‘Americanism’ derives from the idea of a divinity of purpose. The very idea and description of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, as being divinely inspired, established a deeply problematic reverence, as a cornerstone of self-justification. Divinity of purpose is not intrinsic; it is an exposition with a fundamental ideological goal and within the broader context of political endeavour, it was not the brand new idea conceived solely within this particular nationalist context. It is an old attribution and common to the very construct of nationalism. The distinctive differentiation of attributing it as a core value of Americanism, was the held belief that the ‘American way of life’ was so desirable as to be the only one worthy of living and as such, ‘exporting it’ was for the ‘greater good of mankind’
“The liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world; it is God’s gift to humanity. Americans are blessed to have men and women like you protecting us, and defending the cause of freedom across the world. May God bless you, and may He watch over our country.”
4G. W. Bush, ‘Presidential Message’, 24 December 2003.
Neoconservatives and the Fallacy of Virtue
The theocratic precedent of Zappa’s future fascist governance is traceable back to the the Puritan colonialism of 17th Century New England, most especially to John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts, who held the religious notion of Americans as especially blessed. Close to a century later, this theocratic ideal echoed in Andrew Jackson’s advocacy of a ‘manifest destiny’ - a god-given mission to extend this way of life throughout the continent and it spread into justification for global expansionism in the 1890’s and throughout the 20th Century.
At its core, this notion of ‘American exceptionalism’ has never been just an nationalistic ideal. It has been held as a moral imperative and guiding virtue, so much so, it could only ever be America’s post-war imperialist, anti-communist foreign policy agenda, to be exported and instilled on foreign soil. Its imperialistic ambition includes establishing the ‘America way / dream’ elsewhere - and it precludes a re-imagining of foreign countries in its own image. It speaks to an unsustainable and unrealistic fundamentalist expression of a ‘socio-geographical god complex’.
This complexity of politically contextualising faith, patriotism, cultural identity, aspirational economic happiness, in a word ‘Americaniosity’ , into reshaping other national identities, through the enforcement of conservative virtues, ascribing Americanism through theoretical and practical alternatives, is the closest to an expression of an entitled misapprobation of identity in the archeology of nationhood as there can be, just to ‘install’ an Americanised version of social mobility, material abundance, alongside an expectation of a general acceptance of the virtues of liberal individualism, and a ‘pluralist’ political tradition. Such expansionist political ambition could and can only ever lead to conflict.
On home soil, it could be argued that the fallacy of such political idealism falls totally short of a broader moral obligation; falls short of its own standard, by its own decimation and eventual exclusion of the country’s original inhabitants. To an outsider it looks and feels like a reckoning which it still refuses to face, and in such denial, lies a politically inclined adolescent kind of hypocrisy that is proving to be its undoing. The lack of integrity within the mainstream two party system leaves a hollowed out house of cards, susceptible to being blown down by the spectacle of materialist and the cult of populist idolatry and with it, opens the proverbial gates to Frank Zappa’s fascist theocracy - Trump already envisions himself as King and Pope. It’s not a major leap to see he lays claim to being the founding father of America’s ‘unquestionable new found greatness’ - diplomacy is hardly his calling card.
Against this historic proscenium of what broadens out into a wider archeology of nationhood, it is plain to see the intersectional ideological principles between Apartheid, Americanism and Zionism, bringing together totalitarian forces intent on protecting the state and its economy, before its citizenry and the devastation it leaves in its wake is secondary.
But this “‘totalitarian indifference’ to moral considerations, is actually based upon a reversal of all our legal and moral concepts, which ultimately rest on the commandment: Thou shalt not kill.’ Against this, totalitarian ‘morals’ preaches almost openly the precept: Thou shalt kill! The assumption, which can be seen very clearly in Himmler’s speeches to the SS generals in Eastern occupied territories, is that this precept is as difficult to follow as its opposite. In other words, the peculiarity of totalitarian crimes is that they are committed for different reasons and in a different framework which has a ‘morality’ of its own. The morality is contained in the ideology, or rather in what totalitarianism has made of the respective ideologies which it inherited from the past.”
Hannah Arendt
From the film Newsroom.
Video: Orquesta Sinfónica Simon Bolivar de Venezuela Conductor: Jesús López Cobos Performed at Sala de Conciertos Simón Bolívar de Centro de Acción Social por la Música, on June 15 2012, Caracas Venezuela
Featuring South African composer and vocalist Bakithi Kumalo on bass guitar
Coup in Chile September 11, 1973
With thanks to Sam Rasnake and Mark Chadbourn for their initial thorough reading and comments and to Robert L Arnold .
I shall need to read through this a few times but its very astute. Frank was right though wasn't he? A visionary well ahead of his time. Nice work Amantine.
Exceptionally well-written article, Amantine. Ever since my university years of the Sixties, I’ve thought of America as existing only in the geography of imagination. I also agree that the ideas/ideals of the Confederacy have never been adequately resolved.