|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
[Want even more content from FPM? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more—now for just $3.99/month. Click here to sign up.]
Over 150 years the concept of the Great American Novel was invented in The Nation magazine. The mission of this proposed literary “American epic” was to capture “the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence.” Today, The Nation is a hodgepodge of woke rants. The magazine no longer believes in the greatness of America. And how can there be a great American novel without a great America?
America, as a recent essay at the magazine mocking the idea of the Great American Novel puts it, is an “absurdity.” The American novels that the magazine and its leftist ilk praise are either outrages or absurdities. The topics under discussion are identity, race and class, that indeed appear to make any notion of a single America singularly absurd.
That now ancient essay calling for a Great American Novel in the aftermath of the Union’s supremacy in the Civil War had assumed that there was to be a unified America, but the Confederacy’s multicultural great-grandchildren reject the Union as anything but a tool for forcing their preferred radical policies on the country.
But if indeed there is no America, if we’re just Yugoslavia with a variety of unhappy warring tribes struggling against oppression, why not break the whole thing up? Without the rationale of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the conviction that America is a grand experiment worth fighting for, why fight for her at all?
Officially the ongoing purpose of America is to atone for the existence of America, redistributing wealth, power and rights, and reallocating them to the formerly ‘oppressed’ and redistributing narratives, replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day, the national anthem with the black national anthem, and American history with the 1619 Project. Only the complete inversion of America can atone for America.
But why not take a short cut to this tribalist utopia by just breaking up America?
The ‘People’s History’ reading of America as a race and class based tyranny is universally accepted now among the NPR and Harvard set and yet the same regional bureaucrats who begin their sessions with land acknowledgements to vanished Indian tribes never give a thought to breaking up the United States. They are not out to undermine the national governing structure of the country: only its culture.
It’s that notion of an American epic grounded in a national identity, at times tragic but ultimately heroic, that they are coming after. They don’t want to destroy America as a state, but as a nation. When we talk about them wanting to destroy America, we don’t mean that the Left wants to destroy FEMA, the Department of Education, the FBI, local state governments, the local community public schools and parking authorities or any of the structures that they falsely claim are “systemically racist”.
What they want to destroy is the idea of America, the spirit of it, while leaving the dead bones of it intact. They want American power, without the American soul. It’s the machinery of government that they want, the stone and the steel, untethered from any limits, constitutional or electoral, retasked with the mission of building a totalitarian state.
That’s why the Left chose a cultural war rather than a civil war. It’s not the government they’re at war with… it’s with us. As long as there are people who call themselves Americans and have it mean something, the leftist grip on power will be threatened.
To subjugate us, they have to destroy our culture and our identity through our stories.
And so they’ve replaced the national epic with a national anti-epic that anyone who has been to school or college in the last quarter century is already intimately familiar with. Instead of discovery, there is colonialism, instead of hard work, there’s slavery, instead of the journey westward, there’s genocide, and instead of progress, there’s oppression.
The search for the Great American Novel was a foolish proposition. America was always its own story, too great and intimate, overarching and personal, to limit to the pages of any book. The Great Anti-American Novel is a simpler narrative in the way that the antithesis to greatness, the dark mirror and satirical distorted image, is cruder than the work they set out to tear down, but that makes it easier to grasp. America in its true form is hard to encompass, but call it racist and it becomes all too easy to sum up.
America, they’ve been telling us for at least a century, is stupid, ugly, greedy and mean. It’s slave ships, not frontiers, imperialistic wars not patriotic last stands, genocidal massacres of Indians, not pioneers carving out homesteads from the wilderness. We’re racists who tell ourselves dumb stories about liberty, and we’re the mass murderers who bombed the innocent of Dresden and Hiroshima. We do not deserve to exist.
The only thing to do, they tell us, is to let go. Stop fighting. Stop believing. As Oprah put it, we just have to die, as individuals and as a nation, and let our enemies take over
That way they don’t have to go to the actual trouble of killing us if we erase ourselves.
The Great Un-American Story is genocidal in that way. It’s meant to wipe out a people. Us. It’s a poisonous epic that dominates art, literature, music and film. It pervades academia as thoroughly as Marxism-Leninism filled the Soviet university. Patriotism never had a fraction of its grip on our society at any time in American history.
And if we are to survive unto the next generation and the one after that, we must meet that culture of death with a culture of life. It is not enough to attack the Left, we must affirm what America was, is and shall be, to write our own Great American Novel, not perhaps in words, but much more importantly, in the stories we pass down to our children and grandchildren, because if we do not tell our story, they will.
The Left got this far in no small part by telling a compelling story. Telling stories is at the heart of what it does. And it understands, sometimes better than we do, that the stories we tell make us who we are. Once upon a time the stories we told were of the Bible, of Valley Forge, of Andrew Jackson and Pearl Harbor, now they’ve been displaced by pop culture, and some rage and complain that the pop culture, always liberal anyway, is now ‘woke’, and that it promotes an even more extreme version of the Un-American Story.
But that is what happens when we outsource our stories to corporations, to their class of leftist writers and actors, and then complain that they don’t like us, rather than telling our own stories, singing our own songs and taking root in our history and our faith. The culture is not Hollywood or Amazon, that’s consumer culture, the true culture is us. The key to reviving America is not out there, it’s in us: it’s in the stories that we tell ourselves.
We can still tell our Great American Story. And we can make it great once again.
Crossing the Delaware and Valley Forge should be taught in the Schools instead of this America was Founded on Slavery Lie
The Great American Novel is “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand.
One day she’ll be on Mount Rushmore.
This latest comment of yours actually made me laugh. Maybe you should ask your doctor for some meds to stem the insanity.
The story of Yankee Doodle showed us how to deal with insult as a nation. The story of war hero Benedict Arnold was a cautionary tale. A lot of our founding stories, and national stories teach virtue, common sense, and compassion (the Civil War’s angel of Mary’s Heights). It’s no wonder the left dropped them from curriculums.
Wow!!! That was some powerful stuff. I’m a big fan of Russian epics – Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Boris Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Anatoli Rybakov, and who many regard as the greatest Russian writer of the 20th Century, Vasily Grossman. Grossman’s life was an epic story in and of itself – his mother was murdered by the Nazi’s in the Holocaust, as a reporter for the Red Army newspaper, Red Star, he attended every major battle on the Eastern Front in World War II from Moscow to the Fall of Berlin, he had his script for Life and Fate confiscated by the KGB and banned for “200 years”, and his article “The Hell of Treblinka”, the first inside look at a Nazi Death Camp, became evidence in the Nuremberg trials.
As an American, there’s something about the Russian spirit that appeals to me. Maybe it’s that a people can produce such works of beauty while engulfing, subsuming and surrounding themselves in pure evil and human wickedness at the behest of the most depraved ideological mindset, not unlike the Germans, whose intellectual gifts are more logical and empirical. It reminds me of Romans 1, where the Apostle Paul says, ” For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things…For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions [or a depraved mind].”
I think the American experience is different from other peoples of the world in that Americans’ embrace of the God of the Bible in our early settlement of the continent, our founding, westward expansion, through a civil war, industrialization, two world wars, and a global struggle against Communism, led a humble people achieving greatness. American greatness is tied to our reliance on the God of the Bible. When we were a God-fearing people, God rewarded us, protected us, and guided us; and, just as the Germans, Russians, or any people turn their back on God, so will He abandon them to their own depraved mind.
I think the Great American Novel – East of Eden by John Steinbeck – sums this up well with the word “Timshel”, defined as “thou mayest overcome sin”. At the crescendo of the story when the protagonist’s fate is summed up with that of the story of Cain’s in the Bible, when the Lord tells Cain, “Thou may overcome sin.”
America is the midst of a spiritual battle between Good and Evil in the seen and unseen realms, but if we repent and put our faith in the Lord, then he will relent and show His face to us once more. The story is yet unfulfilled.
Marxism comes from Judeo-Christianity, it shares all the philosophical fundamentals of religion but gives those religious fundamentals the pretense of secular science.
Judeo-Christianity prepared the ground for Marxism and Marxism is preparing the ground back to theocracy.
Theocracy is totalitarianism and the end game and thrust of Judeo-Christianity. is theocracy.
“I believe that the medievals understood much better than the moderns on what basis to build a totalitarian society that would last and not collapse in less than a century. They did it and the people in the rising religious movement today know that full well. They’re the ones who have millions, upon millions, upon millions, of followers and a real insight into the fact that economics is not the crucial factor, but philosophy and culture are…. Religion has been the root of [totalitarianism] from the beginning, it has ruled in disguised forms, and still is, and now the disguise had to be stripped off… What socialism is doing is really helping religion, the bigger the statism, the more people grow accustomed to government rule over everything, the more people are ready for religionists to take over the lead from the more secular side… The socialists are building the basis for totalitarianism but only the religionists are going to cash in on it and take over.” – Leonard Peikoff
Posting the same uninspiring, moronic “Marxism comes from Judeo-Christianity” garbage every so often and the equally silly L. Piehole crap, and expecting it to catch on, is the definition of insanity.
In other words, Objectivism is the definition of insanity. But after all, you actually think Ayn Rand wrote the great American Novel “Atlas Shrugged” and that somehow she will be on Mt Rushmore.
Wrong way around. Evangelical churches abandoned their biblical and historical theology in favor of the liberal post-war consensus that erases western nations and their peoples. Too many churches make significant money participating in resettlement programs and teaching that Christianity alone is sufficient grounds for a multicultural utopia. They are wrong and they are usually progressive liberals.
The great Christian reformers (whose teachings and people founded this nation) correctly observed that God’s grace does NOT destroy nature. Modern evangelicals erroneously teach that it does.
Christianity is good for every nation, but Haiti is majority Christian and we are incompatible with them.
The United States of America would have been INCONCEIVABLE to the New England Puritans. These serious Christians did not come to the shores of Massachusetts to found a land of individual liberty but to found their own Christian, totalitarian, theocracy.
The USA was founded during the last years of the Age of Enlightenment, it could not have been founded in any other era. Certainly not so long as Christianity was taken literally and fundamentally SERIOUSLY in all of its comprehensive totality. Cafeteria Christianity can create a semi-free country and Cafeteria Christianity was the actual kind of Christianity the Founders believed in, it was no longer SERIOUS Christianity.
“Since the golden age of Greece, there has been only one era of reason in twenty-three centuries of Western philosophy. During the final decades of that era, the United States of America was created as an independent nation. This is the key to the country—to its nature, its development, and its uniqueness: the United States is the nation of the Enlightenment.” – Leonard Peikoff
You couldn’t find the essence of the enlightenment or America with two hands and a flashlight.
God forbid you actually read what the Founders wrote instead relying on the murmurings of one bitter annoying atheist Lenny the Piehole.
Schools should teach the failure of socialism at Plymouth Rock and what Governor Bradford did to significantly increase output and eliminate starvation, Trigger warning: massive tariffs were not the cure,
Hence, the key battlefront is the recapturing of our educational system from Pre-K through Post-Graduate. Look what John Dewey, The Frankfurt School refugees and Bill Ayers were able to do by turning successive generations of American school children into self-hating automatons.
Unless you serve the God of Abraham then you serve a god that requires the sacrifice of the blood of men. As such you are drawn into the destruction of others and ultimately yourself. We have a history before us of examples of peoples that seem to be civilized but that descend into bloodthirsty devils for childish reasons. It is spiritual. God gives them over. It is up to us to reach them for a God that gave up the blood of his son to cleanse us of the sins we commit.
FANTASTIC ESSAY!!!