The Soul of America

Honestly speaking. America now is white men vs all. Shameful.

Earlier this week an angry mob descended on the US Capitol...and we decided to watch a history documentary on Friday night? It turned out to be a good choice. This film was a sad look at our nation's history, but also a reminder that we have been here before and can transcend even our worst moments.

John Meacham is an amazing and brilliant person - a product of the South who sees an America that has repeatedly failed to fulfill its promises of "liberty and justice for all." And an America that has almost constantly struggled between its "better angels" and worst impulses. Showing us that today's divisions are not new, the film is both reassuring and depressing. Meacham highlights a few of the United States failures (the struggle for women's suffrage, the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, McCarthyism, and the fight to pass Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s) and shows how we sometimes listened to our better angels to address them. All of these events were familiar to me but Meacham brought new insight into them as we follow him while he lectures, teaches and addresses the film audience directly.

My wife and I were blown away with the impact of this film in such a time as this (writing this one month past Jan. 6th 2021). It is a shame it is only available to those with an HBO subscription of some type. I hope it will soon be released on DVD or a less costly streaming services.

This documentary shares details of some of the most appalling events in American history, events that are repeating themselves today. Many people's freedoms are threatened, forcing people into "camps", more like prisons. History is repeating itself. Jon Meacham makes some strong points in his speeches about America. If we choose to, we can unite instead of staying a divided people, always fighting. But to do this we must try to look at things from a different perspective, have empathy and compassion for others, and acknowledge when we have made mistakes.

The movie did some good footage and some good moments, including Lyndon Johnson's getting the landmark Civil Rights Legislation passed; and it's heart was in the right place. But the good angels/bad angels analysis is a very superficial approach and doesn't dig very deeply into the structure of the current situation. Particularly it's bland, MOR (middle of the road) approach, where we all need to find common ground and meet in the middle (however laudable in theory) simply doesn't apply to our current situation. The film would seem to show that both sides are equally the cause of the divisiveness, when in fact one side relentlessly and ruthlessly destroys all possibility of unity with an insistence on having its own way. To properly look at our current situation would including going beyond the superficial analysis presented here and looking at things like the creation of a billionaire funded alternative mediasphere built on anger and lies, the right wing movement pushback against civil rights which started with Nixon and built up steam under dog whistle Reagan, and the neoliberal corporatist agenda which gutted the social safety net and produced historically unprecedented levels of inequality. Also, since Meachem is a historian (and some of the historical backdrop was useful, interesting and well done), it would have been helpful if he had looked further back than World War I, to some of the non-civil war divisive eras in the 18th century. The picture of some mythical unified America is more wishful thinking than anything. There have been a lot of good books written about this, in particular American Nations by. Colin Woodard and more recently, Break It Up by Richard Kreitner. We've gone so far down the rabbit hole, I'm not sure what the answer might be (other than practicing your goosestepping), but this kind of facile kumbahaying sure looks like a dead end to me.