The Greatness of Large Ideas and Noble Ideals

I think now that I was wrong about the slogan.

 

For the past several years we have collectively been regaled with the enjoinder to “Make America Great Again.”  The phrase has energized the populace – thrilling some, while nauseating others.  Count me among the latter.  But I am having second thoughts.  

 

I know this is dangerous.  Such a reconsideration requires a careful, close reading of ourselves and our history – indeed, our collective soul- and Americans aren’t known for subtlety.  Nuance has not been our gift.  We draw with bold strokes – with jumbo crayons on a wide-lined tablet.  We know well the three primary colors, but can’t be bothered with the shades and hues.  So it is that we talk of capitalism and communism, law and order and anarchy, morality and corruption, patriotism and treason, Christianity and atheism, government involvement and personal liberty as if such binaries were the only options.  They aren’t, of course.  There are vast spaces and limitless possibilities between any such polarities, but exploring them, teasing them out and considering their potentialities requires an intellectual patience and labor that, for the most part, we aren’t willing to invest.

 

All that acknowledged, I accept the risk.  Never mind that the progenitor of the phrase in question is someone I experience to be a despicable blight on the American consciousness, I don’t want to turn a blind eye.  We should, indeed, strive to make America great again.  By that I do not mean that we should endeavor to resurrect some mythical moment in our past when all was right with ourselves and the world.  This country never has been “great” in the jingoistic ways that politicians trumpet.  America never has been remotely close to embodying all that it aspired to be.  There surely is no prior period in U.S. history to which women would want to return, or people of color, or indigenous peoples, or those differently abled or sexually oriented or aligned. The past, for all but the narrowest elite and privileged, was defined by constraint, invisibility, or outright repression.  That hardly sounds like “greatness.” There never was such a wondrous and idyllic season in our history that was somehow punctured when voting rights were extended, when marriage equality was recognized, when women gained agency over their bodies, when prayer was supposedly removed from schools and access to affordable health care was expanded.  We did not lose our greatness by liberalizing immigration policies or making room for different religious expressions or reevaluating words in our vocabulary that can exclude and offend.  

 

What once made America great was not our actualization, but our aspiration.  We thought big, we reached high; we had sprawling dreams.

 

Like “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. 

 

Like “liberty and justice for all.”

 

Like the pursuit of “a more perfect union.”

 

Among other lofty, aspirational goals.

 

But somewhere along the way we gave all that up.  We reduced our tools to nailing down rather than prying open; to whittling away rather than building on.  We fell in love with “no” instead of “why not?”  Our large and noble ideals were reduced to puny ideological prejudices.  Our statecraft became obstructionism.  Victory became more compelling than wisdom; maneuvering became more practiced than persuading; coercing more than inviting.  Any potential greatness we may have known has given way to a runty petulance that ought to embarrass us all – liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat or any of the other silly jerseys we have come to wear.  We have become miserably small not because we have grown weak, or because we lost manufacturing jobs or signed treaties, or because of any terrorizing or threatening or morally corroding “them”.  We have shrunk politically, morally, economically, and globally because our interest in big ideas has atrophied, our sense of the whole has narrowed to the individual, and our inquisitive patience with wonder has fossilized.  Content with what we think we know, we haven’t the time or the tolerance for what we might yet learn or comprehend or apprehend.  

 

And it is a smaller and smaller place to be.  

 

We used to be grander than that.  We used to be greater than that.  And I miss that.

 

So let us abandon this village of Lilliputian petulance and thought, and indeed make America great again – not the America that ever actually existed, but the America we once-upon-a-time aspired, together, to be.