Uncle Sam at 250 |
IT’S appropriate that the masks are off as the US marks its semiquincentennial on Saturday. Many of the fairytales about liberty, equality and democracy, perpetuated across the centuries as an exceptional nation’s founding myths, lie shattered at the altar of autocracy.
Ironies abound. The founding myths of America suggest that the war of independence was chiefly about banishing the tyranny associated with British colonial rule. Yet, as the nation turns 250, it wallows in the shadow of a would-be tyrant. There is resistance now as there was then, but this time the malaise is self-imposed.
Even back in 1776, the triumph extended beyond the justifiable demand for ‘no taxation without representation’ to the right to retain slaves. Slavery would not be abolished for nearly 90 years, following a civil war that cost up to 750,000 lives. The mildly hopeful period of Reconstruction that followed entailed a horrific backlash. Exactly 100 years separated the Emancipation Proclamation of 1865 from the Voting Rights Act of 1965, seen as the culmination of a civil rights movement whose hard-gained achievements are being reversed by an administration dedicated to the concept of white supremacism.
In 1852, called upon to deliver an Independence Day........