Words We Don’t Speak: Ilhan Omar and the Cowardice of American Vanity
Not content with the overwhelming spoils from centuries of savage plunder and violence, America continually strives to attain a perch above a well-earned reproach. Too many of our citizens, even worse our politicians, live long lives with rose colored glasses grafted over their eyes. While this condition isn’t unique, the American manner of sugar-coating our darkest days is particularly revolting. Intensifying the vulgarity of such a saccharine standard is that many of these dark days, in some form or another, never ended. At times I almost feel obliged to sympathize with those in the perpetual struggle to mollify the gravest of crimes. You can say we’re the product of our environment, and that you and I are not directly responsible for this or that. That’s not what this is about. For too many, the most arduous task in our reckoning with the past is the simplest.
It also ignites the hottest fires. By just stating outright that the United States has committed crimes, Ilhan Omar attracted the kind of vitriol she is too familiar with. Never mind that as a principle she is treated differently than others in Congress that practice a different religion or have lighter skin. Never mind that she isn’t a natural born American. These conditions alone make her a natural enemy in a country that can’t even agree on the details of the history of stealing and enslaving humans from her continent of origin. The ebb and flow of innumerable death threats and calls for expulsion received another wave for simply mentioning that our country doesn’t have clean hands. They’re even more dirtied with each instance of this kind of blind-eye turning.
The bad faith attacks arrived on time, but the most careless and cynical came from her own party. The official statement condemning her words handed down from party leader Nancy Pelosi only too well illustrate the dramatic disconnect between those that wield power and the origin of that power. You would hope politicians have not only a deep well of historical knowledge, but can at least admit that their power wasn’t happened upon one day hundreds of years ago. Our dominion over this land has a blurry and sordid starting point, but we know it wasn’t divinely appointed. The blood and rubble from our destruction still seeps through our fingers. At this point in her outdated career, and the careers of rest of the elders in her ineffectual party, the Pelosi condemnation was more expected than disappointing.
Maybe they rushed the statement in a hurry to get to the Congressional baseball game, the one that includes Republicans that wonder aloud why white supremacy is a bad thing and speak at conventions that preach it. The photographs of these supposed enemies, shoulder to shoulder or kneeling in prayer in the middle of the diamond, serve as perfect reminders of the real values they hold. It’s bad enough how badly they lack principles, but how malleable their few principles are really salts the wound.
The emergence of the United States as a superpower at the conclusion of World War II sparked a nationalism that shines above the rest in its perversity. Red Scare successes and State Department domination enhanced power and influence inside and outside our borders. McCarthyism, the extreme in-house variation of Red Scare, may be looked upon nearly as poorly as it deserves, but many of its victims didn’t recover in their lifetime. New victims, internal and external, may never recover as we watch Asians in America fall to hate crimes due to our distorted view of China.
I’ll give patriots the slightest leeway in that making assessments of our excesses and fervent hegemonic episodes at their respective denouements don’t usually work. This is only because these events require finality. And much like our literal universe, not only are the size and severity of our evils expanding, often the rate of their expansion is increasing. It’s easy to lose track of the famines, genocides, mass migrations, and apartheids we have been and remain complicit in. At least a small reason for this unimaginable enumeration is the collective lobotomy we perform after each horror, or at least enough of one to misremember.
Martin Luther King, Jr. preached nonviolence and was murdered. The CIA stages a coup any time a peasant in Latin America receives a crumb of bread from their government. Armed standoffs erupt at the mention of removing statues commemorating slavers and the generals that fought for them. You could quip that it’s a shame there are so many whose memories are dependent on the erection of hideous sculptures of traitors, but we know that’s not what it’s about. They know it’s not what it’s about. If they could at least admit that the statues are literal and figurative monuments to the Lost Cause and a reminder of black subjugation, we could finally move on to a more substantive argument.
We fought fascist nations building extermination camps while putting hundreds of thousands in camps on our own land. Harry Truman banned discrimination in the Armed Forces only three years after the war ended. To speak these things, however, is the greater offense. The old guard in American politics thinks their job is expressing uncritical adulation in service of the flag and expressing the opposite for those that don’t. Groveling to cloth is such a rich unbecoming.
War is arguably the most egregious example even if we stay in country for the argument. Eugene Debs racked up nearly one million votes in his fifth run at the White House. He did this from prison after Woodrow Wilson locked him up under the Espionage Act for his public speeches against World War I. For his refusal to serve in the Vietnam War Muhammad Ali was sentenced to five years in prison, none served due to appeals, and was banned from boxing for three years. The Civil Rights Movement was a hotbed of anti-war activism. Stokely Carmichael in particular, in the US and most notably while visiting other nations, spoke in harsh terms against the Vietnam War. Visiting Hanoi in 1967 in revolutionary solidarity against the brutal war, and war crimes, we perpetrated caused a violent apoplexy in the forebears of today’s stars and stripes sycophants.
His case is a paragon for why at minimum a forceful scoff should be furnished for moderates of all stripes. Throughout the Trump presidency, they feverishly wondered where all the decent, sensible, respectable conservatives were. George Wallace, ardent segregationist, was calling for Carmichael to be tried for treason and put to death for his worldwide speaking tour against the war. Wallace’s political lineage never ended, it maybe just got a bit quieter. The lower volume viewed as progress ended as a premature exclamation of victory as its roots forcefully sprout from the freshly fertilized ground beneath Trump’s feet.
During Trump’s ascendance Wallace’s ideological descendants didn’t go mask off, they just got louder all at once. Another dark night that hasn’t ended. To think there have been hidden honorables since 2016 is just another tally in our code of guiltlessness. We lie to ourselves for fear of being irredeemable. There’s also far greater comfort in thinking better of our opponents than confronting them head on. If we won’t do it with fellow Americans, other nations don’t stand a chance.
While extreme, these examples follow the same general pattern of the American need to keep quiet. The pictures painted by Americans of American history are not very colorful lest they cause discomfort. It’s widely held that history is written by the victors, but the enduring legacy of Jim Crow and physical battles over cheap statues of racists drive a wedge in that adage. Instead of our history being studied through interpretation and legacy, in America it’s swept under the rug. The belief that the past is the past, it’s over and we’re better for it now, thorough appraisals need not apply, is the concept that undergirds our stunted evolution. It doesn’t help that this evolution is also broadly unwanted.
Our elections are instructive here, especially with racial issues. In 1967, California Governor Ronald Reagan would sign the Mulford Act, outlawing the carry of loaded guns in public. This was a response to Black Panthers patrolling their own neighborhoods as a counter to excessive force and oppression by Oakland police. Less than ten years later, as he was gearing up for his first presidential run, he turned his white fright into a tough guy act with a 1975 article written for Guns and Ammo Magazine. “In my opinion, proposals to outlaw or confiscate guns are simply unrealistic panacea” preceded the boiler plate conservative idea that “the right of the citizen to keep and bear arms must not be infringed if liberty in America is to survive”. He would reverse course again after he was spared of a direct hit from John Hinckley Jr.
He would of course go on to spark outrageous wealth inequality, start America’s prison population on its meteoric rise, ignore AIDS, fund child murdering and nun raping death squads in Nicaragua, and continue the War on Drugs unabated. None of this is news, but still matters in the context of history being sidecar to the American experiment. It didn’t take long for people of almost all political stripes in this country to thrust an egregious hagiography upon him with every chance they get. This monstrous covenant is still in effect today.
Any perceived flip-flop on guns wouldn’t be enough to doom an American Presidential candidate, certainly not today after a braggadocious admission of aggressive sexual assault came out a month before the 2016 election and it still didn’t matter. But then in lockstep with Trump’s adulators, our lowly moderate liberal citizens decided that routine dismissal of disturbing history was the more important route. When candidate Joe Biden started his campaign, many were quick to point out the 1994 Crime Bill is also nicknamed the Biden Crime Bill for a reason. He was immediately forgiven by his supporters with the insistence that he has changed. I don’t know how much people change from their 50s onward, but that wasn’t the only controversy.
Opposition to desegregation busing was brought up in a debate by his future Vice President. And just like with the crime bill this controversy was pushed aside by supporters as well. Never have it be said we aren’t exceptional at some things. It was eventually forgotten by the former prosecutor that launched the attack. Accusing the future president of a racist position to his face still gets you second in command. Say it’s about a class you’re not in or it was a cynical pick for identity reasons or both, but the position was offered anyway and she accepted it. A real history with real implications was spoken only to have the slate wiped clean with the extension of power.
These supposed fits and starts of progress need to be met with more skeptical eyes. I’ve written before about A. Philip Randolph calling off a planned March on Washington in 1941 in exchange for FDR issuing an executive order banning employment discrimination in military and defense industries. It’s simultaneously a victory and a compromise. While the betterment of others affects us all to varying degrees, I still feel an example like this is not for me to define a legacy for. But it still stands that these types of concessions come at a price instead of being guaranteed rights bestowed upon all.
Stepping stones are what they are, but they’re stepping stones towards a gate kept by those that control the conversation. Like our anti-war pioneers you can’t speak ill of the present. Like Ilhan Omar and many before her you can’t speak at all about the past. Although he was referring to MLK’s philosophy of nonviolence in the strive for black liberation, Stokely Carmichael’s most poignant words apply to America’s default posture of indifference through silence: “In order for non-violence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.” This country, habitually in desperate need of it, too infrequently takes honest inventory of its boundless malevolence and most dire sins. America has an affinity for apathy and dissociation as palliative care.
