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Land on the Edge: Tattered US Stars and Stripes
Photo:
tirc83/Getty Images
Monday, July Fourth.
While most Americans are off to celebrate their independence that day in 1776, I sit down at the computer at noon to write a column about why I don't feel like celebrating this time.
I'm almost done with my tract on ailing US democracy when the horror news from Highland Park buzzes on my cell phone: Six people shot dead in a Fourth of July parade.
Another massacre, on this date of all days.
It's been a long time since a US national holiday has felt so mendacious and at the same time so symbolic.
Despite the mostly peaceful rituals (parades, parties, hot dogs), America is deeply unsettled, deeply wounded - and deeply divided, a nation at war with itself.
Even before Highland Park, at our Brooklyn friends' barbecue the night before, the mood for celebration was subdued.
While the obligatory banging was going on next door, our eclectic group of native Americans and European exiles wondered whether it wasn't time to give up and leave the broken USA - or whether we really had to fight now.
(It remained a tie for the time being.)
Terrorized by gunmen, neo-Nazis and radical judges, the United States is just breaking up into the Un-United States, with irreconcilable values and desires, socially, culturally, politically.
On the one hand, there are the liberal coasts, where I live, and a few islands in the Midwest.
On the other hand, the landmass of the conservative – or at least conservatively governed – states in between: the two Americas are drifting apart more and more abruptly, like tectonic continental plates that are drifting towards the big bang, the historic, incurable earthquake of the century.
Doubts about the adopted country
The foreshocks can no longer be ignored.
Shots fired in ever shorter succession, a possible comeback by the autocrat Donald Trump and the recent shock judgments of the Supreme Court, which has shifted the foundations of US society sharply to the right, only accelerate what has been fermenting for a long time.
On the 246th anniversary of this "great experiment America," as President Joe Biden puts it that day, as if living in a parallel reality, everything seems to be falling apart.
Nothing is agreed on anymore: guns, abortion, climate, civil rights, education, history, media, even the recognition of election results - the bedrock of the system.
My own doubts about the adopted country, in which I have now spent almost half my life, have not only been simmering since the most recent events.
The reasons are not new: the thoughtless violence, the rampant poverty, the arbitrary death penalty, the world's highest incarceration rate, the power of the oligarchic class, the extremism disguised as patriotism.
And, in Der Spiegel, America's surreally exaggerated self-image as the »greatest nation in the world«.
I swallowed that for a long time, as the price for a superlative life.
Joked with gunslingers in West Texas, danced with Cuban exiles in South Florida, feasted with Bible preachers in South Carolina, laughed at the red-white-blue-costumed fanatics at the conventions, and amused at the ideological contortions of the gay Log Cabin Republicans.
Most of the people I met on my research and road trips were nice, easy-going, and extremely accommodating, no matter what political cult they worshiped.
It's been a long time.
I experienced my first Fourth of July as a teenager in Plymouth, Massachusetts, "America's hometown," of all places.
The colonial town was a sea of flags, ruffles in the national colors fluttered on the verandas – a naive, good-natured patriotism that had also been expressed five years earlier in the Bicentennial, the bicentenary of the United States.
For the Plymouth fireworks, I hiked with friends out onto the Jetty, a long pier that juts out into the harbor bay like a saber.
We drank bud, lounged on the rock and giggled pointing at the exploding night sky.
Plymouth Harbor is still dominated to this day by the Mayflower II, a replica of the two-masted ship that the pilgrims landed in in 1620 in hopes of throwing off the religious shackles of England - unaware that their descendants, four centuries later, are now busily putting on similar shackles would.
In the souvenir shop you can buy reproductions of the "Mayflower Compact" for $5.95, the contract by which the settlers subordinated their personal desires to the "common good" - a laudable goal, even if it was formulated by 41 white men who ruled the country stole from others.
Even during my exchange year, before I later moved to the USA entirely, Plymouth's story had become a myth.
But the old ideals were still part of everyday life back then.
My host family was arch-conservative and strictly religious, my mother sang hymns by the hearth and prayed in the Mayflower Church, whose wooden tower adorns Main Street.
Nevertheless, they welcomed me with open arms – me, the agnostic, anything but conservative and obviously gay nerd.
That shaped my image of America.
As a memento of the hospitality that was shown to me so many years ago, I kept a mini stars and stripes on my desk for a long time, whether in Berlin or New York.
Today, the US Stars and Stripes is no longer a symbol of hospitality, but the aggressive banner of right-wing populists, especially (and often in combination with the Confederate flag) in the southern states, which ironically rejected it as the Yankee flag after the Civil War.
It used to flutter everywhere on July 4th in Brooklyn, this time it was only seen sporadically, almost bashfully.
We're not like that, they say
America makes it hard for those who used to like it.
It is a nation on the brink of collapse, brought about not by invaders or immigrants as the right wing would have you believe, but by enemies within who look like them, see January 6, 2021 .
Brutal, heartless, indifferent to the climate catastrophe, the impoverishment of millions, the mass deaths in Uvalde, Buffalo, Highland Park.
"That's not who we are," they say reflexively, we're not like that.
But that's exactly how too many of them are, and again and again.
Now the religious-reactionary majority of the Supreme Court has begun to topple the pillars of US democracy, from the basic right to abortion to the freedom of the states to limit gun mania sensibly.
Next up is free suffrage.
The fact that most people reject this is irrelevant to the Supreme Court.
The law professor Mary Ziegler, with whom I spoke last week, warned me that the henchmen of the far-right Republicans no longer have any shame.
One day they would take on the right to contraception, unbiblical sex, and marriage for all.
Welcome to the Middle Ages.
I fear for my rights
When the Supreme Court, in its old balance
before
Trump, i.e. 2015, made same-sex marriage constitutional, I cried like a child.
They sang the national anthem in court in Washington, and three days later I celebrated with hundreds of thousands at the Pride Parade in Manhattan.
My partner and I got married in 2020, even the corona pandemic couldn't deter us.
The weekend before last, thousands again marched through Manhattan for Gay Pride, but the mood was noticeably different.
There was less celebration and more protesting, with representatives from Planned Parenthood, the largest US family planning organization, marching at the forefront.
We stood on the edge, sobered.
I didn't expect to have to fear again for the rights I had fought for all my life, only to lose them again.
Right-wing US states are already looking forward to legal re-discrimination against LGBTQ groups.
Many women have already caught it.
The Supreme Court's verdict throws them back generations.
Anyone who has to or wants to terminate a pregnancy now has to undertake dangerous journeys – from regions where it is a punishable offense to regions where it is still allowed.
A new "underground railroad" offers those affected logistics and protection, like the network that helped many slaves to escape from the southern states to the northern states in the 19th century.
The liberal coasts are opposed to the center of the country, New York and California are suddenly social security zones that independently anchor abortion rights and gun control.
Will this soon also apply to the rights of gays, lesbians and trans people?
What if we are robbed of our rights again?
If my husband and I want to drive through Texas or Arizona?
Or Florida.
I owned an apartment there when the sun state was still considered purple – half red (republican), half blue (democratic).
Now teachers there are no longer allowed to say "gay" because Governor Ron DeSantis, to Trump's right, is pinning his hopes on the White House.
Late evening, July Fourth.
Through the open window I can hear the five synchronized fireworks popping over the East River in the distance.
The images that are broadcast live flicker in one of my browser windows.
On the riverside stages, in front of the Manhattan skyline, a choir sings "Born in the USA", "America The Beautiful" and "God Bless America".
I turn off the computer.