The Task Ahead

The debacle of the failed American republic presents us with a formidable task: nothing less than the redemption of the American spirit.

That spirit has been corrupted by the turn it has taken through the cancerous side of what Harold Bloom has termed the American Religion.

For Bloom, the American Religion is Janus-faced; and he traces both faces back to Emerson's vision.

For we find in Emerson both the prophet who admonished us that "things are in the saddle and ride mankind" as well as the build-a-better-mousetrap-and-hitch-your-wagon-to-a-star promoter of American can-doism and exceptionalism.

The ideology of American exceptionalism is, without question, the most lethal and pernicious ideology abroad on the planet today. "Just because other Empires proved toxic for the peoples they conquered, doesn't mean ours will..."

The cock-eyed optimism of the Emersonian vein has permitted well-meaning individuals caught up in the sway of the militarized corporatocracy that runs this country to commit violence and fraud on a scale never before witnessed in the history of the world.

The task before us, then, is this: to revivify the atrophied portion of the Emersonian vision--the Emerson who admonished us all for our acquisitiveness, our compulsive reduction of all things to commodity.

The question we must ask ourselves before attempting to undertake such a task, however, is this: how late is the present hour? Is there sufficient time allotted us for so Herculean a task, or ought we to abandon this ship of fools and seek shelter and solace in a world apart?

And if we answer the latter, where is that world?