AMERICAN ADAM
Given by James Covington on January 18th, 2009
Every country and every person needs a story to live by-that is, a controlling narrative that tells us who we are and why we exist. Without this, we wander in a moral wilderness-we lose our focus and make choices that are unworthy of us. [1]
Our country has a grand story, but it has been distorted of late and hardly recognizable. The United States of America is the most ambitious social experiment ever fashioned on the face of this earth. Our founders trembled at their very audacity, at words which the world had never before dreamed possible, and they put their lives on the line for these words: they proclaimed:
We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men <people> are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men <the people>, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government . . . .
How radical was this statement! All people are created equal? All have certain inherent rights? All have a right to freedom, to pursue their dreams? Of course, the ideal was not the reality, and is still not. Many of the Founding Fathers themselves owned slaves at the time. Women could not vote or own property. In fact, only property owners could vote. Native Americans were thought to be savages, and were not considered as people with inherent rights.
And yet throughout the years of our history, our narrative has been there before us, urging us towards the freedoms it proclaimed so long ago. We have taken an uneasy and uncertain movement in that direction, but we have always known our direction. A bloody Civil War was fought, and slaves were made free, During this span of time, women were also given the right to vote. Unions were formed by workers. Brown VS the Board of Education. Roe VS Wade.
The 1960’s and ‘70’s were an amazing time of change. The Civil Rights Movement was born. After the civil war it took almost another 100 years before the Civil Rights acting was passed in 1964 to end segregation in public places and a voting right bill passed in 1965 giving blacks the right to vote. During this time, many of our young men refused to go to the tragic war in Vietnam. Women decided that it was time for them to be treated as full human beings, whose destiny would be determined by themselves, not by their societal roles.
Predictably, there was a sharp backlash to these new freedoms. The revolution we started in the’60’s was crushed-hurt to some extent by the excesses and the naïvete of some of us in the movement-but it was doomed inevitably by fear, by the forces of conservatism that could not abide the changes they were seeing on the horizon; it was crushed by big money that wanted dominance, that wanted empire, and crushed by frightened people who saw their social and economic structure being threatened by “uppity blacks” and “women who wouldn’t stay at home where they belonged” and by “young people who just weren’t patriotic.”
Of course this revolution wasn’t completely stamped out, great gains have been made. But this backlash which I refer to has lasted over 40 years. Forty years. I think it’s about over at last, and the ship of state is back on course once again.
And now consider the events before us. The celebration of Martin Luther King Day tomorrow is particularly significant because the following day, Barack Hussein Obama, will be sworn in as our next American President. He also happens to be black which is not an insignificant matter and carries a particularly dramatic meaning in our history, as he was nominated as our Democratic candidate 40 years after Martin Luther King was assassinated and is being sworn in as President the day after MLK’s national holiday. No doubt, without King’s prophetic message this would never be happening.
Actually Obama was born of an African, Kenyan father and white mother, but Obama is identified as black American. In the United States, blackness has always been a social rather than an ethnic category, so that, if someone looks black and has some African blood, he is black.
At the same time Obama was brought up by white relatives, lived in Hawaii, and attended elite schools. He is married to a bright and astute black woman. Last week I finished reading Dreams from my Father and was impressed by the exotic, chaotic and challenging nature of Obama’s childhood. He comes from extraordinary African and American lineage. And yet, as a man of African descent, born in the nation’s youngest state, with a childhood spent partly in Asia, among Muslims, he presents a distinctly American face. He has transcended all of the racial complexities and father abandonment of his childhood to become a political phenomenon. He is revered as the president of the new-a “new generation, “a new leadership,” a “new kind of politics. Yet, this idea is not altogether new….
I admit, Obama was not my first or even second choice for the Democratic nominee, because of his lack of experience. By election time, I had been persuaded otherwise by Obama’s message of transformation. . to rise above political ideology, wipe clean the slate of history and begin again…..to welcome what the the literary critic R.W.B. Lewis called “the American Adam.” [2]
In 1955 in Lewis wrote in his wonderful book The American Adam, that looming over all of American history, is the Biblical figure of Adam, the only person to have lived unburdened by what came before him. According to Lewis, early generations of Americans became captivated by the idea that they could create a future without reference to the past. The revolutionaries who fought for America’s independence saw themselves as breaking not only with the Old World but within history itself. Thomas Jefferson believed the new nation should regularly renew itself. The Unitarian Transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson described politics as a clash between the “party of Conservatism and that of Innovation.. . . It is the opposition of Past and Future. Of Memory and Hope,” Emerson explained. “Conservatism stands on man’s confessed limitations: reform on his indisputable infinitude. D.H. Lawrence identified the celebration of the new and the rejection of the old as “the true myth of America.”
In the early 1960’s after three recessions in a decade and the apparent loss of America’s lead in space, President John F. Kennedy, perhaps America’s last “American Adam” sounded the bell for change: “Change is the law of life,” he said. Norman Mailer wrote that Kennedy was the only one who could save America-called him a “hipster hero.” In short, the American Adam is a transformational figure.
Enter Barack Obama, the latest representative of Emerson’s party of innovation, radical reform and hope. I do not have to reiterate the ominous social and political state of our nation. In speeches that have been as powerful and moving as any I have heard since Martin Luther King, Jr., Barack Obama asserts: Hope and change have been the causes of my life. Hope is the bedrock of this nation: the belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us; by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is., who have the courage to remake the world as it should be. ..People want to turn the page. The want to write a new chapter in American history.
He deplores the “dead zone that politics has become, in which narrow interests vie for advantage and ideological minorities seek to impose their own versions of absolute truth.” Enter the new American Adam.
In fact, in his endorsement of Barack Obama, Colin Powell said that he thought Obama could be a “transformational” president. To “transform” means to change not just the outward appearance, but the very character of something. How might we as a nation be “transformed”? Perhaps we will become a nation of hope, rather than a nation of fear. Perhaps we will listen to the voices of the rest of the world, instead of disdaining them. Perhaps we will become a nation that can believe in itself once again.
And yet while many whites who voted for Obama also long for racial reconciliation in our nation, there is a backlash of racism that remains in our country. I do fear for Obama’s life. On the evening of his election, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported more than 200 hate-related incidents of cross burn, racial epithets and racist graffiti.
And of course, Obama could very well fail as president. The tasks before him are enormous, not equaled in any other new presidency since Roosevelt. WE have no idea what may be around the corner. No doubt, Obama’s commitment to radical centrism could be severely tested. As we know, presidents have failed in their initial goals before. The past, in the form of race or war or deeply held partisan animosities has a way of lingering around. It rarely recedes without a bitter fight. comic Will Rogers explained, “I don’t make jokes: I just watch the government and report the facts. None of which is to say that Barack Obama will fail. In the end, actually, as always, the party of youth and hope and change will govern effectively to the degree we all are willing to serve that cause.
As a matter of fact, he can do nothing without us. He has made that clear in his speeches-he has said, “You did not vote for me, you voted for yourselves and your children.” Change always bubbles up from the bottom, as it has done this time-Obama is the living expression, the embodiment, of change that has been coming for at least 40 or 50 years. The people-you and I, and countless others like us-are responsible for seeing that the values we believe in are enacted into policy. The cheering crowds, the enthusiastic volunteer force, these folks dare not dissipate and all go home, thinking Obama will handle the rest-please don’t. He needs us. In the words of Theodore Parker, one of Unitarian Universalist’s founding ministers: Democracy is not what we have; it is what we do.
As I see it the moral state of the union is in dire need for attention-from a faltering economy as result of unmitigated corporate greed, to our crumbling schools, to use of torture by our military, to the growing division between rich and poor (the Madov affair supremely highlights the two tier division we have created in this county between rich and poor), to unjust immigration laws, to blundering and overbearing foreign policy, to the lack of medical insurance for all, to an unfair taxation system, to continued racial division, to the devaluing of our environment, to the dismissal of gay and lesbian rights and to the ongoing consumer attitude that relentlessly dismisses the value of sacrifice.
So as Martin Luther King once asked “Where do we go from here?” Interestingly, in one of the more powerful and moving speeches I have ever heard, in Philadelphia, following the Rev. Jeremiah Wright crisis last summer, Barach Obama put it this way:
In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand - that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.
For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.”
Reflecting a similar sentiment 50 years ago, Martin Luther King, in writing the book entitled Where Do We Go From Here? put it this way: Every society has its protectors of the status quo and its fraternities of the indifferent…..but today our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change. The large hour in which we live demands that we transform this world-wide neighborhood into a world-wide brotherhood. Together we must learn to live as borthers and sisters or together we will be forced to perish as fools.
In other words, together,as the Beloved Community, we shall indeed overcome. May this always be the story by which we live and the song we sing.