By Paul Edwards
THE WAKE
A wake is a traditional gathering of family and friends held after the death of a loved one and before the funeral. Though it has never yet been held for a dead nation, the time for that has come.
A nation’s death is not physical and instantaneous, but it is the result of similar processes. The germ of debility or disease, the invisible infection, the attrition of vitality, and the final collapse of the life force: they work the same in Man and state.
The Wake we hold now is not due to the brutal, unanticipated shock of a death unforeseen. We know and recognize the onset of the end in a person we love. And we have understood and accepted the same indicators in what we have always called The Land Of The Free. We have watched the spread of fatal toxins that long undermined the health and viability of the Republic.
An enthusiastically profit oriented enterprise controlled from the beginning by a wealthy elite, it founded itself openly on the reign of capital, and on genocide and human slavery, all the pathogens that were destined to destroy it.
Given the natural, benighted, human vices of avarice and power lust, those fatal elements were disguised and denied by the ruling clique, and left untreated in the body politic. Being the deadly pathogens, the rampant cancers, they are sociologically, they have been steadily metastasizing for two hundred and fifty years.
On this symbolically touted anniversary of our Independence, we are asked by our current rulers to celebrate the nation that their falsity, cynicism and villainy has destroyed. We who recognize death when we see it, cannot comply. But we can mourn.
All life ends in the individual and persists in the mass, in nations as in people, and in both a life is judged on what it verifiably did in its brief mortal span. The function of a wake, and its chief purpose, is to laud the best in the deceased as consistently as possible without denying established fact, and to assuage, to some degree, the grief that is the inevitable result of the loss.
Our nation’s wake must begin with its aspirational intent. There is no doubt that those who designed our foundational document had, in the majority, decent and honorable hopes for its social success, and for a good and worthy outcome for our people.
Though it was crafted with greed, control, and injustice deep in its DNA, that reality was not uppermost in their stated purpose, and it was done virtually unconsciously on the basis of the ruling prejudices of their time. They did not set out to create an engine of exploitation to betray their countrymen. Their prejudices were strongly held, refined by the best liberal thinking of the era and—as we surely are—they were largely selfishly blind to their flaws.
As the founders did what seemed to them their moral best in our enabling act, so throughout our history, the best values have had brave, sincere defenders. They are easily identified because they were strong, lonely voices against the rule of vice, injustice, and cruelty. Inevitably they were few, vilified by the financial power, and forced to make their fights alone. There is nothing unique in this: it is the story of all human history.
To them we owe what small progress has been made in redress of the evils of sex, ethnic, and color persecution, of suppression of labor, of institutionalized poverty, and of denial of indisputable human rights. Their heroic efforts have been violently opposed by the massed forces of Capitalist Power, and their successes relentlessly, systematically diluted, diminished, often eradicated.
As persons can be overwhelmed in life by dark forces that beset them, so with nations, and a wake is where that must be grieved. Abe Lincoln called America ‘the last best hope of earth”, to be ‘nobly won or meanly lost’. To our deep grief it was meanly lost. Our wake today mourns all the promise that might have been.
For, despite the contradictions of our establishment, that loss was not inevitable. Those who struggled for the highest, most generous goals gave America repeated chances to grow ethically toward potential glory. Those, in Stephen Spender’s words, ‘who fought for life, who wore at their heart’s core the fire’s center’, lit and carried, again and again, the moral torch our rulers rejected.
Our country’s death was neither sudden nor surprising. It came in the long, terrible agony that only those who have had to see a loved one stricken randomly with a slow, inexorably fatal affliction ever suffer. It was the culmination of an extended, irresistible invasion and overthrow of all the body politic’s defensive powers and resources until, one by one, they faltered and winked out.
Unlike physical life, a nation that is ethically, politically dead does not cease to exist. It goes on autonomically, operating without reason or purpose beyond maintaining its mechanical function. Robinson Jeffers saw our betrayal and dissolution when it was well under way a hundred years ago, and in his irremediable grief, he wrote, his hail and farewell, “Shine, Perishing Republic”.
The monstrous, mindless, nightmare entity we live in now is not the Republic that Franklin told us that we had if we could keep it. It is an automated remnant, as pathetically dysfunctional as all empires are in the colossal chaos of their implosion. We are like the derelict Voyager, its mission over, wandering blind, lost in infinity.
Men and nations die; ideals, although scorned and abandoned, never. We mourn, and celebrate that.
