No Saints Live Here

Of Love

At nine years old, you take a state-mandated fourth grade history class devoted entirely to Texas. Non-Texans will later inform you this is "fucking weird", but you didn't think so at the time. Back then, if someone had asked you to recount the Texas War for Independence, you might have said something like –

In the 1830s or maybe 40s – who's to say? – Texans fought for their independence. Their chief aim was freedom, and nothing else comes to mind. During the revolution, heroes like Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, and William Travis held off the much larger Mexican army at the Alamo for days and days – again, I don't believe anyone really knows the number. Eventually they lost... though not in vain. The loss at the Alamo would become a rallying cry, like "Quack! Quack!" from the movie The Mighty Ducks, or "Remember the Alamo!" from the movie The Alamo. The Texans would go on defeat Santa Anna's army months or years later at the Battle of San Jacinto and become a sovereign nation, until the United States practically begged us to make the country better by joining.

The Texan flag flew as our national banner for some period of time, and it's this flag, among five others, that gave birth to our holiest of holy sites: Six Flags and its satellite amusement park, Six Flags Fiesta Texas.

You're kidding, of course, though the sentiment is true, because in stories of heroes fighting for freedom, you, child of Texas, are the heir to all that historical shine. It sticks to your skin – pleasantly sticky ichor reflecting invisible light.

The story expands as you grow. What begins as Texas pride becomes something older and vaster — a creed not of a state but of a nation. Over and over, you inherit the luster of legends. Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence for you. Washington suffered Valley Forge for you. The founders created a whole nation for you, and they did it using big words for even bigger ideas – freedom and liberty and independence. They wrote their letters and treatises with an eloquence that reminds you of the Psalms because all righteousness is poetry.

Some of your classmates take their inheritance literally. No fewer than ten students in your fifth-grade class claim a founding father as a direct bloodline relative. There is a tendency of one-upmanship to this game: if one classmate claims John Hancock, the next will claim Jefferson or Washington. The trick is to go last so you appear climactic rather than greedy when you reach for a big name.

If it feels like you are trudging clumsily in your graceless body in the wake of holy slipstreams created by great men, it is maybe that you are still too small to contain their sacred ambitions. You can't help but stumble under the weight.

Occasionally, facts in the shape of sand-grit etch their way across the marble surface of your heroes. The men at the Alamo who fought for freedom happened to be particularly concerned with the freedom to own slaves, a practice by then abolished in Mexico. The founders too owned slaves or cheated on their wives or speculated in indigenous land. You don't disbelieve or deny these facts. But it makes you feel uncomfortable to hear them. Angry even. Some animal inside you alerts and howls, not to protest the history itself, but to chase off the mentioning of it.

Funny thing to be angry at facts, and easier than you'd think. They don't much care if you like them or not, and they rarely fight back. For the most part they just exist. Don't even stain your palms when you toss them aside.

There ought to be a ledger, you think. A cancellation calculation that tallies the marks in a person's columns, wiping out the bad when there's enough good. Two sides of a formula contain the same number, and the number does not exist. That's just math. You accept arguments that ameliorate the sins of your fathers, since you certainly don't want those as part of your American inheritance. You embrace the notion of an historical lens, through which bad things are not so very bad if people at the time didn't think so.

In high school, your history teacher touches briefly on Thomas Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings. He calls on one of the few black students in your class to ask what she thinks, an obvious performance of curiosity that will leave you squirming as he asks without asking that she be the ambassador for Blackness.

She shrugs and says simply, "I think he was kind of a dick", a conclusion she gets away with probably because the room is occupied by a haze of homogenous guilt and discomfort that the question initiated in the first place.

It’s the strangest thing that your animal doesn't make a peep when someone calls one of the ultimate American dads a dick. The animal might be silent because the word dick is funny, especially in rooms you're not supposed to say it. Mostly though, at least in this moment, you just can't see the point in defending someone who can't bleed against someone who can

She's wrong of course. Jefferson authored the Declaration of Independence and co-founded our country's core ideals. He doubled the size of the America, expanded public education, funded the Lewis and Clark expedition. Any one of these would erase any dickishness less noble deeds might suggest. She probably doesn't know about the ledger.

This moment passes through you, the structure of your belief intact. Of patriotism, you've made a religion, defending its gods and seraphim and prophets. You've christened yourself in postulancy, a dutiful steward of legacy, with all the unrelenting dogma of a child.

Of Hate

Overnight, you become a heretic.

As you wade the waters of your memory, searching out a catalyst for this sudden and dramatic change, none are sufficient.

Somewhere along the way are books like Lies My Teacher Told Me, discovered on the school library shelf, immediately appealing for creating titular enmity against authority. Also on the path to patriotic apostasy are the lyrics of your dad's favorite songs, dripping with anti-imperialist zeal (that he still manages to admire Reagan so much astonishes you). There are movies about the clowns who used to be in power blundering Vietnam, and there are edgy political cartoons about the clowns in power now sending bombs to blow up the wrong people in the wrong countries after 9/11. There are a thousand inputs firing their way into your head, and despite a near-constant desperation to be special, you are staggeringly susceptible to new forms of propaganda, so long as the messengers are cool.

The truth is, there is no switch-flip moment, even if naming one might be helpful for the logical progression of this story. You simply become a teenager, utterly unoriginal in your shape-shifting contrarianism. You are pointlessly antagonistic in almost all things, and if you can't find anyone who understands you, you can at least make a sport of intentionally misunderstanding everyone else. You are a cliche of hormones and angst, as unique as ANGRY TEENAGER #2 in any of a hundred music videos shot behind a strip mall. Inside your mind, your animal is unleashed and masterless now. It roams to chew, and nothing is too sacred to bite into.

Your dogmatic nature remains, but you no longer paint over sins, you unearth them. Idle and opinionated, with gleeful epiphany and little self-reflection, you vandalize the totems of your pantheon, deciding that your classmate had it right all along: American history is full of dicks.

George Washington, who bought the teeth of slaves? Dick.

Woodrow Wilson, who screened Birth of the Nation at the White House? Dick.

Thomas Jefferson who kept his own children in bondage? Dick.

Susan B. Anthony, who opposed the suffrage of black men before white women, writing “If you will not give the whole loaf of suffrage to the entire people, give it to the most intelligent first"? Dick.

John F. Kennedy couldn't keep it in his pants, and Teddy Roosevelt celebrated extermination warfare. The "reluctant" Confederate participant Robert E. Lee had the whipped backs of his slaves washed in brine to elicit more pain, the brilliant Thomas Edison put kids to work in factories and mines, and Von Braun, father of the American space program, was a reformed Nazi, if such a thing exists once you've used concentration camp labor to build your hardware. Dicks, top to bottom.

In your reckless American history iconoclasm, you manage to miss the point entirely (you will not be the first or last adolescent to do so).

If an atheist is angry at God... well, they aren't really an atheist, are they?

Of Truth

Worship made you feel inadequate, and blasphemy left you hollow. All of it so serious, though ironically none of it material in the slightest – not the way you've been seeing it.

You set heroes on Olympus to exalt or tear down, while you swam blind as an eyeless river fish through the sludgy Styx, observing nothing of the mortal souls you passed.

Replay that moment, the one where your classmate calls Jefferson a dick. Notice now what you didn't then: she isn't angry, isn't interested in being angry. She calls Jefferson a dick the way you call a banana yellow. And you sitting there with your stupid ledger, counting what remains of your inheritance if you erase what was taken. Never considering that erasure takes something else entirely.

In your wild oscillation between hiding and uncovering sins, you've learned little else than how your American inheritance made you feel, and oh how you learned that it belongs to you. Yours to embrace or shatter, to remember or discard. But yours.

It occurs to you, later than you'd like to admit, that its components are in fact as genetic as the game where George Washington is a great-great-great, great grandfather. So much of the inheritance is exclusively and violently white.

Emerging at the edges of your consciousness at this time is extensive commentary on what this kind of awareness should look like, on who is guiding or using it. You do observe more than a little performative self-flagellation. Mostly though, you observe an acute fear that the ledger might be more closely examined, and the horror that anyone should make suggestion of calling in its debts. You observe the howls of parents afraid that their children will be handed cat o' nine tails in kindergarten and told to beat the whiteness off their backs.

You do not know where this is happening, but you think to write a letter to assuage fears, to note that from last experience, the children of Central Texas public schools at least are quite safe from feeling bad about being white. You think to include as evidence the passages from your 11th grade history textbook that managed to both-sides the Trail of fucking Tears. Ultimately, the letter would need to go to too many terrified Moms for Liberty and you abandon the idea.

Amidst the commentary, you are learning to take from talkers with ideas what is useful, to discard what is not. Your guilt would be as unhelpful and self-serving as your ledger. Your eyes, not your guilt, are needed now, and they should search out what you missed.

The sins of the fathers did indeed pass down, though the ledgers hid the red, transferring it through back-channels to those who were never invited to inherit America. Enslavement and three-fifths and black codes and Jim Crow and convict leasing (slavery with more paperwork) and Indian Removal and Chinese Exclusion and redlining and restrictive covenants and internment and GI Bill discrimination and New Deal worker exclusions and urban renewal (demolishment) and mass incarceration.

By so many, the pathology of sin is discarded for its difficulty. To find the true hue of a past tinged in varied stages of drying blood is too hard, too painful. You told yourself then as surely as you're being told now that all these were wiped from the column whenever liberty or freedom was mentioned enough times, with enough sincerity. The sins do not exist.

If that were ever true, then inequity itself is a finger of accusation. Cruelly, it points at its own victims.

Swim forward through time, quite a few years more, and observe that the conversation has somehow devolved even further. To mixed results, some of the easiest and most ineffectual debt repayment methods have been discovered. These tend to include the moving about of statues and renaming of mascots and ships. The gestures are symbolic, though not entirely meaningless. But to simply humble oneself at the feet of the siblings denied in service to fathers, in ways that take nothing and give not much more... apparently even that is too much.

You thought that the animals defending the honor of American legends with snarls and yaps was something people grew out of. You discover that in fact there are even louder animals. These strange beasts come to bury some sins, to anoint others.

You cannot imagine the reason for honoring any men who sent bullets to whistle through the backs of children. You think that the chimeric monsters undertaking such an effort, and really they are men, must have rat-seagull hearts and rabies besides.

If you thought that the greatness of great men was too big to fit inside you, you haven't even tried to unzip yourself and stuff their transgressions alongside. Try not to. Neither really belong to you. They are.

The ledger, faulty from its inception, was bound to be misused. Dead Americans need no defense and no ledger. If the way that it happens is to sleep to death and wake to gates, then the dead have been admitted or denied already, and certainly no one was ever going to consult you on the matter.

You do not search for heroes and villains anymore. America is made of people, not characters, and history doesn’t forgive or condemn; it accumulates. 

You will write about all this in second person because perhaps you mean each word as an accusation. Or maybe it's just easier to avoid big small words like "I" and "me" and "mine". You'll point this out to wink at your own self-awareness, then grimace at things you still haven't grown out of.

Yes, this American skin of yours sometimes itches terribly. You have none other to wear.