"That kind of discussion was absent" Phil: I know on the telephone setting up this conversation we broached a subject of your personal research – which you may not have enough time here to speak very fully about, but can you gloss it? You were saying that you were tracking this American iconography and relating it to sociology, wars and sources of tension generally. Could you restate some of that, since it seems to me a fascinating way to use the archive, and for about two years you have been using this approach… Kit: Without me making any statement of good, bad or indifferent, but just as observation I notice that when this country went into Iraq the lack of discussion seemed obvious; in particular what was applicable was another point in recent history which could have been accessible to ask questions, as a way of determining if the Iraq idea was good or bad, wise or unwise, and that was Vietnam. We are going into Iraq, and Gee, have we ever done anything like that? And do we say ‘the Vietnam thing didn’t go very well, why?’ That kind of discussion was absent on a meaning level and I found it disturbing since this is short-term memory. Vietnam was not that long ago and we have not been willing to look back and use history as a meaningful measure of what we are about to do. Starting with asking simply ‘what is this that is going on? And it seems to me like a personality, and I started thinking of our country in terms of being a human being, one with a personality, and wondering ‘what is the personality of the United States? Understanding that personalities don’t change as much as they morph, and shift, but not change essentially, unsure they change even in radical times… in trying to determine what our personality was as a country, I lit upon one term – and that was Manifest Destiny. We behaved within the personality of manifest destiny. Now… this phrase has been used as a historical term and for the most part a term that is somewhat OK again as representing C19th thinking. Phil: Of the movement West; Kit Carson, Mexican War, San Francisco and the West Coast. Kit: Manifest Destiny was identified as a term in about 1842, and as a concept; to some the idea was that in coming to America the Europeans that came here, the English, had a moral and God-endorsed right and responsibility to settle this country, implant democracy and spread it. Initially this was done within our borders, but once we had reached California and removed whatever obstacles in our way whether it was the American Indians or the Mexicans – once those obstacles were dealt with geographically we had reached the end once the impulse had hit California – but the idea didn’t go away it became an abstract concept of spreading American democracy beyond the borders Phil: Now it appears as a new euphemism as ‘zones of US interest.’ But what is the relation between that Idea and morality; morality from mores, meaning people’s customary behavior, and also to this document archive? Kit: As a discussion about how this country was settled it seems that when we come to one specific point this idea was behind everything, driving everything. That point was commerce within the democratic experiment – the real energy, real motivation, it seems for everything US was commerce, doing business. I can’t find any deviation from that, the bottom line of everything winds up being commerce. This country did a very interesting thing in that, given that people arriving in this country came here with the background of what had been happening in England, the ideal of doing of what England had done, which was to go into pursuit of colonial occupation, in the United States it was figured that this was a clumsy way to do it, and a cleaner and more efficient way to do it was to shift the colonization process not to occupation, but of making another country economically dependent upon or an integral part of what we were going for; so commerce was the vehicle. Read More ➤ Photo by Vermont Views
Posted on: Thu, 29 Aug 2013 11:18:06 +0000
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