"...that's why I want to read Cox's book—to see that evolution. I want to know what it feels like to go from believing in the revolution to watching it fall apart.
Because it always falls apart."
While you're at it, you might also read Ron Chernow's 'Alexander Hamilton', which (by my reading) portrays the American Revolution as a struggle for its own sake, with the attendant emergence of a new elite running everything (without a plan) to replace the old one, the utilitarian shift from rejecting all things British to noticing that British banks had financed the Continental Army and now wanted their lavish loans paid back (!), the transformation of an ad-hoc office of the President (the first holder of which barely knew what it was he was to preside over and mostly wanted to go home to Mount Vernon and count his remaining cherry trees) into a quasi-religious cult of personality including plans to convert some worthless Virginia swampland into a shiny new national capitol named after him, and the new struggle to the death between rival up-and-comers (Hamilton & Burr, America's 18th century version of a post-revolutionary Trotsky vs Stalin) whose primary credentials each included having served in the war of independence and each having read some law books in the meantime, with each managing to lose a shit-ton of their private investors' money as career side-hustles, which is why they each remained in politics, instead of ever earning an honest living once the Bloody British had been (more or less) thrown out....
It has also bothered me, ever since I began to do my own courses of study on revolutions and why they always fail to become anything but newer and even worse regimes than the ones they had fought to dismantle, that the popular ignorance of the realities of how thirteen colonies eventually became fifty United States tends to give the revolution itself a historic pass. What passes for historic analysis of the American revolution reads as though, for once, these larger-than-life 'founding fathers' had somehow managed to have themselves the one revolution in all history which kept to its ideals (did it ever have any?) and, as if by magic, managed to create, as if a matter of epochal destiny, the most powerful nation on earth with the most perfect form of governance ever devised, with liberty & justice for all, etc, etc.
If you read Chernow's book it might also give you some clue why I find reducing the story of America's first Treasury Secretary and original architect of this indestructible 'national debt' as a new nation-building form of the ancient practice of living well beyond one's true means, to a Broadway musical wherein everyone on stage is cast mostly on a whimsical basis of their having the wrong skin colors (!), and wherein the creation of that nation is somehow rendered as cause to burst into song every few minutes, is about as grotesque a distortion of history as ever occurred, in a nation known the world over for distorting its own and everyone else's history beyond recognition just for the self-admiring (and highly lucrative, I'm told) fun of it...
The revolution which began this country was in reality as much a failure, in its resulting future practices, as any other. American prosperity as we have known it since the end of a second world war (a global conflagration devised by Josef Stalin to begin with, and with that cult of personality emerging as its primary beneficiary) has little to do with some superior template for governing, and much to do with plain old imperialism in conquering the world's most advantageous continent in terms of access to global trade routes. And now a new revolution and personality cult are seeking to dismantle all that, for the fun of it and for the struggle's own self-justifying sake, to achieve better social media results on their smart phones, or something.
As someone once said, 'You say you want a revolution? Well, when you're talking about destruction, don't you know that you can count me out?'
Where was John Lennon in 1776, when we needed him? When I look around at what that revolution has done to this continent ever since, and at whose cost, I'm pretty convinced that had I been of age to serve in that pointless exercise, I would have headed to the Rockies to go trap beavers and hang out with the locals, while one still could.
The rabid destruction being called 'prosperity' would have caught up eventually, no matter who won that needless war. Just look at a map: moderate climates, central north latitudes, boundless natural resources, few prior inhabitants standing in the way, and thousands of miles of uncontested shorelines with hundreds of suitable natural harbors giving unrestrained access to all the world's oceans with the nearest rival powers thousands of miles away across them. Those 'founding fathers' had little to do with granting today's Americans any of that, and mostly were unaware that any of it even existed.
They were too busy trying to destroy each other politically, once the revolution was over, leaving as a legacy mostly a permanent state of war between equally useless rival factions (and a real one in the 1860s: the 'war between the states' was for all practical purposes a war between central-rule Republicans and States'-rights Democrats, over whether to take a southern or northern route building a railroad to those California gold fields, their having been seized by force from Mexico a half-generation earlier...), an enduring curse against the cause of human liberty which to this day the ordinary American people (whom none of this conquest and destruction was ever meant to serve) have as yet been unable to cure.
We're just another country, folks, vicious self-serving politicians and politically indifferent career bureaucrats and all, and NONE of what these do all day is about you. It never was.
We just got lucky, with location-location-location, as the rest of American political history has gone on being just as insincere and fueled by cynical elitist fortune-hunting as any other country's.
"...that's why I want to read Cox's book—to see that evolution. I want to know what it feels like to go from believing in the revolution to watching it fall apart.
Because it always falls apart."
While you're at it, you might also read Ron Chernow's 'Alexander Hamilton', which (by my reading) portrays the American Revolution as a struggle for its own sake, with the attendant emergence of a new elite running everything (without a plan) to replace the old one, the utilitarian shift from rejecting all things British to noticing that British banks had financed the Continental Army and now wanted their lavish loans paid back (!), the transformation of an ad-hoc office of the President (the first holder of which barely knew what it was he was to preside over and mostly wanted to go home to Mount Vernon and count his remaining cherry trees) into a quasi-religious cult of personality including plans to convert some worthless Virginia swampland into a shiny new national capitol named after him, and the new struggle to the death between rival up-and-comers (Hamilton & Burr, America's 18th century version of a post-revolutionary Trotsky vs Stalin) whose primary credentials each included having served in the war of independence and each having read some law books in the meantime, with each managing to lose a shit-ton of their private investors' money as career side-hustles, which is why they each remained in politics, instead of ever earning an honest living once the Bloody British had been (more or less) thrown out....
It has also bothered me, ever since I began to do my own courses of study on revolutions and why they always fail to become anything but newer and even worse regimes than the ones they had fought to dismantle, that the popular ignorance of the realities of how thirteen colonies eventually became fifty United States tends to give the revolution itself a historic pass. What passes for historic analysis of the American revolution reads as though, for once, these larger-than-life 'founding fathers' had somehow managed to have themselves the one revolution in all history which kept to its ideals (did it ever have any?) and, as if by magic, managed to create, as if a matter of epochal destiny, the most powerful nation on earth with the most perfect form of governance ever devised, with liberty & justice for all, etc, etc.
If you read Chernow's book it might also give you some clue why I find reducing the story of America's first Treasury Secretary and original architect of this indestructible 'national debt' as a new nation-building form of the ancient practice of living well beyond one's true means, to a Broadway musical wherein everyone on stage is cast mostly on a whimsical basis of their having the wrong skin colors (!), and wherein the creation of that nation is somehow rendered as cause to burst into song every few minutes, is about as grotesque a distortion of history as ever occurred, in a nation known the world over for distorting its own and everyone else's history beyond recognition just for the self-admiring (and highly lucrative, I'm told) fun of it...
The revolution which began this country was in reality as much a failure, in its resulting future practices, as any other. American prosperity as we have known it since the end of a second world war (a global conflagration devised by Josef Stalin to begin with, and with that cult of personality emerging as its primary beneficiary) has little to do with some superior template for governing, and much to do with plain old imperialism in conquering the world's most advantageous continent in terms of access to global trade routes. And now a new revolution and personality cult are seeking to dismantle all that, for the fun of it and for the struggle's own self-justifying sake, to achieve better social media results on their smart phones, or something.
As someone once said, 'You say you want a revolution? Well, when you're talking about destruction, don't you know that you can count me out?'
Where was John Lennon in 1776, when we needed him? When I look around at what that revolution has done to this continent ever since, and at whose cost, I'm pretty convinced that had I been of age to serve in that pointless exercise, I would have headed to the Rockies to go trap beavers and hang out with the locals, while one still could.
The rabid destruction being called 'prosperity' would have caught up eventually, no matter who won that needless war. Just look at a map: moderate climates, central north latitudes, boundless natural resources, few prior inhabitants standing in the way, and thousands of miles of uncontested shorelines with hundreds of suitable natural harbors giving unrestrained access to all the world's oceans with the nearest rival powers thousands of miles away across them. Those 'founding fathers' had little to do with granting today's Americans any of that, and mostly were unaware that any of it even existed.
They were too busy trying to destroy each other politically, once the revolution was over, leaving as a legacy mostly a permanent state of war between equally useless rival factions (and a real one in the 1860s: the 'war between the states' was for all practical purposes a war between central-rule Republicans and States'-rights Democrats, over whether to take a southern or northern route building a railroad to those California gold fields, their having been seized by force from Mexico a half-generation earlier...), an enduring curse against the cause of human liberty which to this day the ordinary American people (whom none of this conquest and destruction was ever meant to serve) have as yet been unable to cure.
We're just another country, folks, vicious self-serving politicians and politically indifferent career bureaucrats and all, and NONE of what these do all day is about you. It never was.
We just got lucky, with location-location-location, as the rest of American political history has gone on being just as insincere and fueled by cynical elitist fortune-hunting as any other country's.