We Love America. How Convenient.

We love America, of course. It is rich, cinematic, generous when it wants to be, brutal when it has to be, and always capable of explaining the brutality afterward in a language polished enough to pass for moral seriousness. At 250, America asks to be admired again: not examined too closely, not interrupted by the inconvenient dead, not slowed down by those who did not survive the anthem, but admired with gratitude, ceremony, flags, and that familiar solemn prose which turns conquest into difficulty, slavery into contradiction, and dispossession into the complicated childhood of freedom.

The ceremony is well rehearsed. First, the land becomes empty. Then brave people arrive. They suffer, build, pray, legislate, fight, expand, correct themselves, welcome immigrants, defeat tyrants, defend democracy, and become indispensable to civilization. Mistakes were made, naturally. They always are, especially by those who inherit the profits. Then comes the happy ending, except for those who did not live happily ever after: Native peoples, enslaved Africans, children taken into assimilation schools, languages forbidden in children’s mouths, peoples whose worlds depended on the buffalo, Vietnamese villagers under napalm, dissenters hunted by political panic, workers consumed by capital, and communities poisoned by extraction. Such figures rarely receive proper invitations to the birthday party. They ruin the acoustics.

The most useful word in this performance is “complexity.” Complexity has excellent manners. It arrives wearing academic clothing and never denies the corpse outright; it merely asks that we consider the broader context in which the corpse became historically understandable. Complexity provides background for the settler, the missionary, the governor, the investor, the general, the judge, the patriot, the theologian, and eventually the university department that will arrange the matter into a balanced panel discussion. The victim, by contrast, receives less context. A child taken from a mother is embarrassingly direct. A broken........

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