Steve Bannon on the Culture and Reason for Being of the United States—A Different View

In his talk to the Conservative Political Action Committeein National Harbor, Maryland, on February 23, 2017, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon said about the United States, “We are a nation with a culture and a reason for being.” Oddly enough, I agree with the ultra-conservative Bannon on this point—but I completely disagree with his definition of the culture and reason for being of the United States.

I think that Bannon and Trump believe in a culture of the U.S. that is dominated by one group—white Christians. In fact, their actions are all aimed at creating a world lorded over by nations where white Christians rule. Every one of their policies points toward this: the travel ban on six predominantly Muslim countries, the denial of the Black Lives Matter movement in favor of a blanket law-and-order policy, the expulsion of immigrants from Latin America who have put down deep roots in the United States, the building of a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border, the embrace of Vladimir Putin and his authoritarian state in Russia. Clearly the “reason for being” of the United States in the mind of Steve Bannon is for white Christians to predominate in America and globally.

What is the alternative to this culture and nation of white Christian domination? There is another concept of the United States that generations of Americans have been working toward, from the demonstrations of the suffragettes, to the pro-union strikers who occupied the GM plant in Flint in 1936, to the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, to the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, to the Native American encampment resisting the Dakota Access Pipeline. That idea of the United States is one based on the most enlightened and progressive strains of the American Revolution: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [and women!] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…” as Thomas Jefferson so beautifully phrased it in the Declaration of Independence.

That fundamental belief in the equality of all people and the sanctity of life is the true reason for being of the United States. Martin Luther King Jr. expressed that vision of the U.S. when he said in his “I Have a Dream”speech: “we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

The culture of the United States is not a private club. It is an open culture rooted in the traditions of Native Americans and added to by every wave of arrivals to this country from every latitude and longitude of dry land on the globe.

The culture of the United States is inherently a hybrid culture. American culture blends melodies from Scotch-Irish fiddlers with Yoruba drumming patterns to create jazz and country music. American culture combines the humor of Yiddish theater and vaudeville with the theatrics of the English stage to give birth to Hollywood movies. In American culture, lesbian feminist poets write in the ghazal form devised by Arabic troubadours and elaborated by Persian bards. American culture wants to try out knishes with Spanish rice, it needs to taste Korean kimchee in Mexican burritos. It fuses ballet and African dance and creates Alvin Ailey and Paul Taylor.

Yes, the United States has a reason for being and a culture. That culture and that reason for being are fundamentally democratic, pluralistic, and multicultural. Nothing that “the Donald” or Steve Bannon can do will ever change that.

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Zack’s memoir about his writer dad, Hugging My Father’s Ghost
Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Preaching to the Choir—Is It Always Wrong?

One of the most frequent criticisms I hear of political writing is that it involves “preaching to the choir”—in other words, telling an audience of people who agree with you what they already know. At first glance, this seems like a terrible idea. After all, what possible good could come of trying to convince the people who are on your side? But I think the question of the audience for political writing is actually more complex.

There are reasons to repeat to those already convinced the principles that many of us believe. Why? One reason is as a reminder—“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” to quote the U.S. Declaration of Independence—but the details of those truths are often obscure.

For example, most thoughtful people may be in favor of “equal protection of the laws,” as mandated by the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But not everyone may remember that this entails equal treatment by the police on the streets.

A poem that deals with this issue is “In Two Seconds” by Mark Doty, sparked by an incident where a police officer shot and killed the twelve-year-old African-American youth Tamir Rice when he was playing with a toy gun in a playground in Cleveland, Ohio, in November 2014. (I am indebted to Anne Caston, my colleague in the low-residency MFA at University of Alaska Anchorage, for introducing me to this poem.)

Tamir Rice, 2002–2014

Mark Doty’s poem bewails and protests the officer’s taking only two seconds to assess the situation before shooting and killing the young man. On a larger scale, this poem is a plea for the issues raised by the Black Lives Matter movement—Doty implicitly calls for an end to racial profiling and to police violence against unarmed black citizens.

I hope that this poem has convinced many readers who were not previously opposed to police violence against unarmed blacks. Without any cynicism, though, I would bet that the vast majority of readers who look for or find this poem already agree with Mark Doty’s ideas on this subject. And yet this poem feels far from pointless to me. For one thing, Mark Doty is reminding us, using the example of the egregious death of Tamir Rice, of the urgency of preventing police killings of African-Americans. There is a way in which hearing or reading this poem permits us to experience more fully the roots of our beliefs. The poem also fills in details about the general idea of equal protection, and inspires us to rededicate ourselves to the campaign to end police violence against unarmed citizens, a situation that persists despite the close attention focused on it.

There are very good reasons to preach to the choir, so long as the writer avoids using cliché language or situations. In his poem, Mark Doty never resorts to often-heard phrases such as “racist," “police brutality,” or “innocent.” He sketches this particular story clearly and with emotion, making real to the reader the life of this boy, with his “comic books, pocket knife, bell from a lost cat’s collar.” Ultimately, Doty calls Tamir Rice, in what is to me the most transcendent moment in the poem, “beloved of time.” The poet gives us the individual and allows the reader to draw the larger conclusions, an approach far more engaging than a recitation of statistics.

If preaching to the choir were pointless, we would only sing our national anthem once and never repeat it. But each time we sing a national anthem, or a folksong such as Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” or we read or listen to a poem such as “In Two Seconds,” we reaffirm our ideals and goals. Writing about political subjects may often involve preaching to the choir, but that’s what a minister does every single Sunday.

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry