Bobbie Ann Mason, a celebrated fiction writer, essayist, and literary critic from Kentucky, interviewed Schenkkan and wrote a sharply critical essay in The New Yorker in 1993. Mason’s first novel, In Country, dealing with Vietnam veterans who come home to Appalachia, was made into a major Hollywood film in 1989. Schenkkan told Mason that the core value he saw in his play was larger than Kentucky: “One of our big problems is how much we’re in denial about our past, and how unwilling we are to examine our past and to come to terms with it. There’s so much loss in this country, so much grief that we’re in denial about. There’s a river of loss that runs through the bedrock of this country… . What I am interested in is how much Eastern Kentucky’s situation, which can be viewed, and has historically been viewed, as somewhat isolated, is in fact really a paradigm for the United States as a whole.”16
This is exactly what University of Kentucky professor and writer Gurney Norman hated most about Schenkkan’s play. Norman, who grew up in the eastern Kentucky Appalachian coal country, was one of its most vocal critics. “I know the story of Appalachia deep in my bones,” writes Norman, “I have immersed myself in it all my adult life, and to see Robert Schenkkan run roughshod over a whole culture is very upsetting.”17 He was most upset by Schenkkan’s use of Kentucky as a standin for the United States as a whole, saying, “The play imposes the form of classical tragedy—where people bring about their own downfall—on the history of the region… . It blames the victim,” while reducing the people and the place to embodiments of violence and greed. But Professor Norman goes on to express a larger theme, one of “political correctness,” an accusation that was just taking off in the early 1990s: “‘The Kentucky Cycle’ is a very politically correct play… . It’s revisionist history… . The old American dream of the frontier is replaced by a vision of butchers and murderers… . The vicious hatred of America is very prevalent today.”18 So Professor Norman actually appears to see Kentucky as representative of the nation.
Mason ends her long essay by seemingly referring to the “lost cause” of the Civil War that continues to divide North and South: “In the country, when two farmers can’t agree to maintain a common fence, each man builds a fence on his own land. They have a name for the space left between the two fences. They call it the Devil’s lane.”19
This denial of the past is not unique to Kentucky or Appalachia, but rather reflective of U.S. settler-colonialism moving from the original thirteen colonies following the War of Independence. Kentucky was the navel of that process and Daniel Boone its mythologized figure—Daniel Boone, “the hunter.”
Another of Daniel Hayes’s essays, “Why I Hunt,” reflects an even deeper symbolism and mythology of guns that is a part of the Kentucky story and part of the national story. Hayes tells of the first shot he ever fired while hunting, his distance from the prey—a white-tail buck—being the length of a football field and a half, viewed through his rifle’s scope. On a snowy January day, he writes, “One grand buck and his ladies and children moved nervously on a white background. They bunched together, the big male turned his head this way and that … moving as one… . I pulled the trigger and the buck rolled back to his left. He took a half dozen staggered bounding steps, fell, and lay still in the snow. As the adrenaline died down I started coming to myself again.”20 Hayes tells of butchering the deer, putting aside the hide for tanning: “I recall a feeling of deep symbiosis… . I felt ‘not alone.’ … It felt like a ritual and I felt like I was not alone… . It made real for me the truth that for every thing that lives on this planet something else must die and it made real the truth that this animal’s life was saving me from death. I hunt and I’ll keep hunting.”
Hayes gives even more specific reasons why he hunts: “I hunt because I’m an environmentalist and conservationist. I hunt because I believe that I’m closer to the Earth when engaging with it and there’s something at stake… . Something could very well die. In fact, that’s the goal.” But he abhors industrial meat production: “What I do is the antithesis of the stockyard. It’s the key to that imprisoning gate… . I hunt for love and I hunt to escape… . I hunt for competence, discipline, and craft.”21
These words echo from the narratives created by the real estate entrepreneur John Filson about Daniel Boone in Kentucky. But Boone was an industrial hunter. Like him, most of the settlers who hunted and the famed “mountain men” of the West, they set traps to capture animals for their fur. They killed for pelts, not for food, not for love of nature. The central role that the myth of the hunter continues to play in Americana is to perpetuate the contemporary romance with firearms and justification for the sacredness of the Second Amendment, eclipsing the fact that this was a capitalist enterprise carried out through atrocities of violence, territorial theft, and mass displacement, not an adventure.
SIX
THE SECOND AMENDMENT AS A COVENANT
The Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the writings of the “Founding Fathers,” Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, the “Star-Spangled Banner,” the Pledge of Allegiance, the flag,1 Columbus Day, Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, the Second Amendment, and even Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech are all bundled as sacred fetishes2 and rituals that comprise the U.S. state doctrine—American Exceptionalism—which is capable of absorbing and adjusting to disruptive cultural and political changes, such as by taming Dr. King’s radicalism. An aspect of this most visible today is the all-powerful “gun lobby,” whose members are devoted to the presumed sanctity of the Second Amendment. In the forefront of these Second Amendment adherents are the descendants of the old British and Northern European settlers who say that they represent “The People” and have the right to bear arms, the right to have military bases around the world, and the right—even the duty—to overthrow any government that does not, in their view, adhere to the God-given covenant.3
In a satirical essay written following the Orlando nightclub mass killing that took forty-nine lives, historian and theologian Garry Wills concluded that gun control in the United States is “inconceivable.”
And it is historically inconceivable—everyone knows that guns are what made this country great, taming the West, keeping up our fighting spirit, shoving sissies aside as we make our tough progress.
It is also theologically inconceivable. God gave us guns to show us who we are. Giving up the gun would be surrender to evil, taking us abruptly into eschatological time.
So this time let us skip all the sighing and promising and moments of silence. Why keep up the pretense that we are going to take any real and practical steps toward sanity? Everyone knows we are not going to do a single damn thing. We can’t. We are captives of The Gun.
The Gun is patriotic.
The Gun is America.
The Gun is God.4
According to the founding narratives of the United States, colonists from Europe acquired a vast expanse of land from a scattering of benighted peoples who lacked a concept of private property, and therefore could claim no right, in any Western sense, to the land. The historical record is clear, however, that English colonizers aggressively displaced a large network of small and large nations whose governments, commerce, arts and sciences, agriculture, technologies, theologies, philosophies, and institutions were intricately developed. These nations maintained sophisticated relations with one another and with the environments that supported them; they were stewards of one of the seven locales of agricultural civilization, which they created over tens of thousands of years. Many have noted that had North America been an unpopulated wilderness, undeveloped, without roads, and uncultivated, it might still be so, for the European colonists could not have survived without forcibly appropriating the Indigenous peoples’ developed lands and resources. They appropriated what had already been created by Indigenous civilizations. They stole already cultivated farmland and the corn, vegetables, tobacco, cotton, and other crops domesticated centuries before the arrival of
European invaders who took control of the deer parks that had been cleared and maintained by Indigenous communities, used existing roads and water routes in order to move armies to conquer, and relied on captured Indigenous people to identify the locations of water, oyster beds, and medicinal herbs.
The United States is not unique among nations in forging origin myths, but one of the few in which its citizens seem to believe it to be exceptional by grace of the Creator, and this exceptionalist ideology has been used to justify genocide, appropriation of the continent, and then domination of the rest of the world. Other such exceptionalist national entities are Israel and the now defunct apartheid state of South Africa, both of which were founded in 1948, as well as the Ulster-Scots colony of Northern Ireland. None of these, however, openly pursued global “full-spectrum dominance” by formal military doctrine, as has the United States.5 The origin narratives of these colonizers are based on Judeo-Christian scripture, but the states they founded were not theocracies. According to their narratives, the faithful citizens come together of their own free will and pledge to each other and to their god to form and support a godly society, and their god, in turn, vouchsafes them prosperity in a promised land.
The influence of scriptures was pervasive among many of the Western social and political thinkers whose ideas the founders of the first British colonies in North America drew upon. Historian Donald Harman Akenson points to the way that “certain societies, in certain eras of their development,” have looked to the scriptures for guidance, and likens it to the way “the human genetic code operates physiologically. That is, this great code has, in some degree, directly determined what people would believe and what they would think and what they would do.” Dan Jacobson, a citizen of Boer-ruled South Africa, whose parents were immigrants, observes that, “like the Israelites, and their fellow Calvinists in New England, [the Boers] believed that they had been called by their God to wander through the wilderness, to meet and defeat the heathen, and to occupy a promised land on his behalf.”6
Founders of the first North American colonies and later of the United States had a similar sense of a providential opportunity to make history. Indeed, as Akenson reminds us, “it is from [the] scriptures that western society learned how to think historically.” The key moment in history, according to covenant ideology, “involves the winning of ‘the Land’ from alien, and indeed evil, forces.”7
The principal conduit of the Hebrew Scriptures and covenant ideology for Christians was John Calvin, the French religious reformer whose teachings coincided with the advent of the British invasion and colonization of Ireland. English Puritan settlers drew upon Calvinist ideology in founding the Massachusetts Bay colony, as did the Dutch Calvinist settlers of the Cape of Good Hope in founding their South African colony during the same period. In accord with the doctrine of predestination, Calvin taught that human free will did not exist. Certain individuals are “called” by God and are among the “elect.” Salvation therefore has nothing to do with one’s actions; one is born as part of the elect or not, according to God’s will. Individuals could never know for certain if they were among the elect, but outward good fortune, especially material wealth, was taken to be a manifestation of “election”; conversely, bad fortune and poverty, not to speak of dark skin, were taken as evidence of damnation. “The attractiveness of such a doctrine to a group of invading colonists … is obvious,” Akenson observes, “for one could easily define the natives as immutably profane, and damned, and oneself as predestined to virtue.”8
The U.S. Constitution represents for many citizens a covenant with God, and the covenant concept goes back to the Mayflower Compact, the first governing document of the Plymouth Colony, named for the ship that carried the hundred or so passengers to what is now Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in November 1620. Forty-one of the “Pilgrims,” all men, wrote and signed the compact. Invoking God’s name and declaring themselves loyal subjects of the king, the signatories announced that they had journeyed there “to plant the First Colony” and did therefore “Covenant and Combine ourselves together in a Civil Body Politic” to be governed by “just and equal Laws” enacted “for the general good of the Colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.”
The original Puritan settlers of Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded in 1630, adopted an official seal designed in England before their journey. The central image depicts a near-naked native holding a harmless, flimsy-looking bow and arrow and inscribed with the plea, “Come over and help us.”9 Nearly three hundred years later, the official seal of the U.S. military veterans of the “Spanish-American War” (the invasion and occupation of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines) showed a naked woman kneeling before an armed U.S. soldier and a sailor, with a U.S. battleship in the background. One may trace this recurrent altruistic theme into the early twenty-first century, when the United States still invades countries under the guise of rescue, calling it “humanitarian intervention.”
British settlers in North America brought with them the covenant ideology of Calvinism that had been the work of the Scotsman John Knox. John Locke, also a Scot, would later secularize the covenant idea into a “contract”—the “social contract”—whereby individuals sacrifice their liberty only through consent. Adam Smith, another Scot, during the period of the founding of the United States further developed Locke’s theories, which were embraced by the “founding fathers,” so that the U.S. republic became the first independent nation state founded on the ideology of capitalism, of land as a commodity.10
In other modern constitutional states, constitutions come and go, and they are never considered sacred in the manner patriotic U.S. citizens venerate theirs. Great Britain has no written constitution. The Magna Carta is an important and inspiring historical document, but it does not reflect a covenant. U.S. citizens did not inherit their cult-like adherence to their constitution from the English. From the Pilgrims to the “founders” of the United States and continuing to the present, the cultural persistence of the covenant idea of exceptionalism, and thus the bedrock of U.S. patriotism, represents a deviation from the main course in the development of national identities. Both the 1948 birth of the state of Israel and the advent of Nationalist Party rule in South Africa were emulations of the U.S. founding; certainly many U.S. Americans, particularly evangelical Protestants, closely identify with the state of Israel, as they did with Afrikaner-ruled South Africa. Patriotic U.S. politicians and citizens take pride in exceptionalism. Historians and legal theorists characterize U.S. statecraft and empire as those of a “nation of laws,” rather than one dominated by a particular class or group of interests, suggesting a kind of purity or quasi-holiness.
Parallel to the idea of the U.S. Constitution as covenant, politicians, journalists, teachers, and even professional historians chant like a mantra that the United States is a “nation of immigrants.” From its beginning, the United States has welcomed—indeed, often solicited, and promising “free land,” even bribed—immigrants to populate conquered territories “cleansed” of their Indigenous inhabitants. From the mid-nineteenth century, immigrants were recruited to work in mines, raze forests, construct canals and railroads, and labor in sweatshops, factories, and commercial farm fields. In the late twentieth century, technical and medical workers were recruited. The requirements for citizenship mandate adherence to the Constitution through taking the Citizenship Oath, which involves swearing to “bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law … so help me God.” Yet no matter how much immigrants might strive to prove themselves to be faithful and patriotic, and despite the rhetoric of E pluribus unum, their historical role is different from that of the colonial settlers who founded the republic. The original settlers are those who fought in the fifteen-year war for independence from Britain, but also, and perhaps more important, those who fought and shed Indian blood, before and after Independence, in order to gain possession of land; these were English Pilgrims, the Scots-Irish, and French Hugueno
ts, Calvinists all, but also German Moravians and English Quakers, who took the land they believed had been bequeathed to them in the sacred covenant that predated the creation of the independent United States. These were the settlers who fought their way over the Appalachians into the fertile Ohio Valley region, and it is they who claimed blood sacrifice for their country. This remains the ideology that rules the United States.
New evangelical offshoots refashioned Calvinist doctrines to do away with church hierarchies and decentralize. Frontier settlers continued to regard themselves as chosen people of the covenant, commanded by God to go into the wilderness to build the new Israel, and many towns in the United States, like Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, reflect this fervor with their Biblical names. Many settlers saw themselves, as their descendants see themselves, as the true and authentic patriots, specially endowed individuals entitled to the land through their blood sacrifice. The land won through bloodshed was not necessarily conceived in terms of particular parcels for a farm that would be passed down through generations. Most of the settlers who fought for it kept moving on nearly every generation. Land was property and interchangeable with other tracts of land for commercial agriculture. In the South many lost their holdings to land companies that then sold the land to slavers seeking to increase the size of their plantations. Without the unpaid labor of enslaved Africans, a farmer growing cash crops could not compete on the market. Once in the hands of settlers, the land itself was no longer sacred, as it had been for the Indigenous. Rather, it was private property, a commodity from which to earn profit—capable of making a man a king, or at least wealthy. Later, when Euro Americans had occupied the continent and urbanized much of it, this quest for land and the sanctity of private property were reduced to a lot with a house on it, and “the land” came to mean the country, the flag, the military, as in “the land of the free” of the national anthem, or Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.” Those who died fighting in foreign wars were said to have sacrificed their lives to protect “this land” that the old settlers had spilled blood to acquire. Expunged from national memory is that the majority of the blood spilled was that of Indigenous families.
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