America is the Land of Violence & Vice — and That’s OK
A Trip Through American Rascality: Gambling, Booze, & Crime from Vicksburg to Vegas
“They delight in their present low, lazy, sluttish, heathenish, hellish life, and seem not desirous of changing it.”
— Rev. Charles Woodmason, 1766
“Violence is as American as cherry pie.”
— H. Rap Brown
America has got to start being honest with itself.
I’ll be honest.
I really didn’t see what all the hand-wringing was about over the recent police brutality protests-turned-riots. Self-important pundits right and left clutching pearls over the notion that anyone would burn their own city to the ground in the face of invincible corruption. I was just surprised that’s as far as it went.
But then again, I consider myself exceptionally American. That is, a degenerate — unfazed by violence and weak for vice.
It took torching a city, and consequently many more across America, to simply begin the process of any kind of justice for George Floyd. The cop responsible was charged with second-degree murder. Would this have happened solely with peaceful protests? Hard to say. We saw the frothing-at-the-mouth response to athletes simply taking a knee. It doesn’t pay to play nice in America. The flip side to systemic change has always been chaos and the thirst for blood. It’s a silent understanding that to get anything done in America requires lawlessness and the threat of violence — if not violence itself.
Seeing images online of Target and Wendy’s (and any other box store or corporate chain) reduced to smoldering rubble made me swell with pride to be an American. And there ought to be plenty more of that to go around as long as the rich get richer in 2020, and as long as police department budgets swell in tandem with homelessness.
But I’m not here to write yet another thinkpiece about current events. Rather, these current events got me thinking about the historical character of our…
