Sherry Chandler

Shamash tells us five things we didn’t know about her, all of them remarkable. Most remarkable, perhaps, item # 3:

I once quit my 10-year career to take off on a year-long trip across the US in my little Honda Accord, with my tent and sleeping bag in my trunk. I stayed at State Parks, and slept in hotel parking lots, and hung out at beaches and old, country diners. I visited wineries, southern mansions, and bat-filled caves. I learned that America is not a scary place. Don’t believe the news. There are a lot of good people in the United States, especially if you don’t judge by appearances. At one state park, a greasy-haired man covered in tattoos and who looked like a Hell’s Angel, gave me pointers on how to stay safe as a single, traveling female, and then let me hold his two, tiny, pet chiwawas.

But then I doubt there’s much that Shamash is actually afraid of. Read the rest of the list.

And — for those of you who think the good old U.S.A. is the only place to get decent medical care — read about her Hospital Holiday (or having emergency surgery in Bangkok).

William Pfaff argues that we once were so in his article Manifest Destiny: A New Direction for America, in the current New York Review of Books:

During the first century and a half of the United States’ history, the influence of the national myth of divine election and mission was generally harmless, a reassuring and inspiring untruth. During that period the country remained largely isolated from international affairs. The myth found expression in the idea of a “manifest destiny” of continental expansion— including annexation of Mexican land north of the Rio Grande—with no need to plead a divine commission.

You might try persuading the First Nations that we were “generally harmless” or the Mexicans or the Cubans. It’s a little burr that always gets under my saddle when I’m trying to love our founders, that belief that God had somehow given the white European settlers this whole big empty land to transform. As in this passage from Emerson’s “Boston Hymn” that I came across the other day in American Religious Poems:

Boston Hymn
Read in Music Hall, January 1, 1863

The word of the Lord by night
To the watching Pilgrims came,
As they sat by the seaside,
And filled their hearts with flame.

God said, I am tired of kings,
I suffer them no more;
Up to my ear the morning brings
the outrage of the poor.

Think ye I made this ball
A field of havoc and war,
Where tyrants great and tyrants small
Might harry the weak and poor?

My angel,—his name is Freedom,—
Choose him to be your king;
He shall cut pathways east and west,
And fend you with his wing.

Lo! I uncover the land
Which I hid of old time in the West,
As the sculptor uncovers the statue
When he has wrought his best;

I show Columbia, of the rocks
Which dip their foot in the seas,
And soar to the air-borne flocks
Of clouds, and the boreal fleece.

I will divide my goods;
Call in the wretch and slave:
None shall rule but the humble,
And none but Toil shall have.

I will have never a noble,
No lineage counted great;
Fishers and choppers and ploughmen
Shall constitute a state.

Go, cut down the trees in the forest,
And trim the straightest boughs;
Cut down trees in the forest,
And build me a wooden house.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Here is a glorious vision, Whitman’s American dream that Rexroth says was lost in the Civil War. The poem goes on for another page and a half (full text here), describing the pine state house, the equality of workers, the freeing of the slaves. It was read on the day the Emanicipation Proclamation took effect and even contains a message to the Virginia legislature that lately expressed “profound regret” for slavery but did not apologize for fear of having to pay reparations:

Pay ransom to the owner,
And fill the bag to the brim.
Who is the owner? The slave is the owner.
And ever was. Pay him.

But no mention of Native Americans, no acknowledgement that this wonderful land in the West might previously have been inhabited. And, unfair as it is of me to project modern concerns backwards, no notion that those trees of the forest might have been home to men and others of God’s creatures, that perhaps their very best use might not have been building “a pine state house.”

No work of man is ever perfect and I suppose it is naive of me to dwell too much on the dark blots and arrogance of our past. But the fact is, we were not mostly harmless even when we were at our best.