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This is KZSU Stanford, special greetings
to the entitled "Pinnions Brigade," from your host,
Robert Harrison, and our allegiance producer, Vittoria Mo Lo.
We've been coming to you somewhat erratically of late,
an episode here, an episode there with indeterminate gaps
in between.
It's not that we're petering out, or that I don't love you
as much as I used to.
It's just harder for some reason to keep up
with all the demands on one's time and energy these days.
A lot harder than when we first launched this program
in our days of innocence, back before there were iPhones
and the word podcast didn't even exist.
Speaking of podcasts, nowadays it seems
that every third person in America is starting one.
There's a lot of talking going on in this nation of ours.
And yes, I'll admit, at times I am in fact
tempted to go silent once and for all
and let the cacophony go on without me.
But entitled "Pinnions Doesn't Die Easily,"
he thinks mostly to you, our loyal fan base.
So here we are back in KZSU, the underworld,
ready to share some thoughts with you about America,
more specifically about the nature and idea of America.
When I say the nature and idea of America,
I mean the birth of the American nation,
as well as the North American continent.
How do they relate to each other?
That's the question that interests me today.
And I may as well start with the word nature,
which comes from the Latin nashii to be born
and shares the same root as the word nation.
We could say, therefore, that America's nature
has a spatial dimension, one that extends
from one coast to the other.
And it also has a temporal dimension.
And so far as the nation was born at a specific moment
in history.
Abraham Lincoln was well aware of this
when, in his Gettysburg Address, he described the founding
of the American Republic as a birthing process.
Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth
on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty
and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
That declarative sentence turns our fathers into mothers
or maybe into midwives who brought forth a child
in a place indicated by a demonstrative pronoun, this continent.
The child in question was a new nation, new,
because it was newly born, but also because in a world
dominated by monarchies and aristocracy,
it was conceived in liberty.
In other words, it was also new historically speaking.
America begins with its conception
or what Lincoln called its proposition.
We hold these truths to be self-evident
that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their creator with certain
unalienable rights and that among these are life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,
that to secure these rights, governments are instituted
among men, deriving their just powers
from the consent of the governed.
It's a beautiful idea that opens the declaration
of independence, but an idea is a very strange thing
to found a nation on.
Most nations are founded on history, traditions, people's,
shared customs, shared moorays, a common set of laws
and institutions that have grown up over time.
The founding fathers did not conceive
of their nation ex-Nihilo, but they did conceive
of it abstractly as a set of principles
and they framed a constitution accordingly.
The problem is that the American idea
and the American nation do not share the same Natality.
They were born separately as it were.
The institution and horrors of slavery
made a mockery of the Declaration of Independence.
And to this day, the idea of America divides the nation
as much as it unites it.
And in addition to that,
the American Constitution's abstract body of laws
was not bound to a specific location,
at least not in theory.
The Civil War erupted from within the fissure
that separated the American idea from its reality.
It was on this fissure that America wobbled,
its foundations about to collapse.
It fell upon Abraham Lincoln to re-found the American nation
on its guiding idea, as well as on the solid ground of this continent,
where the newcomers from Europe had set up residence
during the previous two centuries.
He did this by engaging a war to decide the future meaning
and future authority of the American Constitution.
He made very clear what was at stake in that war
at Gettysburg, who cemetery received the remains of those
who had died on behalf of the Union or the Union's idea.
Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth
on this continent, a new nation conceived in liberty
and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war
testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived
and so dedicated can long endure.
We are met on a great battlefield of that war.
We have come to dedicate a portion of that field
as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives
that that nation might live.
It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate.
We cannot hollow this ground.
The brave men living in dead who struggled here
have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.
The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here,
but it can never forget what they did here.
It is for us the living rather
to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here
have thus far nobly advanced.
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task
remaining before us that from these honored dead,
we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave
the last full measure of devotion.
That we here highly resolve that these dead
shall not have died in vain that this nation, under God,
shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people
by the people for the people shall not perish from the earth.
In Lincoln's words, the Civil War appears as a crucial moment
of America's ongoing unfinished birth.
Lincoln linked the new birth of freedom to the underlying land of the American continent.
What so remarkable about this address is the way it brings history
and geography together in time and place.
The moment is now in the midst of a Civil War,
the place is here on the battlefield.
The word here occurs in astonishing eight times in the speeches 14 sentences,
and in each case it refers to the ground, this ground as Lincoln emphasizes,
where the slain have been laid to rest.
By declaring that the dead through their dedication to the nation's founding proposition
had consecrated the ground on which he stood,
Lincoln associated the blood of the wars martyrs with the birthing process of the American Republic,
suggesting that now, for the first time in its history,
the nation could come together and root itself here,
where the sacrificial bones of the dead took possession of this ground.
In his speech act, he did nothing less than assert the nation's possessive claim
over the American continent, which henceforth,
if these dead shall not have died in vain,
will ground the unity of the American Republic and with it its redeeming idea,
or so Lincoln hoped at the time.
The tragic irony of America's Republic is that it was born defectively,
or only partially, and it would have to be born again, not once,
but many times in the course of its future history.
A century after Lincoln's speech at Gettysburg,
Martin Luther King stood in the riverside church in New York City,
and in the midst of another conflict that was tearing America apart,
echoed Lincoln's now when he declared,
with reference to the Vietnam War,
we are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.
King went on to proclaim, "Now let us begin, now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter,
but beautiful struggle for a new world."
Barack Obama would later take up and repeat word for word,
King's words about the fierce urgency of now,
applying it to his own historical moment.
When we look at American history, we see a nation forever struggling to be reborn into its founding conception.
To this day, America continues to obsess over its birth,
to war over its birth, and to correct its birth.
Lincoln asks whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
Yet an equally pertinent question is whether the birth of such a nation remains always an ever-receding prospect.
Not that long ago, Langston Hughes wrote,
"America was never America to me, and yet I swear this oath, America will be."
More on America's birth pangs coming up.
Happy New Year, first of all.
[applause]
Yeah, by the way, I'll tune that in more of them.
If we can get over the summer, yeah, yeah.
When I did dedicate this one to the dragon scene that's going on,
all the soldiers had a fight in Chicago and no one came to New York.
Oh, yes, and all the soldiers fighting the Vietnam.
I did a thing called "Machinga."
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HBase, well before the Republic was born as a political entity, the early Puritan pilgrims
conceived of their crossing of the Atlantic as a kind of baptism for pairing them for spiritual
rebirth on the North American continent.
For whatever reason, this wild expectation of a reborn life in the New World, a Vita
Anova in a Tera Nova never came to pass.
An eye for one believe that it explains in part that deeply American sentiment of disappointment
that runs like an undercurrent through our society, politics, and culture.
Many of the early Puritans had resigned themselves to such a disappointment by the time
Anne Hutchinson and her fellow antinomians, fomented such a dissent in the Massachusetts
Bay Colony in the 1630s.
Their pastors, or so they claimed, were still preaching the old covenant of works, while
they, the dissenters, insisted that they had come to America to walk in the new covenant
of grace, the outward signs of which surrounded them in the continents, luxuriant, in spirited
nature.
It's impossible to say how much of the antinomian movement was inflamed, nourished, or even
sponsored by the prospect of grace that America's physical nature opens up in the soul of
those who allow it to enter them.
You can still feel it today, and the maddening thing about America's land, waters, skies,
and all that falls under the rubric of what Wallace Stevens called the "silken weavings"
of our afternoons is that they are full of intimations of paradise, yet we have no idea
how to make ourselves at home here.
It used to be called the "Spirit of the Land" surrounds us from all sides on this continent.
It surrounds us and even permeates us.
Yet in the end we do not belong to it.
We do not fully inhabit it because we are not fully born into it.
When I say we, I mean we, the citizens of the American Republic who are not indigenous
to the land, who were drawn here from afar and continue to be drawn here by the extravagant
promise of America.
The Indians who were dispossessed of it belong to that land or this land, they are the
sons and daughters of its spirit, the rest of us are resident aliens, and we act like
it too, or at least the American nation does.
As Jim Morrison put it, echoing a song of the Navajo Indians, "What have they done to the
earth?
What have they done to our fair sister?"
Ravaged and plundered and ripped and bit her, stuck her with knives in the side of the
dawn, and tied her with fences and dragged her down.
I hear a very gentle sound with your ear down to the ground.
Our alien residence has disfigured this land unspeakably and unforgivably.
The American nation will never become native to the continent until and unless it learns
to love it, honor it, and inhabit it in a new, less brutal way.
We have a long way to go before that happens and maybe we should begin by putting our ear
to the ground and hearing the gentle sound that comes from the earth itself.
The sound of what America could become if only it would listen.
I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions, say well, and take care.
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