in the land whither wee goe to possesse it
Why exactly the Secretary chose “Hoochie Coochie Man” is a mystery, although the spectacle of a pallid bureaucrat singing a blues standard about hoodoo and pussy, like he’s trying to embarrass his kids at a talent show, is a good exhibit of Biden-Era aesthetics: not a divorce of form and content so much as a tripartite drift of intention, sincerity, and articulation. Earnestness and expertise come wrapped in cringey spectacles and fumbled charisma, which, like the President’s slurred speeches or the Vice President’s nervous laughter, are mostly benign. And yet an uneasiness lingers, reflective of the national mood.
At any rate, one assumes that Music Diplomacy was of little help to the Secretary when Hamas made a brutal incursion into Israel on October 7, defeating a high-tech border with bulldozers and hang gliders, taking over 200 hostages, and killing some 1,400 people, most of them civilians. Or when Israel responded by hammering Gaza, an act of vengeance that looks a lot like genocide—over 8,000 killed to date, including over 3,000 children—and sounds a lot like it too. The Israeli Prime Minister, whose policies are partly to blame for the attacks, has insisted that “we are in a battle of civilization against barbarism,” that “this is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.” In addition to cutting off water and telecoms to Gaza, in violation of international law, Israel also cut off electricity—children of darkness, indeed.
After traveling to Israel to mourn the murdered civilians and pledge military support, President Biden addressed the US, asking for more funds to defend Ukraine and now Israel, attempting to link the two wars despite their incongruity. Perhaps wary that the American public has soured on post-9/11, Good-vs.-Evil rhetoric after 20 years of aimless war on terror, Biden hewed closer to pragmatism. What really unifies Ukraine and Israel is their importance to US hegemony, and Biden came close to admitting as much: “Beyond Europe, we know that our allies and, maybe most importantly, our adversaries and competitors are watching. They’re watching our response in Ukraine as well. And if we walk away and let Putin erase Ukraine’s independence, would-be aggressors around the world would be emboldened to try the same.” That would-be scenario, of course, is Taiwan. Ukraine and Israel are not just allies; they are developing situations; they are precedents.
Too much pragmatism is bad PR, though, and the US is an empire that insists on styling itself as a Revolutionary underdog.1 So Biden also trotted out the old American mythos, recounting how, “as I walked through Kyiv with President Zelensky, with air raid sirens sounding in the distance, I felt something I’ve always believed more strongly than ever before: America is a beacon to the world, still, still. We are, as my friend Madeleine Albright said, the indispensable nation.”
That familiar image—the beacon to the world—comes from a 1630 sermon by the Puritan settler John Winthrop, invoked by nearly every US President since JFK. In 1961, President-Elect Kennedy called for the country to be
guided by the standard John Winthrop set before his shipmates on the flagship Arbella three hundred and thirty-one years ago, as they, too, faced the task of building a new government on a perilous frontier. ‘We must always consider,’ [Winthrop] said, ‘that we shall be as a city upon a hill—the eyes of all people are upon us.’ Today the eyes of all people are truly upon us—and our governments, in every branch, at every level, national, state and local, must be as a city upon a hill—constructed and inhabited by men aware of their great trust and their great responsibilities.
Winthrop’s exhortation was not just to aspire toward Christly conduct but to be an example to the papists and persecutors back home—a call for both clarity of mission and awareness of audience. Kennedy updated this for the Cold War’s grand dichotomy of Democracy and Communism, reminding his countrymen that the former is something actively constructed and kept, rather than an inherent quality that would make the case for itself.
In his speech on Israel and Ukraine, Biden speaks of eyes upon us—those of both “allies” and “adversaries”—but he is less concerned about America setting a good example than America making an example of others. Its duty is not to fulfill some lofty promise to itself but to set hard limits throughout the world. In his address, Biden insisted that “American leadership is what holds the world together.”
When Biden calls America a beacon to the world, he’s not misquoting Winthrop or even Kennedy; he’s quoting Reagan. Reagan loved the idea and loved to exaggerate it, preferring “shining city” and “beacon” to the more modest hilltop city. In keeping with his presidency, his speechwriters gave the image a storybook quality, which demanded simplicity rather than the double-edged nature of parable. In his farewell address in 1989, Reagan described his idea of the city with childlike fascination, stripped of urgency and accuracy:
I've thought a bit of the ‘shining city upon a hill.’ The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we’d call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free. I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; […] And she’s still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom.
Dumbed down to damn near nonsense, but every President has mentioned the city on a hill since. Obama even quoted Reagan at the 2016 DNC.2 One might imagine each invocation of the city on the hill, from 1630 to 2023, as the very constellation of American political rhetoric, the 20th century its busiest cluster, like a crowd of distant planes in the night, circling and waiting to land.
The line from former Secretary of State Albright that Biden quoted, that the US is “the indispensable nation,” is a much better illustration of Biden’s foreign policy—if not America’s self-conception—than Winthrop’s city. If you can believe it, Albright’s line is from a press tour in the late 90s, when she was drumming up support for war against Saddam Hussein.3 In a 1998 interview with Matt Lauer, Albright said that
we are doing everything possible so that American men and women in uniform do not have to go out there again. It is the threat of the use of force and our line-up there that is going to put force behind the diplomacy. But if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us.
Gone is the idea that the city on the hill might attract criticism, or that its privileged status might be dependent on its conduct. But if we have to use force, it is because we are America is as tautologous and troubling as it has become true. The moral task is not even worth invoking. The “little wooden boats” and “early freedom men” may be the story, but the reality is Empire, and using force is just the thing it does.
I realize that I fixate on official functions and Presidential speeches, which are ripe for analysis but often of little consequence. But to watch Biden deliver a mix of mangled Puritanism-via-Reaganism and recycled neoliberal hawkishness, in a call to sponsor Israel’s genocidal and indiscriminate revenge tour, is to feel something hollow, some grimly American feeling that we were remiss not to name before it settled in for good. The grand national parable has long since degraded into metaphor, then fantasy, then tagline, then excuse. Probably it was always the latter.
Of course the city on the hill wasn’t Winthrop’s coinage but came centuries earlier, on a hill in Capernaum, in present-day Israel, where a crowd had gathered to hear a man preach. You might know the one: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. And later: Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. The spot where Jesus is said to have preached is called the Mount of the Beatitudes, some 25 miles south of where the Israeli army and Hezbollah are currently trading fire, as the Israel-Hamas War threatens to spiral into a broader conflict.
Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your father which is in heaven. It’s a nice notion, but this is Old Testament country, and you honor the god of the desert by preparing one for Him, turning buildings into sand and people into bone. The beacon to the world, the children of light—declarations of exceptionalism, even if they begin as idealistic charges, easily become slogans of absolution.
After invoking the “citty on a hill,” Winthrop went on, saying that “if wee shall deale falsely with our God in this worke wee haue undertaken, and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from us, wee shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.” US Presidents have referenced Winthrop to present America as the fulfillment of a prophecy, a gleaming city beyond the settlers’ wildest visions. The irony is that Winthrop’s city was not a prophecy at all but a warning. Four hundred years on, its god may have yet to withdrawe, but America is as much a by-word as it is a beacon. Or if it shines, it shines like phosphorous and fire overhead, revealing the rubble and the dead.
ben tapeworm
—
Postlude: McKinley Morganfield, 1948:
In the spring of 1948—the same spring of the termination of the British Mandate of Palestine, Israel’s Declaration of Independence, further Arab-Israeli war, and the ongoing Palestinian Nakba—Muddy Waters released a single in Chicago: “I Can't Be Satisfied” b/w “Feel Like Goin’ Home.” The A-side’s where the real magic is, slink-strutting further into madness. But I’m partial to the B-side, those walking blues. Conditional on its face, but sung with a certainty that only hopelessness brings. The guitar like a grief machine, wound up and wailing til it guns like an engine.
Well now, woke up this morning,
All I had was gone.
Well, brooks run into the ocean, the ocean runnin
Into the sea.
But don’t find my baby, somebody goin to
Sure bury me.
Brooks run into the ocean, man, that old
Ocean run into the sea.
Well now, I don’t find my baby child,
Somebody sure goin to bury me.
1 I think often about a line in a 2022 essay by Marco D’Eramo in NLR: “‘Most Americans do not recognize—or do not want to recognize—that the United States dominates the world through its military power’, wrote Chalmers Johnson. ‘They are often ignorant of the fact that their government garrisons the globe. They do not realize that a vast network of American military bases on every continent except Antarctica actually constitutes a new form of empire.’ This is the first novelty of US world power: it is an empire that refuses to acknowledge itself as such to its own citizens.”
2 Obama: “Ronald Reagan called America ‘a shining city on a hill.’ Donald Trump calls it ‘a divided crime scene’ that only he can fix.”
3 This would culminate in Operation Desert Fox later that year, a four-day bombing of Iraq, which happened to coincide with Clinton’s impeachment hearing.