A Shriek in America's Night

 

                                     

                    A Shriek in America's Night

In the future, when everyone, or most everyone, has forgotten the America that was, there won’t be any wrong-thinkers. There will only be shades of right-thinkers. Those who know that the stories Americans once told about themselves were lies, that the great, existential quest, the striving for a more American America, the New Jerusalem, the paintings it painted of itself, the Hudson Valley, the Great Plains, the Great Lakes, the sprawling, harried novels it wrote about this deeply flawed, beautiful, wondrous experiment, the sonorous, dissonant symphonies it composed, the ticker-tape, black and white movies it projected onto its screens — it was all a ruse.

We should be grateful, these post-Americans will tell themselves, that we do not live in this place, that we never knew it. That we have been liberated from the fictions of this bloodied land. That we are finally, at long last, free.--Peter Savodnik