My Fellow Americans

 

After all the madness of politicizing a deadly epidemic, after all the efforts to hobble every effort by public health officials and medical professionals to stem the tide of infections, after the resulting death toll of over 600,000, I don't think I will be able look at my fellow Americans the same way ever again.  I certainly don't trust them anymore.  Legions of people all over the world are sick and dying from this disease and have no access to any vaccine or even masks, and don't have the room to socially distance or have access to clean water to wash hands.  And yet inhabitants of the richest empire in history who have all those things in abundance refuse to take a vaccine that could save their lives and spare their families and neighbors.  I have no sympathy for such people.  In fact, I blame them for the resurgence of the pandemic in this country.  All the deaths happening around the country right now are on their hands.  That we are going through another major disruption because of covid is entirely their fault.  

Yes, I'm very angry because none of this is necessary or had to happen.  The far-right white supremacist leader cult formed around Trump is now a suicide cult.  Prove your loyalty to the Beloved Leader and just say no to that Jew liberal vaccine.  If it was just among their own members I wouldn't care.  A Jonestown of dirty disease-spreading racists wouldn't be much of a loss as far as I'm concerned.  But, they are spreading disease and infecting a whole lot innocent bystanders, and they are killing them as surely with a virus as with bullets.

The USA that I have is a cruel and brutal country with a violent culture built on bloodshed, genocide and slavery that thinks it's God's darling.  The USA that I want is there behind the anger in James Baldwin's writings, in what he meant by the phrase "achieving our country."  The USA I want is in the hopeful and visionary letters of Abigail Adams to her dismissive husband.  It's there in the courage and enterprise of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman.  It's there in the preambles to both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  It's there restated simply and memorably in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.  It's in the erotic passionate verse praising democracy of Walt Whitman.  

And it's here in this painting by George Inness of the Delaware Water Gap painted in 1861 as the Civil War was just beginning, long a favorite of mine.  Inness paints a landscape at peace with itself.  It's not the lonely wilderness where Jehovah dwells, but long settled countryside made productive.  There are fields, cattle, and farmhouses.  A train passes on the left.  A raft of fresh cut timber passes down the Delaware river.  It is a landscape where people may live happily and freely at peace with their neighbors and mutually dependent on each other's work and protection.  All the people making the land productive and depending on that production are at peace with nature that makes all this possible and sustains human life and all other life.  The artist harmonizes a wide variety of colors into a beautiful passing sequence of warm and cool colors that further embody mutual peace.  The rainbow appears as a benediction and a small summary of all the colors used throughout the painting.

George Inness was an ardent Abolitionist who tried to enlist in a Massachusetts regiment when the Civil War broke out.  At age 36, he failed the physical examination for military service.  He spent the war speaking and drumming up donations and enlistment into the war effort.  He sometimes donated paintings to sell to raise money for the war effort.  During the war, Inness became associated with utopian reform movements such as the Eagleswood Military Academy that advocated reform through education and social contact between classes and races.  Inness was invited there to teach drawing.  Inness all his life was interested in Swedenborgian spirituality with its conceptions of spiritual harmonies and correspondences, a faith that I think informs many of his decisions about form and color in his painting.

My photo taken at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on July 26, 2021, and freely available to anyone who wants to use it.