““You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid.”
- From the words of Jesus the Messiah according to the Jewish tax collector, Matthew
Call it chauvinistic, but our heritage does set us apart. Some years ago a writer, who happened to be an avid student of history, told me a story about that day in the little hall in Philadelphia where honorable men, hard-pressed by a King who was flouting the very law they were willing to obey, debated whether they should take the fateful step of declaring their independence from that king. I was told by this man that the story could be found in the writings of Jefferson. I confess, I never researched or made an effort to verify it. [...] We are not a warlike people. Nor is our history filled with tales of aggressive adventures and imperialism, which might come as a shock to some of the placard painters in our modern demonstrations. [...] When I was your age, believe it or not, none of us knew that we even had a racial problem. [...] We have not finished the job {the racial problem}. We still have a long way to go, but we have made more progress in a few years than we have made in more than a century.
[...]We are indeed, and we are today, the last best hope of man on earth.
–Ronald Reagan, January 25, 1974 “Shining City on a Hill speech”
At the very beginning of Reagan’s 1974 “City on a Hill Speech,” he lauds the praises of torture survivors such as John McCain and two other soldiers who were in North Vietnam. Later, as President, Reagan would oppose torture at all costs. It would seem to me, at least, that his admirers in today’s contemporary settings, who bow before the Altar of “Enhanced Interrogation” could take a few pointers from The Gipper. However, I think the dehumanization process and theories that go into the defense of torture also stem from a misinterpretation of the United States place in the world. First and foremost, the notion that “America is ‘man’s last hope’ is deeply problematic. To place our hopes in a nation not only leads to nationalist ideologies, but permits us to forget that God has set limitations on all great republics throughout history. The very premise of the conservative notion of limited government stems nothing less than from the notion of God’s eternal sovereignty and humanities need for ordering and re-ordering.
It is not our unchanging “heritage”-[read: western heritage] in its sets this country apart from any other but that our system has proven thus far to adapt to change while embracing traditional principles of limited government, love for neighbor, and rule of Constitution (a piece of paper rather than a party or monarch).
It was the Bush 43 administration’s post-9/11/01 reception of Reagan’s triumphalism and recasting it into an un-American and un-Christian position of hating our enemies and abusing their bodies. Of, course, because there is no racial problem any more, right?
Frantz Fanon argued in Black Skin, White Masks that Mayotte Capecia’s use of the location of Didier in Je Suis Martiniquaise (a book about the elite blacks in Martinque) was the ideal city on a hill, where a society provided wish fulfilment, as a black would earn entry into high society, “magically turning white” (44). What no better analogy than this? To see Reagan and Bush’s “City on a Hill” as the epitome of neoconservative utopian logic?
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- Rose(s) Are Black, Devils Are Blue:The Fab 5, Race & College Hoops (politicaljesus.com)
