Sail on, Oh Ship of State!
Why unity with our political enemies is more American than you think
Welcome to The Experiment, the weekly newsletter where we’re making our way through the Uncertain Now. Sonia and I have spent a week walking in the woods up here in the Ozarks, and I think I’ve found a way to understand unity as an expression of determined optimism about America.
It’s all about determined optimism this week in The Experiment. Larry Krutchik turned his reaction to the 2020 elections into art in “50 x 50.” Admittedly slightly less optimistic, Matt Zeller thinks Donald Trump needs to have his passport taken away in “Flight Risk.” Sonia Van Meter recaps S3E3 of Star Trek: Discovery, which picks back up the theme of determined optimism in “Because he's Star Fleet.” Stefan Hankin shows how centrism can be wildly and determinedly optimistic in “Rethinking the Free Market.” And not at all determined or optimistic is our Robin Whetstone in her latest chapter of Red Ticket, “My Mistake.” Y’all, girlfriend is a mess.
And as always, we remember who we’ve lost and offer recommendations on what to do, read, watch, and listen to.
But first, did I ever tell you where the phrase “ship of state” comes from?
The phrase “ship of state,” a metaphor in which a country is all in the same boat, is credited most often to Plato, though he probably drew from others who probably stole it from the guy who invented boats. Roger Williams, not the nothingburger Texas congressman but the founder of Rhode Island, revived the phrase in his Letter to the Town of Providence in 1656, which is probably why the phrase popped into Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s head on November 11, 1849.
This is a story about what Longfellow did with that phrase and what it means for our ship of state today. Right now, I’m in the Ozarks, waiting for the counting to stop so we know who our captain is. I’m also, as suggested by the photograph above, celebrating our 11th anniversary. All good things come to those who wait, whether for happy years to pile up on top of one another, for ballots to be tallied, or for me to get on with the story.
Every year Sonia and I get out of town for the election, which usually falls on the same week as our anniversary. A friend lent us a lake cabin in the Ozarks. We traveled north on the same highway the Y’all Qaeda Trump trucks tried to force the Biden bus off the road. The first billboard for Donald Trump is just north of town next to another billboard touting the re-election a sheriff currently under criminal indictment. A billboard in Temple calls for God to bless Donald Trump. In Waco, a billboard says a vote for Trump is a vote for law & order, all evidence notwithstanding. Yet further on is one equating Trump with the words negocio, trabajo, and opportunidad. We listen to Marc Maron talk about how living through the Trump presidency is like having your step-father kick in your door and tell you he is burning the house down.
Haunted houses have nothing on 2020.
In Oklahoma we see billboards for pill addiction and pain clinics, Indian casinos and veteran suicide hotlines. Some fence lines along the highways are carnivals of Trump signage. One features a massive wooden replica of the Ten Commandments. I wonder if there’s any commandments Trump has not broken. A friend texts me, asking what my reasons are for opposing Trump. It turns out she needs ammunition for conversations, if you can call them that, with combative Trump supporters.
“All they say is ‘prove me wrong’ or ‘give me one fact.’ Like, do they not have the same internet we do?”
“I just hate that Trump supporters only want to debate instead of discuss and for some reason refuse to see the bad in him,” she writes. “I’m not sure if it’s actually on me or because they are already close-minded. All they say is ‘prove me wrong’ or ‘give me one fact.’ Like, do they not have the same internet we do?”
My cousin texts that she’s taking her family to the beach to escape election anxiety. “Portland is getting boarded up today,” she writes. “We are being told to get a week’s worth of food.” Later I find out that many other cities are doing the same thing. These were preparations for a war that would prove blessedly unnecessary.
Dawn on Election Day is pink, and the sky remains a deep blue all day long. There are reports of scattered attempts at voter intimidation and suppression. Y’all Qaeda drives their trucks festooned with Trump flags within the 100-foot limits at several polling places. Robocalls urge households in contested congressional districts not to go outside “until Thursday for you own safety. Stay home. Be safe.” Turnout is lighter than expected on Tuesday.
I spend the day walking through the woods and listening to podcasts. Ryan Holiday advises Daily Stoic listeners to make a plan for any outcome and to love whatever fate would deliver. My meditation app counseles staying off social media until the results are in. A former client asks me to draft a statement in case things go horribly wrong, and for a while that night they seem to. “Let’s just go to bed,” says Sonia.
***
As we know from The Ride of Paul Revere, Longfellow was always good for a little slap and tickle with patriotic myths, and though The Building of the Ship was about the United States, his first draft was kind of a bummer. Titled simply The Ship, Longfellow played with the metaphor of the ship of state, calling his ship “The Union,” but this one ended not in triumph or valor but as wooden boats must inevitably do:
But where, oh where,
Shall end this form so rare?
... Wrecked upon some treacherous rock, Rotting in some loathsome dock,
Such the end must be at length
Of all this loveliness and strength!
This was the version he sent to the printer to be set in type. And had he never had dinner on November 11, 1849 with this close friend, Charles Sumner, that poem probably would not have had the effect it did on the world, because as much as events matter, how we talk about them can have the most lasting effect.
***
Wednesday morning I text my friend Ed: “I don’t know much, but I can say with certainty which pair are NOT my lucky pants.”
I latch onto the only comfort I can muster, and that is the appreciation that I am not a pollster, and everyone isn’t mad at me. “Polls (esp. at the district level) have rarely led us more astray, and it’s going to take a long time to unpack,” tweets Dave Wasserman of the Cook Report. But polling doesn’t predict turnout. In fact, polls are built upon predictions of turnout, and if you don’t correctly guess the makeup of the electorate then you’re going to be surprised by who shows up.
The surprise guest to dinner on Tuesday were a whole lot of white evangelical and Catholic voters, who showed up about 12% more than they did in 2016. White people who say they follow the example of Jesus Christ voted for Donald Trump. For four years they watched Trump act in non-Christlike ways, eschewing charity and peace and embracing cruelty and racism, and decided four more years sounded pretty good. In the section of the Sermon on the Mount in which he warned against false prophets, Jesus said, “Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.” He was talking about how we recognize charlatans, but I think it applies equally to those to call themselves Christian but walk a different path for Ceasar.
White people who say they follow the example of Jesus Christ voted for Donald Trump.
Sonia and I are hiking through a deserted park the next morning and trying to make sense of things. “White people,” says Sonia, “are tired of being on their best behavior.” There’s only so much a poll can tell you about a person’s moral rot. Trump winning seems secondary to having to accept that we have to share this ship of state with millions of Americans who identify with and endorse Trump’s character. This is a bigger tragedy to me than how the election turns out. I have not made a plan to accept this fate, and I do not know how to love it. People talk about us being a divided country like it’s a bad thing. Am I really supposed to hold hands with people who wear T-shirts that say, “Fuck your feelings”?
Ed texts back: “This will be the first election where a win feels like a loss. Very 2020.”
***
All of this brings us back to November 11, 1849, when Longfellow was having dinner with Sumner. Remember the story about the senator who almost got beat to death with a cane for calling a Southern senator a “pimp for slavery”? That was Charles Sumner, but this was before he got elected to the senate as a Republican from Massachusetts. In fact, this was the night before he stood for election to congress as a member of the Free Soil Party that stood for the then radical notion of abolishing slavery. Sumner had just come from giving a rousing speech on the subject, and Longfellow got so caught up in Sumner’s charismatic enthusiasm and subsequent election that he wrote his publisher, asking if he could rewrite the ending and rename the poem “The Building of the Ship.”
That is how we ended up with the most famous lines from his poem:
Sail on, Oh Ship of State!
Sail on, Oh Union strong and great
Humanity, with all its fears
With all the hope of future years
Is hanging breathless on thy fate.
There is something conservatives get wrong about liberals and liberals get wrong about America, and I’ll count myself among them who’ve made latter mistake. They say we hate America. They see protestors as anti-American when we criticize uniformed institutions of America power. We aren’t anti-American. We say we love this country but demand it live up to its promises of equality of treatment and opportunity. That is true, but saying we love this country but just want it to be better is sanctimonious and worse, incomplete, because underpinning our protest is the insistence of structural defects. We walk around like inspectors, pointing out cracks in the racist foundation. Sure, you could repair it, but our house would still rest upon the forced labors of stolen lives. This is true. This is also incomplete, because we liberals do not say the full truth about how we still love this country.
Built into this country is the mechanism not just for repair but for our own redemption. The point of America is to become a more perfect union. We can do more than fix the cracks. We can transform our foundation. Slave holders wrote cheat codes into the operating system to allow Americans to make America greater than it ever imagined, and that is what conservatives do not understand about anti-racism training, or those who protest police violence, or those who simply want us to treat everyone equally.
“Sail on, oh ship of state” sounds like rah-rah claptrap to a modern, cynical ear, but consider what it took for an abolitionist to write these vows to a union then struggling with the question of expanding slavery in new states after war with Mexico. This was a full 12 years before the Southern states seceded. He knew the promise that this country held for “humanity with all its fears/With all the hope of future years” and loved it without knowing that we would ever make good on that promise. Imagine the courage it took for him to be optimistic in 1849. Imagine what it took for an abolitionist to pledge his faith in a union that had just compromised on the expansion of slavery.
In spite of rock and tempest’s roar,
In spite of false lights on the shore,
Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea!
Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee
That poem gave Abraham Lincoln courage when he had to preserve that union and end slavery. FDR wrote those famous lines beginning with “Sail on, Oh Ship of State!” by hand in a note to Winston Churchill, who used them to rally his country against fascism in a famous speech in 1941.
It takes courage to believe in a union that would bind you to people who do not support your full citizenship. I am tempted to laugh at the Trump sign on the porch of the rundown mobile home in rural Arkansas and ask what exactly is it about America that poor white people want to keep great. I am tempted to regard as my enemy those who witnessed the last four years, rose on Tuesday, and thought, yeah, four more years of this guy outta do it. I cannot abide those who espouse a religion built on the Golden Rule but flock to the man with Golden Toilets and low character. I want to regard them as my enemy, and I might end up doing so. And if I’d written this on Wednesday morning, I might have written about the inevitable ruin of our democracy.
This, as it turns out, is exactly the ship of state imagined by Roger Williams in his Letter to the Town of Providence.
There goes many a ship to sea, with many hundred souls in one ship, whose weal and woe is common, and is a true picture of a commonwealth, or a human combination or society. It hath fallen out sometimes, that both papists and protestants, Jews and Turks, may be embarked in one ship; upon which supposal I affirm, that all the liberty of conscience, that ever I pleaded for, turns upon these two hinges–that none of the papists, protestants, Jews, or Turks, be forced to come to the ship's prayers of worship, nor compelled from their own particular prayers or worship, if they practice any.
This is a version of unity that I can get behind, that we are all on one ship together, “papists and protestants, Jews and Turks.” If Longfellow can love this ship of state knowing he had to share it with slavers, I can believe in America, too. Calls for unity only require us to accept sharing space on this voyage. We do not need to agree with racists and hypocrites to move forward, only to recognize that we all have an interest in plugging leaks, making sure there’s enough food, and not ending up stuck on a reef.
By now we know the election has a happier outcome. As John Nichols of The Nation points out, Joe Biden is getting a higher percentage of the national vote than John Kennedy in 1960, Richard Nixon in 1968, Jimmy Carter in 1976, Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, or George W. Bush in 2000. The picture, which took days to come into focus, shows clearly that a majority of Americans reject Trumpism, which at its core is the proposition that pro-Trump America is at war with anti-Trump America.
“This seems to be the most ironic form of justice: a slow, agonizing political death at the hands of thousands of government bureaucrats,” texts a friend. “Trump can only watch the bleeding.”
“This seems to be the most ironic form of justice: a slow, agonizing political death at the hands of thousands of government bureaucrats.”
In fact, Trump is trying to stop the bleeding, but the only doctors available are spin doctors and doctors of jurisprudence, and third-rate ones at that. His incompetence overrides his intentions once again. This is the Obamacare replacement of coups, threatened but never delivered. We finally got our infrastructure week, but this time we’re putting our country back together again.
On our anniversary, we awake to the news that John Lewis’ home county pushed Biden into the lead in Georgia, and as I write this Philadelphia has put Biden over the top in Pennsylvania. The sky above his home in Delaware is now protected airspace. We have reached safety. I want to share the news with Sonia, but she is napping. I will let her sleep a little longer. Things are going to be OK.
Now the next phase of our journey begins. This ship exists to take us from where we are now to where we cannot yet reach, and this time, this Uncertain Now, is our opportunity to do the work to build a more perfect union.
50 x 50
by Larry Krutchik
My colleague Larry Krutchik exemplifies the theme of this week — determined optimism in the face of reality. During the early days of the pandemic, he started writing poetry again, and as the election approached he started writing about the choices the country was facing that were personified in the Biden-Trump contest. I was charmed by his choice to portray his poetry on the flag. He was gracious enough to allow me to share his creations in The Experiment with all of you.
…as the events of 2020 unfolded, my writing focused on more serious issues facing our country -- the pandemic, racial equality, and the erosion of our democracy. I then created a series of shape poems, titled 50 x 50.
50 letters representing the Stars.
50 words on the Stripes (the 3rd in the series has 13 lines, not 50 words).
Flight Risk
by Matt Zeller
Matt Zeller, who used to write Presidential Daily Briefings for Barack Obama, notes that Donald Trump has more state secrets than ready cash. What if he decides to cash in the former for the latter as his debts come due? The President of the United States is a flight risk.
Presidents are not required to fill out either or undergo a vetting process to determine if they can be trusted to access our secrets - because up until Trump, we never had to worry about a President also being a traitor.
S3 E3: "Because he's Star Fleet."
by Sonia Van Meter
This week Sonia Van Meter leans into the present-day parallels when the Discovery tries to make a pit stop on Earth and, um, discovers that things have changed in the last 900-plus years. For one, the Federation hasn’t been around for a century. For another, earthlings are quick to violence, closed to outsiders, and pretty much a bag of dicks. How does our intrepid crew resolve the conflict? It takes a little bit of trickery, and then (sigh) some talking and listening. I know. This is another in our week’s theme of relentless optimism.
What in god’s name has happened on Earth that these paranoid militants are now the ones running the show?
Rethinking the “Free Market”
by Stefan Hankin
Our free market isn’t as free as advertised. Pollster Stefan Hankin is back with another modest proposal, this time making the Democratic case for breaking up tech monopolies, redesigning our patent system, and simplifying our corporate tax code. What’ll that get you? More jobs, more innovation, and fewer patent trolls gaming the system.
The GOP’s defining ethos seems to ignore how the world has changed over the past 70 years; it views closed borders, broad control over trade, and internal and external protectionism as policies that are in the best interest of the nation.
Red Ticket: My Mistake
by Robin Whetstone
This weekend in Red Ticket, Robin Whetstone is rescued, sort of, by Lyosha.
“Say something, or he’ll hang up,” I thought.
Whatever the reason for his call, I couldn’t let him hang up. I definitely was not okay.
RIP
This Texas doctor who treated COVID patients
How we’re getting through it
Hiking in the Ozarks
Seeing the Ansel Adams exhibit at Crystal Bridges
What I’m reading
The only thing I’ve been reading this week is Ben Barnes’ Barn Burning Barn Building: Tales of a Political Life, From LBJ to George W. Bush and Beyond. Boy howdy can that man tell a story.
What I’m watching
I might have picked the wrong week to watch Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7. I may have picked the best one.
What I’m listening to
Yep, it’s really happening.
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