The Shame of It
The lesser way of being America will go hard, and we will feel every second of it.
Frank A. Spring comes as close to making sense of Afghanistan as anyone you’re likely to read. This is not the fall of the American Empire but the end of a way of being America, and that’s a good, if painful, thing.
by Frank A. Spring
It’s the shame of it, really.
**
We think of Alaric I as the leader of the Gothic army that sacked Rome (and we think of him often, if by “we” you mean “me” and by “often” you mean “pretty much all the time”). That name, originator of the sack of Rome, the symbol of the imminent fall of the Empire, stuck in my brain early in my life, I assume because as an adolescent I was very interested in people who sacked things (Agamemnon and Charles Haley being prominent in my personal pantheon). I had the impression - I dare say I was given it - of Alaric as a bog-standard barbarian, the chieftain of a tribe who hated the Romans and, as soon as the Empire swooned, turned up to stick the Eternal City right in the damn neck.
It wasn’t until adulthood that I learned this was largely wrong; Alaric and his boys (his numerous, belligerent boys) in fact served in the Roman army, cracking skulls across Western Europe under the sign of the aquila. The usual reward for a barbarian chieftain who served the Empire like that was citizenship. Alaric expected it, and never got it. He went away mad. He came back madder. We know the rest of that story.
**
This is not an “America now is Rome during the fall” piece. I’ve read one version or another of that since I was old enough to think about such things, the argument deployed on the political left as a lament of American imperialism (a real phenomenon) and on the political right as a clarion call to a return to shared American and Rome-at-its-peak values of hardiness, sacrifice, and discipline (fucking nonsense).
The parallel has never sat right with me because - and I accept that this is a truly wild thing to write given present circumstances - I am not convinced America is falling. I accept the validity of essentially all possible caveats and objections to this: our politics is comically dysfunctional; our leadership cadre suspect before an array of stupefying challenges; our prevailing economic system a gasping vampire frantically searching for one last sweet, sweet drop of blood before the dawn light burns it to ash.
And yet. Across the country, our governing bodies look more like the people they govern than ever before (which is not to say that they are fully representative yet because hoo boy are they not). The idea that we don’t have to live under vampire economics has jumped from the political left to the political right, which - for all its public mewling about socialism - has a generational rift with respect to views on unfettered capitalism. This bodes well. A Black woman came so close to becoming governor of Georgia (!) that her election had to be outright stolen. The energy and momentum - one might say the future - of one of our major parties is slowly but powerfully shifting toward a group of leaders whose defining common feature is a refusal to pretend that our political system’s many obvious failings are in fact virtues or at least as inevitable as the weather. A criminally overdue racial reckoning has found real political purchase.
What might look like collapse in fact suggests to me the shedding of an old way of being.
Hell, in the teeth of some of the most aggressively dishonest election tactics in recent memory, the American people voted out an incumbent president in a head-to-head matchup with no third-party spoiler. Yes, it took four years of appalling skullduggery and the cataclysmic mismanagement of a pandemic to instigate this, but still: an incumbent president got voted out! That never happens! unless the challenger is the founder of the modern incarnation of their party, possessed of a radical vision for the country and a singular mastery at communicating it. Whatever his other virtues may be, I doubt even Joe Biden would argue he’s the second coming of FDR. But he still won, because we, the people, willed something better.
What might look like collapse in fact suggests to me the shedding of an old way of being. It is not America that is collapsing, but a way of being America (and American) that is passing. We are, to borrow a phrase, privy to a great becoming.
But, god help us, is that old way going hard. Its avatars and agents flail about in ecstasies of cruelty and do savage things in our collective name. The harm has been real and human - lives lost; ruined; destroyed. And it has been moral. One of my fears in the last few years is that we - that I - would become inured to the feeling of shame, that the very idea of righteous and rightful conduct would become as distant and cold as the stars.
**
In that sense, the appallingly botched withdrawal from Afghanistan has done me a favor, because that sense of shame is clearly alive and vigorous. The virtues of withdrawal itself have been argued ad nauseum elsewhere; my own view is that whatever opportunity the United States might have had to contribute to an enduring, stable, democratic state in Afghanistan has long since been eclipsed. But, and this is perhaps the least original thought I can express, no one wanted this.
American imperialism has been (is) a real thing, and I’ve seen our mission in Afghanistan described as an imperial entanglement or a colonial war. But even with respect to how we position - or don’t - the most powerful military in the history of the world in that significantly less-powerful country, the imperial metaphor fails.
An empire has a center and a periphery; the center rules the periphery to the advantage of the center, and the disadvantage of the periphery. The Iraq War was a terrific example of an imperial entanglement; human behavior is multiply-determined, but you don’t even have to squint to see the desire for a large Middle Eastern client-state just behind the swirling delusions and naked falsehoods that got us there.
The Afghanistan operation, however, ended as the powerful center ruling the periphery to the disadvantage of both. Whatever American interest the occupation of Afghanistan served ended with the death of Osama bin Laden, and there’s a good argument to be made that it came years before that. It’s emerging that this wasn’t even the boondoggle for defense contractors that one might have expected (in contrast to Iraq, which appears to have been a larger cash cow). In that sense, our continued presence was one of the last gasps of that older, passing way of being America, a ghastly potemkin imperial occupation in which a great power went through the motions of occupying a small one for lack of a better idea and the will to execute it.
It seems fairly clear that, writ-large, we remained in Afghanistan because no one wanted to be the person who “lost” it, or to do the painfully exacting work of figuring out how to conduct a responsible departure from a place where we had racked up a generation’s worth of debt in the form of people who believed us when we said we were there to help them and would repay them if they endangered themselves to help us.
**
America is not Rome; the Afghans are certainly not the Visigoths. Alaric was a product of his time and his place, both of which are long gone. But I think of him now because he was the specific instrument of Rome’s reckoning for a larger crime - a crime of which America is guilty, too.
There are two ways to motivate someone to fight for you if they do not come from your tribe or country: by coin, and by covenant. The coin model is direct and simple: here’s your money, kill the other guy.
The covenant is older. Older than America, older than Rome. If you risk your life for us - our tribe; our city; our nation - we will treat you as one of us. It’s atavistic. In our bones.
If we were doing the America Is Rome Falling narrative, it would be a convenient beat to say that America’s failure to protect our Afghan (and Iraqi, and for that matter Kurdish peshmerga) allies is a new low, a fresh shame that shows how far we have fallen, and can the reckoning be far behind?
The truth, of course, is that America has always violated this covenant. People of color, particularly Black and Native people, have given their lives in service of this country since before it was a country at all, for all the good it has done them and their descendants.
This is not a new shame, but a familiar one, a holdover not from a better Time Before the Fall, but a lesser time in a lesser way of being America. Which makes it all the more poignant because we were promised, and as a people bucked history, specifically because we were promised the decency we obviously crave.
What we are doing now is fundamentally indecent. It does not have to be this way, and it might not - we may yet pull this out, in the almost literal sense that we might still pay the debt of our promises and get out the people we promised to. But it shows that the muscle memory of American power is in many ways attuned to obliviousness and casual cruelty.
That way of being America will pass. We will shed that skin. But it will go hard, and we will feel every second of it.
Frank Spring is the best American writer no one knows. Check out Frank Spring’s previous contributions to The Experiment which include “Neither Gone Nor Forgotten,” “Oh, DaveBro,” and “In Praise of Gold Leaf.” Follow him on Twitter at @frankspring.
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