Tag: Opinion

Moral materialism

I have been trying to gain a better understanding of how we Americans have gotten to the point we are – as fucked up as it seems. I found an article that summarizes a view taken by the late historian David Potter:

The European settlers who first came to the country found forests stretching on forever, flocks of geese so large that they required 30 minutes to take off. All of this possibility drove the settlers sort of mad. They found themselves walking more in a day than they had ever imagined, dreaming dreams bigger than they had ever imagined. These immigrants, the ones who weren’t brought here in chains, turned entrepreneurial, disordered, antic, religiously zealous, morally charged, messianic, and perpetually restless. They measured their life by how much they had grown and how far they had climbed. They were propelled by a central contradiction: They had this intense spiritual drive to complete God’s plans for humanity on this continent—and they also had this fevered ambition to get really rich. They were propelled by a moral materialism that would never let them rest.

This follows several ideas that continually pop into my head: Manifest destiny and the fact that – indeed – America was founded as a Christian nation. I have, in the past, confused freedom of religion with freedom of belief.

Occupy Mars

Update January 2025

It’s official! Fearless Leader tRump mentioned Manifest Destiny when making some vague tRump-style commitment during his Inauguration Weave, ringing in America’s new Oligarchy.

It just fucking pains me to no end to have to agree with our Felon-In-Chief being a Liberal Coastal Elitist Sociopath. However, I grew up right smack dab in the middle of another President’s proclamation:

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. 

President John F Kennedy ~ from an address at Rice University on the nation’s space effort, is a September 12, 1962

I am not going to hold my breath, but I have to admit it would be fucking bitchen for humankind to make it to Mars in my lifetime.

American Progress (1872) by John Gast is an allegorical representation of the modernization of the new west. Columbia, a personification of the United States, is shown leading civilization westward with the American settlers. She is shown bringing light from east to west, stringing telegraph wire, holding a school book, and highlighting different stages of economic activity and evolving forms of transportation. On the left, Indigenous Americans are displaced from their ancestral homeland. Updated by yours truly to incorporate our fearless leaders’ inauguration comments. – source Wikipedia

Manifest Destiny, Indeed