Nothing sacred: From Jefferson to Jan. 6, America's toxic mythologies are destroying us

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Nothing sacred: From Jefferson to Jan. 6, America's toxic mythologies are destroying us
Thomas Jefferson hid the ugly truth of Bacon's Rebellion — an early example of the myths emerging around Jan. 6

By DONALD EARL COLLINS
PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 6, 2021 6:00AM


(Salon) One of the great myths of the United States is that rebellion and insurrection are among the necessary components of patriotism. Myth-making provides the U.S. a way to recycle its gory mess of violent anti-government white supremacy and white privilege into something sacred. Perhaps no nation has accumulated more myths about itself in its short 245 years of existence than America, which has used those myths to justify everything from Indigenous genocide and slavery to dropping nuclear weapons on Japanese cities at the end of World War II.

The defenders of and the deflectors from the Jan. 6 insurrection have been spinning a new tale for the world for months now. Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., said in May, "There was no insurrection, and to call it an insurrection, in my opinion, is a bold-faced lie." Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., an ardent Trump supporter, defended the insurrectionists under investigation and arrest for their roles in the Jan. 6 riot. "The DOJ is harassing peaceful patriots across the country," Gosar said on May 12. As author Mychal Denzel Smith put it in a recent article for New York magazine, "If we let the mob participants and sympathizers claim their own version of the narrative, it will be told through a righteous lens." They have already laid the groundwork for making the House hearings on Jan. 6 a dog and pony show.

This sort of mythological alchemy dates back to America's violent beginnings. "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure," founding father and third president Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to William Stephens (future president John Adams' son-in-law) in 1787. Jefferson wrote this during the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, in which Massachusetts had threatened open rebellion against a new centralized federal system of governance. In his letter to Stevens, Jefferson also wrote, "What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them."

Aside from owning slaves and his love affair of statutory rape with Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson was also one of America's first great myth-makers. With white America's first big insurrection in Bacon's Rebellion, Jefferson as president tried to plaster over the bedrock reality of open rebellion against extreme class inequalities among Englishmen that developed in colonial Virginia and elsewhere. ..............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2021/09/06/nothing-sacred-from-jefferson-to-jan-6-americas-toxic-mythologies-are-destroying-us/