Democracy in the Rain

America has always been an impressionistic promise

One of my favorite impressionist paintings is Childe Hassam’s The Avenue in the Rain.

Hassam’s painting is held in the permanent art collection of the White House.

The Avenue in the Rain was painted in February 1917, about two months before the United States entered the First World War. Political and military tensions were building across the nation in the early months of that year, and after much argument and division, the United States declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917. It was a difficult time, and that war would set trajectories for the century about to unfold.

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The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself —
always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested in adversity.

— Jimmy Carter

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I’m not given to flag art; I don’t like patriotic paintings. But Hassam’s moody image captures something about America and democracy — that it is never entirely clear, this national project striving toward freedom and equality. The Avenue in the Rain doesn’t rejoice in flag-waving. The flag isn’t flying proud. It has been battered by a storm, it hangs soaked and limp.

It has always seemed to be an icon of America’s impressionistic promise.

The nation may think of itself as a city on a hill — the one whose light cannot be hid. Truthfully, however, the light of liberty can be indistinct, muted, diffused. And sometimes it rains on the national parade.

Indeed, America is often stormy, rainy, blue. We see only the wavy reflection of democracy in the water pooling under our feet. Many days, the best we can do is huddle together under umbrellas to keep each other dry.

As uncertainty and fear rain down on the nation this July 4, it is important to remember that there have only been seasons of America, some sunny days, many storms, and more than a few earthquakes.

The light dims, the sky threatens. This year, they say, may be a particularly dangerous hurricane season.

It is hard to wave a drenched flag.

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INSPIRATION

Below are three poems of American ambiguity for your reflection this July 4. Which one speaks to you most deeply?

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth.
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate,
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet, as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.
— Claude McKay, “America” (1921). McKay was an important poet of the Harlem Renaissance

The truth is, I’ve never cared for the National
Anthem. If you think about it, it’s not a good
song. Too high for most of us with “the rockets’
red glare” and then there are the bombs.
(Always, always there is war and bombs.)
Once, I sang it at homecoming and threw
even the tenacious high school band off key.
But the song didn’t mean anything, just a call
to the field, something to get through before
the pummeling of youth. And what of the stanzas
we never sing, the third that mentions “no refuge
could save the hireling and the slave”? Perhaps
the truth is that every song of this country
has an unsung third stanza, something brutal
snaking underneath us as we absent-mindedly sing
the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands
hoping our team wins. Don’t get me wrong, I do
like the flag, how it undulates in the wind
like water, elemental, and best when it’s humbled,
brought to its knees, clung to by someone who
has lost everything, when it’s not a weapon,
when it flickers, when it folds up so perfectly
you can keep it until it’s needed, until you can
love it again, until the song in your mouth feels
like sustenance, a song where the notes are sung
by even the ageless woods, the shortgrass plains,
the Red River Gorge, the fistful of land left
unpoisoned, that song that’s our birthright,
that’s sung in silence when it’s too hard to go on,
that sounds like someone’s rough fingers weaving
into another’s, that sounds like a match being lit
in an endless cave, the song that says my bones
are your bones, and your bones are my bones,
and isn’t that enough?
— Ada Limón, “A New National Anthem.” Limón is currently the United States Poet Laureate, the first Latina to hold this honor

Let them not say:   we did not see it.
We saw.

Let them not say:   we did not hear it.
We heard.

Let them not say:     they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled.

Let them not say:   it was not spoken, not written.
We spoke,
we witnessed with voices and hands.

Let them not say:     they did nothing.
We did not-enough.

Let them say, as they must say something: 

A kerosene beauty.
It burned.

Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,
read by its light, praised,
and it burned.
— Jane Hirshfield, “Let Them Not Say”

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Democracy itself is not just an unruly contest for power, but also the site of an ongoing debate about what democracy is or should be.

— Michael Ignatieff, former leader of the Liberal Party of Canada

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Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.

Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.

No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.

― Reinhold Niebuhr