Hollow Homeland

The New Orleans Speech
That Was Never Given

For anyone familiar with the history of Nazi Germany, shivers ran down the spine when, soon after 9-11, the Bush administration began talking about "homeland" security. The shivers became shudders when the phrase was finally codified into a new cabinet-level department.

The only thing worse would’ve been if they’d really slipped up and called it the Department of Fatherland Security.

Ignorance—on endless display in this administration—is bliss, sort of. Because at the same time these young theocrats were setting up the machinery of "homeland" security, their brethren in Congress were busy passing what they, in their proud ignorance, called the Patriot Act, which, if we go back to the meaning of the Latin root-word, of course in fact means "Fatherland Act."

Who knew? Who cared?

If you tried to think about it, what did these people mean by "homeland" anyway?

Though perverted and depraved, the Nazis had a sort of ideological framework in mind when they spoke reverently of the "Vaterland." The framework had three parts: "Heimat," "Blut", and "Boden." "Homeland" (!), "blood", and "land" were combined into a racist, supremacist knot of pure psychopathology involving the blood of mythic teutonic "heroes" who had shed their blood on and for German soil, etc., etc.

Their latter-day American kindred (partly perhaps because they had no homegrown Wagner to feed their fantasies) hardly achieved that level of warped patriotism.

What, then, was going through their minds in those hectic days after 9-11? One wonders who exactly first uttered the word "homeland" and one wonders further why it resonated in private discussions and finally burst forth in presidential speeches and acts of Congress.

What precisely, for these people, was this "homeland" we were all being called on to defend?

Probably because of the old, tricky issues of our centuries-long mistreatment of both the Native Americans and African-Americans, there was (as far as anyone can know) no talk of such blatantly savage concepts (blood, soil, etc.) as the Nazis had used.

No doubt there was in these American minds some shard of geography, some remnant of the old idea of "Fortress America," isolated by two oceans. But geography alone is not enough to get the old American (pardon the expression) blood flowing, is it?

Strangely, for a nation as profoundly and popularly anti-intellectual, the word "homeland" works because it evokes, without defining precisely, the ABSTRACT idea of "America."

Land of the free (ask the slaves about that), home of the brave (ask the Indians slaughtered by those safe behind their technological superiority). Land + home, yes?

One nation under God (ask the unorthodox religious, non-religious, and anti-religious about this).

"Homeland" worked because it resonated powerfully with, and offered unquestioning support for, this widely held IDEA of America. Not—as in Germany—blood and soil but freedom and liberty. (No matter that the American reality fell far short of the ideal.)

The central loss of 9-11—the two Manhattan buildings—played right into this dominant American abstraction because, in addition to their soaring sheer physicality, they were SYMBOLS of the very greatness of, well, the land of the free and the home of the brave, as least as understood by a lot of True Believers.

When George Bush stood on the still-smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center, he was framing himself in this now-lost and very powerful symbol. Clearly (as his handlers and cohorts were quick to realize) a nation immersed in a wholly abstract idea (and ideal!) of itself could easily be called to arms to prevent any further loss of such symbols. (Of course other important factors, primarily economic, were in play, but we’re trying to get at a certain emotional American bedrock here.)

The give-away to all this, what finally revealed the utter casuistry of these poseurs wielding the levers and symbols of American power, came after Hurricane Katrina, with the speech that was never given.

Cities, for all their problems, have from the beginning of history functioned as hotbeds of creativity, growth, development, and progress. For reasons more complex than clear, some cities (Athens, Florence, Vienna, Kyoto) though small produce remarkable ideas, art, and leaders, while other cities though large and even wealthy produce little that is new (Hong Kong, Seattle, Rio de Janeiro, Milan).

The four very large American metropolitan areas (New York-Boston-Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco) have obviously given the world much of great and lasting value in almost every area of human endeavor.

Among the smaller cities only one has achieved far, far beyond its size. That one is of course New Orleans.

To any person who perceives an American "homeland" as something more than a sweet, Thomas-Kinkade, slice of pie-in-the-sky, leave-it-to-Beaver set of antiquated homilies, the loss of New Orleans is a direct and deadly blow directly to, well, to the very heart of America.

The city of great, unique, and uniquely American music, drama, and fiction… lost?

No, it cannot be.

Yet no one, in this media-manipulative government gave the great, elegaic speech that a grievously wounded New Orleans and a simultaneously grievously wounded nation deserved.

Because no one in this administration got it.

To them, New Orleans was a Democratic, poverty-filled enclave in a state that would otherwise be pure Republican, a place to sow some wild oats (as the president himself, on one of his numerous photo-op trips to the area, fondly recalled having done as a young man).

They didn’t (and don’t) understand the importance, the critical importance of New Orleans to the REAL American homeland, so they were incapable of even thinking about the rousing speech that should’ve been given about what New Orleans means to us all and why it must and will be rebuilt.