'250 Years of Cruelty' – Viet Thanh Nguyen on the ‘American Empire' and How to Save the U.S.
The liberation of the American peoples cannot be achieved without the shedding of imperial weight, writes the Pulitzer prize-winning author in this somber essay marking the semiquincentennial.
The word I think of to describe the United States on its 250th anniversary is cruelty. There are other words, of course, that could describe a country of such size, power, and diversity.
One could be optimistic and choose to emphasize words like hope and audacity in an effort to summon up the angels and illusions of American history and culture. There are undoubtedly Americans who are doing their best to hear those angels and who struggle to turn the illusions into reality, who believe that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Martin Luther King Jr said that, and it is comforting, but there is also the possibility that the gravity of American history bends that arc towards something far worse than justice.
That is what we are witnessing at the moment: the black hole of cruelty that has always been there from the very beginning of the United States, or “America,” or the “New World.”