“Wear none of thine own chains; but keep free, whilst thou art free.” – William, Penn, 1693.

But William,  what if freedom for others means chains for you, who was never free?

It’s fitting; I suppose that the beautiful play Hamilton was finally available to all of us on the Disney Channel on July Fourth, the same day as President Trump’s speech at Mt. Rushmore.

This was a holiday when culture, race, and politics all collided in a rich and laden cultural mash.

Hamilton, written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, opened on Broadway in 2015. It has earned more than a billion dollars, won 11 Tony Awards, and a Pulitzer Prize.

It is the most successful  Broadway production of my lifetime. But when I watched it last night, I saw it very differently than I did just a few years ago.

The story about Hamilton and also about our President’s behavior this weekend is about moral failings, new realities, and lost opportunities.

Both are, in a sense, lessons in the painful struggle of white people to come to consciousness about race in a country founded on lies and distortions, a heralded experiment in freedom while caving into slavery and denying it for centuries.

Last week I learned that  Black Lives Matter had become the largest social movement in American History. That is change. Across the country, in the far West, Donald  Trump was living in an altered reality.

I learned again – this is happening a lot lately –  that I need to understand race in a completely different way if I’m supposed to grasp it.

I can thank Donald Trump and Lin-Manuel Miranda for this weekend lesson.

We are in a new dimension.

Friday and Saturday, the President decided to energize his re-election campaign, re-igniting the deep and disturbing fear many white people in America have of black Americans and “outsiders” and “leftists.”

At the same time, a brilliant singer and playwright released his stunning and racially charged portrayal of the American Revolution on  Disney, one of the most iconic American corporations.

Finally, all Americans could afford to see it, including black people.

The new Disney + channel movie version of the play was released on Friday.  Americans got to see the play for just over $6; Broadway tickets ran up to $1,500 at times.

It was a surreal joy to see this play, a surging, beautifully written and sung and choreographed production.

The play was a masterpiece, a  radical portrayal and re-imagining of the birth of America, and of Alexander Hamilton’s life during and after the American Revolution.

Miranda’s stroke of genius was to use actors of color to portray Hamilton and other prominent figures in the American Revolution; all of them were white. This was taken to be a powerful statement about diversity, and it was.

But just a few years later, those same actors conveyed a completely different image and idea: why do we keep celebrating and honoring the people who brought us and fought for slavery?

The weekend was very much about heroes.

Hamilton was about the heroes of the American Revolution.

Trump promised a National Garden Of Heroes at Mt. Rushmore. He wants to honor Evangelical Leader Billy Graham (who would have despised Trump’s message that day, Graham was a real Christian, not a pretender) and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the brilliant and extremely conservative justice.

There were African-Americans on Trump’s hero list, including Martin Luther King and Harriet Tubman, whose image the President has kept off of our currency people of color on Trump’s heroes list; no one outside of his insular and angry world was asked for nominations.

I don’t have any doubt about how Dr. King or Harriet Tubman would react to Trump’s speeches over the holiday weekend.

So this weekend was very much about heroes. How should we feel about the ones we – white we, that is – were taught all of our loves to honor?

Should we give up on the heroes we’ve been celebrating since the first Fourth of July, or should we see them in a different light, and re-consider them, even take their statues away and their names off of buildings?

Both events surprised me.

One – the Rushmore trip –  repelled me. A gathering of musty old white men, living and dead.

The other got me to thinking.

Much as I loved Hamilton, I felt almost from the beginning that something was wrong as I watched it.

What seemed so well-meaning and noble in 2015 seemed morally scrambled and off-kilter to me in 2020.

I’m not into knee-jerk politics, left or write.  I want to think for myself.

I don’t care to join the progressive confessionals, the hand-wringing, and self-flagellation, all the things that annoy people about liberals. I’m less interested in denouncing racism than I am in understanding it.

I’d like to find a way to love my country again. I’d like for other people to come to love it too.

The play was terrific and deserved all the praise it got.

But I see now that it also laid bare our now nakedly exposed inability to take responsibility for what our country did, and how it was conceived. We haven’t been telling the truth. We just don’t seem able to stay with it.

Those men and women so creatively portrayed in Hamilton all worked together to make a deal with the Devil. They were indeed brave and surely brilliant. But they acquiesced to great evil.

They agreed to a new country in exchange for decades of slavery and tens of thousands of death and countless misery.

Tom Paine got it, he wrote slavery was “so monstrous is the making and keeping of slaves at all..and the many evils attending the practice, such as selling husbands away from wives, children from parents and each other, in violation of sacred and natural ties; and opening the way for adulteries, incests and many shocking consequences, for which the guilty masters must answer to the final judge..”

Not one of the heroes in Hamilton joined his abolitionist group, the first in America. And nobody answered to God or anybody else.

But we have changed a lot in a short time. That is good news.

A play that uses black and yellow and brown actors to glorify the American Revolution seems suddenly confused now, thanks to George Floyd and Black Lives Matter.

As the country is being aggressively challenged to come to terms with the awful echoes of slavery, we are learning that the slave trade was entangled with the founding of our country.

Wait a minute; I thought as I watched.

Aren’t these slave owners these actors are portraying?

Aren’t these the people whose statues are being pulled down all over the country? Aren’t these the ones who used slavery as a bargaining chip to protect money and property?

The short answer is yes.

Why, I wondered,  was slavery mentioned only twice in the play, and why wasn’t there a single actor playing the role of slaves?

Shouldn’t it have been mentioned that the price paid for our new country was slavery? The South would never have joined the union if the constitutional delegates hadn’t gone along.

I know from my readings that a number of our Founding Fathers and supporters objected to slavery.

John Adams considered it an abomination,  Jefferson whined about it but kept his slaves, Tom Paine founded the first abolitionist group in America.

But nobody thought abolishing slavery was worth angering the South, disrupting commerce, or breaking up the union. They had their chance, they ran from it.

I don’t fault Miranda for any of this. Like me, he was living in a different time, in a different head, with altered consciousness.

Nobody saw these submerged issues in his play when it came out.

In late May, Miranda and the show’s producer, Jeffrey Seller, conceded that they were guilty of a “moral failure” in not supporting the George Floyd protests.

But how could they?

Hamilton, the play is a brilliant, spirited quicksand bog when it comes to justice and slavery.

Much of the play centers around Hamilton’s marriage to Elizabeth Schuyler, whose father was a prominent American General.

The play never mentioned that the Schuylers were one of the most notorious and cruel slave-owning families. Last month, the mayor of Albany ordered the removal of a statue honoring Gen. Philip Schuyler, Hamilton’s father-in-law.

But then, I didn’t notice it either when I first saw the play. I took it as a beautiful and hopeful idea.

The show was an immense smash, but I remember seeing the photographs of the politicians and celebrities who somehow got their hands on those thousand dollar tickets.

Almost all of them were white. And nearly all of the ticket goers were white. Not too many black kids in New York City get to go or want to go to Broadway shows or can afford those tickets.

How telling that very few would see a play like this with its groundbreaking cast of people of color of them while white people came from all over the country.

It was almost eerie that Trump and Hamilton performed on the same day.

Trump, as he did in 2016, is playing on the long-standing fear of many white people that the colored hordes of the world are coming to take their jobs and communities away, or worse.

For a President, this kind of speech on Independence Day is a kind of social treason, a rejection of the country’s fading idealism and moral grounding. One of the most elemental responsibilities of a President is to unify the country, to help mend and heal the ugly scars of democracy.

The people who support Trump must agree with him when it comes down to this xenophobic ranting. It is painful for me to see, but I need to accept it. We all have to look in the mirror each morning and like what we see.

Both the play and Trump’s speech were moral failings, each from different ends of this charged spectrum. But both were instructive. One was accidental, the other deliberate.

To accept the President’s remarks, or embrace them, one had to deny the reality and History of millions of people who tell a profoundly different story.

Consciously or not, Hamilton is another cultural creation that appears to celebrate black people, but it ends up being about getting white people to buy tickets for $1,500 and feel uplifted and affirmed in their own vision of the world.

This is why my black novelist friend tells me he is sick of white people telling him they are or are not racists.  He’ll care when things change, he says.

I know Miranda and the producers gave a lot of tickets away to poor and minority children, but still, this was a play meant to glorify the white and slave-owning fathers of our country without ever acknowledging the hypocrisy and pretense of the revolution itself.

Imagine what would have happened if Adams and Hamilton and Washington had rejected the Southern States’ insistence on keeping slavery? What if they let the Southern states form their union?

And our Republic was slave free? Our country would be very different today.

Then, all of those declarations and flowery self-righteous inscriptions on marble buildings would have been true.  We would all have a different view of our country today.

I wonder what I am supposed to do these days besides pretend I’m not a racist or confess that I am?  I need to see things differently and change what’s in my head.

As with the left and the right, the challenge is to start talking to one another and listening.

But I can’t pretend, even in the interest of balance, to support what Donald Trump did or said on the Fourth of July.

Given a choice, I would prefer not to be racist in my thinking of writing.

Donald Trump has a choice; he wants to be a racist.

His racism is calculating and deliberate and right out in the open.

He wants people to see it; he is betting his re-election on it. At the moment, he is offering us nothing else.

That is a new low in the history of American presidential politics.

People who support this kind of blatant exploitation and bigotry are not just wrong. They are complicit.

This weekend, Trump stood in front of those giant Mussolini-sized flags at Mt. Rushmore and told his fellow Americans on the Fourth of July that many of them are the enemy now, his people, our neighbors, and friends, not just immigrants from other places.

“Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe our History, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children…Angry mobs are trying to tear down  statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.”

People who aren’t troubled by these words are beyond the reach of someone like me. Troubled people don’t need me to tell them what is wrong, even evil, about them.

On both ends of the racial divide  –   Black Lives Matter and President Trump – racism is now a major issue for the Presidential campaign, second only to the pandemic. Sadly, we have not seen the last video of brutality.

Race joins the coronavirus as a defining moment for the presidency, race relations, and the country.

The President believes he can exploit racial tensions and win re-election in that way.

Black Lives Matter, now a mainstream political movement, believes that white Americans are finally ready to move the needle in this long and intractable struggle.

Someone wrote to me yesterday to demand to know if I was aware that two of the founding people of Black Lives Matter were “trained Marxists,” as if I would swoon

Yes, I did know of it, I wrote back, Trump tweets about it almost daily.

I asked the message writer if she was a “trained Trump supporter,” and I said the Marxists had done a great job. Black Lives Matter is changing America when everyone else has failed for centuries.

The training must have been good.

But both of these visions can’t win in November. The President has done us great harm, and it will take a long time to heal those wounds, on both sides.

“Our unalterable resolution should be to be free.” – Sam  Adams, 1776.

I always loved Sam Adams’s peaceful resolution about freedom; I always thought it was stirring.

But what would I have thought about it if I were in chains and enslaved and if my family has just been taken from me and sent away, and I would never see them again?

Looked at in that way, Adams stirring quote seems a little different to me, perhaps a little staged and narcissistic. Maybe even a lie.

I dislike the term white privilege; it smells of cliche and cant and political correctness, even if I am coming to see the meaning of it, and how it might apply to me.

I believe the President has misjudged and underestimated the rest of us and desecrated the flag he presumes to love but does not ever seem to understand.

I don’t believe most Americans want to accept his dark and unforgiving vision of America. Trump makes Ronald Reagan and his shining city look like the Muppet Show.

Being an American is not about never protesting; it is all about protesting.

To call African-Americans savage mob for protesting the killing of George Floyd is no better than calling Jews greedy and cunning.

I believe many Americans want to find our better angels and feel genuinely proud of their country again. I think most of us want a kinder nation.

We want to be just and equal, even if we are not there yet. I feel the promise of our revolution is still within our grasp if we can face the truth and learn from it.

Everywhere I look, I see that is beginning to happen.

Our election, now just a few months away, is full of meaning and promise now. We get to find out who we are.

 

 

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