Baron Wormser: The Weight

“And (and, and) you put the load right on me”

 from “The Weight,” written by Robbie Robertson, recorded by The Band

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   Every American, regardless of gender, religion (or lack of), ethnicity, race, socioeconomic status, geography, and whatever other identifiers you wish to summon, carries the weight of being an American, which is the weight of America’s destiny. It’s a strange weight because a person can live a life in the United States and never particularly notice the weight, as if the weight were weightless. I suspect this is because the weight is second-nature and goes with basic American beliefs in freedom, property, individual rights, and enterprise. Destiny, however, although it is not to be found in any particular founding document, is there every moment in American life because it supplies the reason for the nation’s existence. The nation isn’t just an agglomeration of people who form a heterogeneous democracy. The nation has a destiny to be—among other stirring shibboleths—a lamp unto the rest of the world, a city upon a hill, and the last best hope. The destiny can also by taken on by sub-groups such as white supremacists (the Ku Klux Klan) and Internet-inspired believers such as QAnon who are intent on uncovering various phantasms of malfeasance. Desperate for an assertive American task, people will grasp at some very wretched straws. 

   The weight has a great deal to do with the nation’s being an experiment, something created that did not exist before and thus different from the course of ethnic, tribal roots that evolved over centuries and also something whose creation involved enslaving people and extirpating most of the people who lived in what became the nation. Thus an experiment encompassing heartless expropriation and brutal logic—them versus us. An experiment can produce confidence, on one hand, as in “We know what we’re doing” and anxiety, on the other hand, “We don’t know what we’re doing.” Destiny not only has to do with knowing but, even more importantly, believing that the circumstances are bound to be favorable, or, as the Puritans liked to put it, “providential.” The nation has been God-blessed in a literal sense. The American endeavor in all its manifestations (including slavery, as numerous apologists explained) has been overseen by God. Even as the number of churchgoers has declined, the official, sanctimonious, crusading credo has gotten stronger. There is no going back on God-given destiny. 

   Travelers to the United States have always noted the assertive character of American life. Everything must be bigger, better, newer. America is the epitome of progress and each American must identify with that progress, one achieving way or another. The nation is a dynamic unto itself and thus something different from the typical chest-thumping nationalism. Americans must assert themselves to show they are truly Americans. The spasms of super-patriotism the nation has undergone, along with the notion of people being stigmatized as un-American, have to do with the need to assert the identity that went with being an American. The dilemma has been that there is no one simple identity that describes an American. The only true Americans would be the Native people who have been exiled in their own land. This has been ignored by politicians of all stripes for centuries as they seek to assume the mantle of Truest American by proclaiming whatever version of destiny appeals to them—economic, democratic, or religious, to name three. The Christian-capitalist-Hollywood-atomic republic has presented an ethos few could resist. For better and worse, some intractable, purblind power resides in that hyphenated melange. 

   Once upon a time, the destiny was manifest: it had to happen. That destiny was geographic (“fifty-four forty or fight”) and, accordingly, tangible in that regard. Once the frontier ceased to be and the borders were established, the destiny became something inward, a matter, to be sure, of overreaching, external power but also a matter of the nation identifying itself with a sense of life that perpetually needed justification. Despite all the protestations to the opposite, all the clamor of confidence and certainty, the locus for that sense of life would be the anxiety that is every American’s dubious birthright. Some of this anxiety has religious origins: Am I saved or damned? Some of this anxiety has seemingly demographic origins: Where do I fit among this restless people who are continually heading elsewhere in search of something or other? Some of the anxiety has to do with the political uncertainty that goes with an experiment: Does democracy offer what it purports to offer? Many a minority group would beg to differ. Their weight has been palpable to any who cared to look. Some of this anxiety continues to be downright existential: What is all this hubbub, which becomes a daily weight, to me? Whither the nation is bound is a question not limited to the United States, but in the United States the notion has to do with numerous basic uncertainties: What are we doing here? What is the land to us? What have we done? What are we doing? 

   The answer has been to assert the validity of each individual self and let it go at that: many bank accounts and many jobs and many moving vans and many blank moments in front of the endless advertisements and news, so endless they start to intertwine. Given the advent of consumerism as a way of life, it’s not a bad answer. George W. Bush knew what he was saying when he told Americans to go shopping. Unfortunately, the shopping only adds to the American weight, something that tended to be beyond Mr. Bush and many other Americans who believe in the material genius of “more.” Mr. Bush was not about to call for some sacrifice or to call attention to what might be construed as his derelict behavior in ignoring the warnings about the terrorism that was visited upon the nation. Responsibility can be very hard weight, particularly when the attack of 9/11 brought up the nation’s destiny as an inviolable bastion of freedom. The unhappy fact of those terrorists being eager to kill innocent people because they hated what they perceived as the nation’s overbearing, collective guts was more than could be parsed in a televised sound-bite. 

   The synergy of violence, assertion, and the weight of destiny has been part of the nation’s DNA for centuries. Destiny has nothing do with getting along with others and merely living. Each mass shooting in the USA enacts a nightmarish parody of weight and assertion. Each shooter is telling the world he (typically) is someone violently special who must tell the nation-at-large. No, no, no, we say. That is not what the nation is about. I agree but destiny becomes twisted in more than a few minds and some of those minds recognize that a gun is the final assertion. Alas, destiny, since it’s a free-floating conceit based on nothing more than adventitious and advantageous circumstances, is fundamentally unhinged. The USA has had no trouble propping up monstrous dictators in the name of freedom. In a fallen world, an unfallen nation can do what it wants. No dirt clings to unfallen hands—or so goes the story. 

   The pace of American life has been famously efficient—no vacations for everyone in August, no respite for single mothers, no sympathy for workers making an indecent minimum wage. Americans must prove themselves, no matter how adverse their circumstances may be. The fixation on identity at this point in time makes sense. If you know my assertions, you know me. As an American, it is my right and duty to assert the integrity of those assertions. My character is irrelevant. It comes as no surprise that so many celebrities over the past fifty years have entered American politics. They are the grand winners in the identity-recognition sweepstakes and can assert anything they choose to assert à la Donald Trump. Their weight is golden. They bested the anxiety. 

   Yet, hydra-like, the anxiety remains. Again, Donald Trump almost seems an allegorical figure, a homage to forceful emptiness, the dead-end of American destiny, an ego jumping up and down in the same place and demanding to be recognized as such, a messiah without a religion. No room for calm there nor for a sense of humor nor the latitude of empathy nor the benefits of culture. With Trump one senses that the weight has explicitly turned against the nation, that the ballyhooed freedom means little more than a license to act out, that what the nation faces is implosion, too much weight that has no idea what to do with itself. Yes, entertainment is desperately there and desperately filling in the days. But somehow life is supposed to be more than a video game or technological fix. The nation craves purpose beyond tending to the needs of its citizens. Destiny can do that admirably—and not so admirably. 

   One wonder of the American weight is that it is steeped in optimism. It’s as if the heaviness of anxiety must be balanced not only by pills and therapy but by the lightness of optimism, the sense that everything can get better, whatever “better” may mean. I know very well that in summoning up this unhappy vision, I can be written off as “dark.” But I feel as a nation the USA is very much whistling in the dark at this point in time. However manifest, any destiny is bound to be desperate because it is utterly beside any peaceful, realistic, helpful, cooperative point. Our interventions and our withdrawal from treaties or indifference to them both stem from a sense of exceptionalism that our self-conceived destiny has bestowed on us. So we live with the weight while we sprint through our techno-colored days. We mutter and anguish about overdoses, suicides, shootings, addictions, abuses, traumas. The sound is a thin one, however, as if we were prisoners.

Copyright 2023 Baron Wormser

In 2000, Baron Wormser was appointed Poet Laureate of Maine by Governor Angus King. He served in that capacity for six years and visited many libraries and schools to talk about books and writing.