American Greatness: Has Our Once Promising Utopia (1776) Declined into a Dystopia (2017)?

By H. G. Hastings-Duffield

The book was inspired by Donald Trumps presidential campaign mantra: Well make America great again. The phrase great again contains implications:

1. If America was ever great, when was it great?
2. In what ways was it great?
3. And if it was great, what happened to its greatness?

The author discusses these implications in conjunction with, among other documentations, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Emancipation Proclamation, todays ineffectual and self-serving Congress, and contemporary events having nothing to do with greatness. Also, he questions who is included in the we of the mantra and how renewed greatness will be effected.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 26, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524553753

H. G. Hastings-Duffield

The author is professor emeritus of Central Michigan University, where he taught writing, literature, and aesthetics for thirty years. He has published twenty-two books—some on American society and the Christian religion and four novels. He is a professional cabinetmaker, clock maker, and basket weaver.

Book preview

Copyright © 2017 by H. G. Hastings-Duffield.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2016917687

   ISBN:   Hardcover           978-1-5245-5377-7

               Softcover            978-1-5245-5376-0

               eBook                   978-1-5245-5375-3

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Rev. date: 01/26/2017

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Contents

Preface

PART ONE

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

PART TWO

(A)

(B)

(C)

(D)

(E)

(F)

(G)

Addendum

Epilogue

The Gettysburg Address, November 18, 1863

Made by the Right Writer’s Press,

A Secular Humanist (Atheist) Enterprise

Other publications by the author, under the names Holley Gene Duffield; H. G. Duffield; H. G. Hastings-Duffield

•  Tolstoy and the Critics: Literature and Aesthetics (1965)

•  Problems in Criticism of the Arts (1967)

•  Journal of Shaker Studies (editor and author) (1995–1998)

•  Historical Dictionary of the Shakers (2000)

•  On a Tiny Iceberg Drifting South: The Tale of a Man Who Chose Not to Swim: A Novel (2007)

•  Not to Swim: A Novel

•  Two Pups and a Pop: Probers of Problems, Issues, and Other Things: a Novel (2007)

•  Calvin and Reuben Reveal the Shakers: A History (2007)

•  Shakers, Mormons, and Orthodox Christians: Any Good News for Everyman? (2010)

•  About Stuff in Our Society (2010)

•  Reuben’s Tale: Of Loves, Truths, and Deceptions: A Novel (2011)

•  God and Religion: Myth, Tyranny, and Ignorance (2011)

•  You and I and God: The Glory, Jest, and Riddles of the World (2011)

•  The Meaning of God and Thoughts About Incredible Christianity (2012)

•  The Christian God Is Unnecessary, Dangerous, and Disgraceful (2012)

•  Life is Like … (World Poetry Movement, 2012) (2012)

•  Preposterous Principles and Practices of Christianity (2012)

•  The Yahoos of American Society (2013)

•  As I See Them: Remarkable Matters in My America (2013)

•  I Am God by Name, a Megalomaniac by Choice (2014)

•  Reuben and Women, an Uncommon Account of an Uncommon Man’s Love of the Pleasure of Pleasures—a Celebration of Natural Human Sexuality (2015)

•  Unsolicited Discourses by an Atheist for the Edification of Citizens, Especially Christians, Who Are Unaware of Their Ignorance (2015)

•  Two Yellow Lab Puppies and an Old Guy: Fabulous Tales by an Incomparable Trio (2016)

Preface

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump pushed the mantra We’ll make America great again. (Other versions include Let’s make America great again and Make America great again.) Every word in the slogan demands amplification if we are to understand it exactly. Thus, whom does he reference by we and let’s, and who is the subject of make? Does Trump mean the entire American populace or just Republicans of his ilk? And how about the contentious Democrats? Does he believe that they will help to make America great again? After all, his position is that they with their lousy trade policies—among other detrimental ones—have brought down American economic greatness.

Note that all three versions of the mantra contain the phrase great again. What does he mean by great? To raise America above average (maybe far above average), to make it eminent in ability and quality and opportunities for citizens to succeed in their endeavors to develop a happy and honorable life, or to assert again that all citizens have the Constitutional right to life, to liberty, and to pursue happiness, et cetera?

We could query the implication of the mantra that America used to be great. Well, was it ever? When was it great? And in what ways was it great? And what has happened to its greatness? And how can its greatness be restored? Or, said another way, can it be made great again actually?

Maybe not, for our society is distressed by a closet Muslim president with no sense of what American greatness is and a monstrous, ineffectual government controlled by obsequious citizens of low character, indifference, ignorance, apathy, selfishness, greed, racism, physical violence, criminality, corruption, and degeneracy, among other grievous attributes.

A great nation is made of great people who realize their potential to be great—never just okay, never just good, never mediocre, never detached, never disinterested, and never indifferent. Does America have such people today?

USA! USA! USA!

Land of the free, home of the brave

The American dream

Freedom

Liberty

If any Love America or Leave It advocates lose control of their hackles before they read this entire dissertation, they should investigate and think about the history of their nation. For among other things, the proposition that all men (and women) are created equal (Declaration of Independence) is a mythical sentiment in which only the fortunate can indulge and about which the oppressed only can dream.

Unquestionably, on July 4, 1776, Americans—Grand Patriots—laid the foundation for manifesting their potential for greatness. In 1789, they implemented the document—the blueprint, if you will—for achieving that greatness (amended 27 times to make it more comprehensive, to make it better).

At its beginning, the America nation was great—a promising utopia of sorts, a unique nation in an era when Humankind was profaned by oppression and tyrants in the Western world—but ironically, it contained the inevitabilities of its decline from greatness.

Read on, citizens.

Part One

Chapter 1

July 4, 1776, An Incomparable Day of Greatness

Yes, fellow citizens, we too are in times that try men’s [and women’s] souls. However, as Founding Father Thomas Paine did, we do not reference characters he called a summertime soldier and a sunshine patriot—citizens in name only, so to speak, that is, parasitic citizens who basked in the good fortune of freedom earned for them by the Grand Patriots but who themselves did nothing to merit the privileges and rights accrued to them from bona fide citizens, from good citizens: the ones who fought in all kinds of weather and who too often had no sunshine, no warmth, to soothe their wounds, the ones who did not shrink from the service of their country.

(We’ve had our share of their counterparts such as draft dodgers, draft card burners and the men who fled to other countries.)

Today—after twelve score years, two hundred and forty years (some very wretched indeed)—we struggle, not to the send the Nazis British to hell, but to keep vital not only the acknowledgement of the Grand Patriots’ service to Humankind but also the reverence we owe to them, the common men who froze to death and starved to death and fought even unto their death so that they and their children and their children’s children—you and I—could enjoy the most precious of Humankind’s conditions: freedom from all manner of oppression. According to my long history of experience with fellow citizens, too many are ignorant of and disgustingly nonchalant about their great fortune.

The American Revolution for Independence was engendered by and carried on by people as common as the dirt upon which they trod and from which they grew the stuff that made living possible.

They said No more! to the gang of Nazi British tyrants who harassed them continually, to the gang of Nazi British bastards who sailed their ships around the world, maiming and plundering and murdering so that they might have an empire greater than that of the antique bastard Alexander and the Nazi Roman bastards who shortly followed him.

In effect, the Grand Patriots said to them, "You no longer can rape our mothers and wives and daughters. You no longer can force us to feed you. You no longer can intrude into our homes. You no longer can incarcerate us at your whim. You no longer can force us to pay unjust taxes. You no longer can treat us as slaves who always must be ready to obey your every beck and call. No longer, you lousy bastards!"

These Grand American Patriots would not be put off from their attempt to establish and forever to ensure the rightful dignity of Humankind.

Theirs was the most magnificent endeavor in politics and social morality ever to exist, even unto today (2016).

From the very ancient Homo sapiens to today’s Humankind, nothing, absolutely nothing in Humankind’s history, is comparable to the value of the welfare to Humankind accomplished by their grand endeavor.

They were intent on making a new world in a place called the New World—not a new world because it was thousands of miles west of the Old World, the abode of the Nazi British and other tyrants of their ilk. It was a New World because it burgeoned with new ideas about Humankind’s relationship to Humankind. It was the place for Humankind to start anew—to unburden itself of the shackles placed on it by iniquitous kings, reprehensible thugs serviced by lackeys of every contemptible nature.

As a testimony to its