Watching "Hamilton" July 3rd,2020

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Watching Hamilton on July 3rd 2020

In the midst of spiking coronavirus rates, in the middle of a fragile natural  environment on what was holy ground to the indigenous people of  the region, the President is conducting a massive display of fireworks and rhetoric. Free dog whistles provided. No masks or social distancing required. On the very same night, Disney is giving us, (well not exactly giving , but $6.99 beats $250…) the Broadway production of “Hamilton” by Lin-Manuel Miranda.  And there we have it.

Hamilton opened in February 2015, on the back 9 of President Obama’s final term. The heady rush  of hope that  had come with his election had become muted with the realities of governing especially with a block at all costs republican congress. But something of that hope remained. ( I remember election night 2012. My friend Uli was visiting from Germany. When the results were official, we poured out onto Broadway to join the celebration. It’s like in Berlin, when the wall fell, he said . We just had another wall fall, I said.)

So what does Hamilton look like on this side of  the Trump assumption to the presidency? Its basic message has always been pretty straight forward. It’s when Lafayette and Hamilton shake hand and say, “Immigrants, we get the job done.” And the audience applauds.  This is a nation of immigrants. 

But it goes deeper. It’s almost as if to try understand our narrative, we have to see an America that never was in order to envision an America that could be.  The truth of the American myth only is real in an alternative universe where a multicultural, multiracial band of young revolutionaries throw off the shackles of domination and declare a new nation.  The play’s occasional nods in the direction of abolition seem superfluous when the former slaves are already reincarnated as the founding fathers. What never was, what could be. 

But there is also this. The founding words of our nation had more depth and meaning than those who wrote them realized.  Everyone knew “all men are created equal” only applied to men like us. The others, were not really as much even thought about, not even visible,  let alone considered equals. Yet it would be these words that would  anchor Lincoln when he moved from seeing slavery as a political problem to its abolition as a personal calling.  And when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. quoted these words in his Washington, DC address, he knew full well America had never lived up to these words, truly taken them seriously.  But he understood the strategic power of cognitive dissonance.  That when confronted with the gap between what people want to believe about themselves and what is reality, most (we hope) people will resolve in terms of working to move reality closer to what we want to believe. 

I understand the truth of the rhetorical statement, America was never great. I’m not sure what ultimate value the statement has. We are currently engaged in perhaps the most serious reevaluation of our reality as a nation in our history. The truth of the southern past now finally is  being said and faced. The confederate battle flag seen for what it has always been. The heroism of men no longer being granted grace for, well, being men of their time. True heroes are people  beyond their time in their time. Although radical iconoclasm, makes me nervous, and I’m not down with anarchy, what’s going on right  now is a necessary reevaluation. The soundtrack of Hamilton playing in the background.  Part of what it says is that the vision of those who created the country was greater than the people who created it, perhaps even more than they could ever imagine. They wrote greater than they lived. And something of that vision calls us forward onto a stage every bit as colorful, passionate, vibrant, at times even joyous, as living in the world of Hamilton.