>>As for Blake, do you really think that when he suggested we "build
>>Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land" he meant ..."and
>>nowhere else"?
>
>And where did you get that from what I wrote? But Blake wasn't a
>rootless cosmopolitan. He was aggressively English,w ithout being
>the least little bit John Bullish about it. To counter Yoshie's
>impliedsmal at my own patriotism, for which I invoked, as a
>referent, Brecht's German patriotism, while she quoted some of his
>anti-American tirades (he didn't like it here, in part because he
>was very European in general and Geramn in particular), see Blakes
>America, with its marvelous hymn to the freedom of the salve. Who of
>course was anything but free when Blake composed America, I will
>say, jsut to avert someone's pointing out this obvious fact that
>Blake knew and I do to. But the poem was called America: A Prophesy.
When William Blake wrote "America, a Prophecy" (1793), America, for all its founding crimes of enslavement of blacks and expropriation of land from Indians, could plausibly serve as the symbol of the revolutionary spirit of republican freedom against empires and of democracy and secularism against the tyranny of monarchy and the established church. It was ahead of all other nations, and it was on the side of revolutionary progress. What is crucial is that at its founding moment America was _not yet_ an empire. Given its foundation as a settler colonial state, it is difficult to say when America metamorphosed from a republic to an empire, but many think of the Spanish-American War (in 1898-1901, in other words shortly after the massacre at Wounded Knee and the closure of the frontier in 1890, that is, after the completion of the colonization of mainland America) as crucible of the American Empire. Therefore, one can appreciate Blake's symbolic use of the American Revolution as the spirit of freedom at the same time as recognizing that today's US armed forces must act toward the rest of the world as the Redcoats did toward revolutionary America. This is how Daniel Ellsberg puts it in _Hearts and Minds_ (Dir. Peter Davis): "According to some people, the United States fought on the wrong side in Vietnam. I disagree. In Vietnam, the United States WAS the wrong side" -- the side of counter-revolution, the exact opposite of what revolutionary America stood for at its founding moment.
Given how Blake portrays the Guardian Prince of Albion -- "A dragon form clashing his scales," eventually "smitten" with his "own plagues" that he had flown forth to destroy revolutionaries -- one can well imagine how he might portray the Guardian Prince of the American Empire were he alive today.
Orc, a mythological figure that Blake invented to symbolize satanic energies without which no freedom, no progress, can possibly be achieved, is called "the terror like a comet...his horrid length staining the temple long/With beams of blood" -- "Lover of wild rebellion, and transgressor of God's law" in the eyes of Albion's Angel. Would today's American patriots embrace Orc, or would they "tremble at the vision" of the terror as the King of England does in the poem? -- Yoshie
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