By Mason Flink
This unbinding ritual is designed to take the participant through an interrogation of their relationship to exceptionalism, both as an individual and as someone living in the United States of America. For the purposes of this experience, the term “exceptionalism” involves the interplay of two different definitions: being the best of the best, and being exceptionally different from anyone/anywhere else. The ritual takes about 20 minutes and can be done more than once, should you find your knot of American exceptionalism resists unraveling, like mine did.
INGREDIENTS
For this ritual, you will need:
A piece of rope, jute, or fabric between 1-2 ft long. Ideally, something thick enough that if you tied a knot, you’d be able to grip it firmly between your fingers.
THE RITUAL
Preparation
Once you’ve gathered your ingredients, find a private, quiet place where you will be undisturbed for the work that follows. If you like, you can listen to the rest of the preparation as an auditory experience; otherwise, continue reading below.
That the United States of America could be exceptional at all is a story like any other – it relies on authorial intent, the perspective from which the tale is told. I am a White gay man with 33 years of lived experience in Texas and California, two states that expend great energy in proclaiming their supremacy. I offer the struggle to dismantle my own sense of American exceptionalism in the hopes that so doing brings us closer to the collective acts of Reimagination we urgently need.
Thank you for witnessing my adaptation.
***
I was born in Dallas at the end of the Reagan era, the sundown years of our first Made-for-TV President. In early childhood, my Whiteness protected me from the “us versus them” mentality of settler colonialist suburbia, but the purple Texas I grew into – one then governed by Democrat Ann Richards – lurched red in the 1994 midterm, part of a nationwide conservative backlash to the charismatic “liberal” president and his “banshee” wife who supposedly threatened the pro-business, pro-fundamentalism of the “God is Greed” 1980s. The vast majority of my White neighbors bought into that narrative, placing us in the callous/ed hands of America’s next White savior, inheritor of family wealth and political power:
Governor George W. Bush.
My parents did not want this to happen, which meant that I, by extension, did not want this to happen either. But almost everyone I knew at school, also lacking the ability to distinguish themselves from their parents’ beliefs, embodied a near messianic worship of our Dear Leader, reinforced by the insidious cacophony of conservative media – Bush loved baseball, oil, and Jesus Christ. Didn’t you just wanna grab a beer with the guy?
Not if you were a Democrat, which my mom was, informing her three decades of work to protect women and children from domestic violence, opening my eyes from a young age to the brutal impulses of the patriarchy, to systemic gender oppression, to the life-and-death stakes in advocating for those who have nowhere else to go.
Not if you were Jewish, which my dad was, an inheritance that manifested mostly in us lighting the menorah and opening Hanukkah presents from him and his parents, but now proved a “complicating” factor when the local Presbyterian basketball league told him – in the late 1990s – that he could no longer coach my classmates unless he decided to switch spiritual teams.
And not if you were a closeted homosexual, which I was, staying quiet about my true orientation during the entirety of my time in Texas, forced into silence as means of survival, though also sharpened by a growing awareness of my difference from everyone around me; in other words, my American exceptionalism.
As an adolescent with a secret, I quickly learned to harness this fixation on exceptionalism to my advantage. Any attempts made to distinguish myself – whether through academic achievement, artistic skill, community service, or even my nascent activism in refusing to stand for the Texas Pledge of Allegiance – were subconsciously engineered as part of my strategy to persuade an elite university in a blue state to grant me safe passage into the America I had been promised.
I fled to Stanford at 18, one of the ivory towers closest to San Francisco, then capital of Queer America; I proclaimed myself “gay artist” and moved to Los Angeles at 22, redirecting my ambition toward the pursuit of platform, amplification.
California was where I thought my American dreams could come true; California was where I realized my American dreams were a fantasy engineered to sustain the myth of American exceptionalism itself.
The refuge I sought in the Bay Area was founded by a railroad tycoon who brutally exploited non-White Americans in his climb to fortune and power, thus endowing the palm tree paradise where my classmates would go on to create and serve the social media companies now colonizing the globe’s attention.
The refuge I sought in Hollywood was controlled by multinational corporations slowly consolidating their business to include every aspect of the storytelling machine, enriching executives at the expense of workers, censoring content that did not serve the aims of the entertainment conglomerates now colonizing the globe’s attention.
Then, the Fall of 2016. Four years of revelation, when the illusion of our supremacy – the lie that we are the greatest country on Earth, that being American ensures one’s own greatness – dissolved once again in the deluge of falsehoods, racism, and corruption emanating from the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court. I finally saw truths that centuries of Americans had seen before me. In lifting the veil, in witnessing America as it actually was—
I had lost my desire for being “exceptional.”
Watching Biden take power on a dais outside the Capitol, surrounded by fascist sympathizers who enabled the worst abuses of the Trump era, I craved a different way of being with my self and my country.
A different way of being American.
And yet by day’s end, Covid-survivor Tom Hanks shivered his buns off at the Lincoln Memorial to the tune of Katy Perry’s “Firework,” offering that we could once again “celebrate America” and the “promise of our promised land” – one week off an impeachment, two off a violent insurrection, and three after my home of Los Angeles became the pandemic’s newest epicenter.
I committed in that moment to resisting the enchantment of American supremacy, a prison we are socialized into believing as unbreakable truth when contradictory evidence abounds, a powerful magick that precludes our ability for critique, a devious spell that opens one of our nation’s founding documents:
A “We the People” where they did not, in fact, mean everyone.
***
That is my story as I tell it today. Now it is time for you to tell yours.
Step 1: The First Knot
If you would like guidance on Steps 1-3, you can perform the ritual along with this audio track:
If you are reading and performing the spell without guidance, continue here:
Close your eyes. Inhale. Exhale. Let go of any notions that you have to do this correctly. You are exactly as you need to be in this moment, asking questions, entering with playfulness, curiosity. Thank you for bringing yourself here. All of your experience is necessary and welcome.
Take a moment to consider the word “exceptional.” How do you feel now? Where do you feel? See if that feeling leads you to a memory – from childhood, perhaps on a soccer field, the spelling bee; from adolescence, class rank, homecoming court; from adulthood, optimization, entrepreneurial ambition.
Wherever you go, remember you are safe. When you are ready, open your eyes, and take the rope in your hands.
With the feeling you conjured, tie the rope into a single knot, pulling it tight.
Step 2: The Second Knot
Close your eyes. Take a moment to consider the United States of America as being exceptional. How do you feel now? Where do you feel? See if that feeling leads you to a memory, a time when you encountered America’s exceptionalism, or a story you learned as proof that our country, the United States of America, is the greatest on earth.
Wherever you go, remember you are safe. When you are ready, open your eyes, and take the rope in your hands.
With the feeling you conjured, tie a second knot in the rope, spacing it 1-2 fist lengths from the first knot, if possible.
Step 3: Contradiction
Pick up the rope so that you hold a knot in each hand. Placing your fingers over the knots, gently pull them in opposite directions, and consider these contradictions. After you have taken in each contradiction, you may offer the response:
“We the People Untie the Knot.”
The United States of America is the richest country in the world, but has the severest income inequality of any industrialized democracy. [1, 2]
“We the People Untie the Knot.”
In our quest for dominance, the United States of America has contributed more excess carbon to the atmosphere than any other country in human history and is currently the world’s largest producer of oil and gas. [3, 4]
“We the People Untie the Knot.”
Striving to control the Redwood Forests to the Gulf Stream Waters resulted in approximately 13 million excess deaths of the Indigenous people already living here. [5]
“We the People Untie the Knot.”
4 million Black people won their freedom from enslavement after the Civil War, descendants of an unknowable number who perished at the hands of White owners and slave traders, ancestors to Black Americans who, on average, possess only 14% of the wealth that White households do. [6]
“We the People Untie the Knot.”
The United States has an immigrant population four times larger than any other country, yet more than 2,100 children separated from their parents at the Mexican border have not been reunited with their families. [7, 8]
“We the People Untie the Knot.”
Americans invented Jazz, the Internet, mobile phones, personal computers, Agent Orange, DDT, Facebook, and the Atomic Bomb. [9, 10]
“We the People Untie the Knot.”
America has more guns, more Olympic Medals, more prisoners, more Nobel Prizes, more billionaires – and more Covid-19 deaths – than anywhere else in the world. [11, 12, 13, 14]
“We the People Untie the Knot.”
Let go of the rope.
Step 4: Untie The Second Knot
If the concept of exceptionalism no longer serves in the story you want to tell about the United States of America, what kind of framework would you like to play with in its place? Is there another lens you might like to use instead?
If this is a struggle, stick with it until the knot is untied. You already have the answer you seek.
When you’ve settled on a phrase/concept, take the rope and hold it on either side of the second knot you tied. Say the phrase/concept you’ve settled on aloud three times, then untie the knot.
Step 5: Untie The First Knot
If the concept of exceptionalism no longer serves in the story you want to tell about yourself, what kind of framework would you like to play with in its place? Is there another lens you might like to use instead?
If this is a struggle, stick with it until the knot is untied. You already have the answer you seek.
When you’ve settled on a phrase/concept, take the rope and hold it on either side of the first knot you tied. Say the phrase/concept you’ve settled on aloud three times, then untie the knot.
Hold the rope in your hands, palms facing up. Take a moment to consider your transformation, though no physical evidence remains. Thank the rope for showing you a New America.
Inhale. Exhale.
***
FURTHER EXPLORATION
This ritual would not exist without the dialogue between friends and family seeking to dismantle systems that uphold this way of thought. If you’d like to hear one such conversation, Season Two of American Ritual: Exceptionalism awaits, wherever you get your podcasts.
RITUAL CITATIONS
[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/were-number-one-the-us-is-more-like-number-19-these-days
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/07/6-facts-about-economic-inequality-in-the-u-s/
[3] https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2
[7] https://citizenpath.com/countries-with-the-most-immigrants/
[9] https://artsandculture.google.com/theme/the-darker-side-of-invention/dgKy8cSx6BC7LQ?hl=en
[10] https://owlcation.com/humanities/10-American-Inventions-That-Changed-The-World
[11] https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-gun-policy-global-comparisons
[12] https://www.statista.com/statistics/262961/countries-with-the-most-prisoners/