“What kind of republic was the United States of America that its national border didn’t just move occasionally, in response to episodic war or diplomacy, but constitutively as a quality of its being? What, exactly, lay on the other side of that moving border? And what happens to a nation when that line stops moving?”
This meticulously researched book features parts that are almost impossibly disturbing to read, but Greg Grandin has fashioned a resource that should be required reading for every U.S. citizen.
“Security was commerce, commerce was prosperity, prosperity was power, power nurtured virtue, virtue was freedom, and freedom had to be extended to be secured and secured to be extended.”
"The End of the Myth" is essentially the defining textbook of the nation's history, delving into the development of the frontier spirit and where the promises that the United States has made to its people have been repeatedly broken -- and the impact that has had on contemporary events.
“After centuries of fleeing forward across the blood meridian, all the things that expansion was supposed to preserve have been destroyed, and all the things it was meant to destroy have been preserved. Instead of peace, there’s endless war. Instead of a critical, resilient, and progressive citizenry, a conspiratorial nihilism, rejecting reason and dreading change, has taken hold. Factionalism congealed and won a national election.”
The author is at his most powerful when he documents the cycle of war begetting more war, justifying further violence and savagery by the violence and savagery it had already created.
“In the years ahead, the expected virtues that would come from the next war were regularly prescribed as the solutions for the vices generated by the previous one.”
Subtitled "From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America," the book offers a troubling chronology of the nation's long reliance on brutality and an implicit agreement to ignore self-awareness. How these events have shaped U.S. 2025 -- a country with the highest infant mortality and lowest life expectancy among high-income countries -- is a fascinating component of Grandin's work.
“As vast stretches of the West burn, as millions of trees die from global warming-induced blight, as Houston and Puerto Rico flood, the oceans acidify, and bats, frogs, and flying insects disappear in uncountable numbers, any sentence from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road could be plucked and used as a newspaper headline.”
“Never before has a ruling class been as free – so completely emancipated from the people it rules – as ours.”
The quibbles come from the author's reliance on incredibly long sentences and some really contentious allegations (the "Los Angeles Rams" trading season tickets for illegal Mexican women?!) that aren't cited.
Overall, Grandin pulls no punches in delivering the history that you never got in school -- while offering a glimpse into a future that feels nearly impossible to avoid.
“But instead of having the force of natural law at their backs and the welcoming sun of manifest destiny on their brows, today's American migrants – a ‘sheer mass of humanity,’ as a border patrol agent described NAFTA’s first wave of refugees – are moving into a country that increasingly defines itself by what it hates.”
