Columbia’s in debt: she’s bought another cam
And started up an OnlyFans to pay the rent;
While all her videos are bought by Uncle Sam,
Her Brother Jonathan asks where his sister went.
You can’t fully shake your youth, I suppose. My punk rock adolescence is usually pretty good about keeping to the shag-carpet basements and dingy music venues of my past. Every now and again, though, he insists on coming out to leave me anxty notes scrawled in sharpie or a broken-tipped number two. This is one such example.
Columbia emerged as one of our earliest country personifications; about the late 1600s by most measures. She was a kind of across-the-pond, front-page likeness of Britannia, though she was anything but a Tory. Rather, she gave us one of the earliest concepts of The Colonies as a single entity. She hoisted up banners devoted to Colonial Virtue, Liberty and Democracy to show us all what they might look like.
Uncle Sam we already know—or do we? I find it interesting that regardless of what kind of political rally you prefer, all groups use Uncle Sam to personify the place they want to describe. He’s a shining symbol of either national pride or institutional subjection, depending on which folks you like to hang out with on the weekends.
Brother Jonathan only gets mentioned every so often, when “Did You Know”-type channels make the rounds on him again. In a way, he’s Columbia’s rowdy twin: they were both very much around in the 17th century but went on to lead very different lives. Initially, Brother Jonathan represented Puritan and New England colonies, but the revolution turned him ornery. He became the Yankee everyman, a kind of colonial Joe Six-pack who, according to his fans, was brash, shrewd, and proudly rural. They also liked that he’d pound it to England when they thought England deserved it.
Columbia and Uncle Sam are spokespeople for what this place is. Brother Jonathan was always good for telling you what this place was not. And I think he’d have a lot to say to us now if we had kept him around.
Anyway, I think my teenage self still has things to say about current progress, cultural values and the kind of reality we’re adamant about living in. But if you’re trying to ferret out whether the quatrain above is intended to be left- or right-leaning, this may be of some help:
My advisor in Australia believed that the competitive edge America had on the rest of the world, the one thing it could do better than anyone else, was reinvent itself. Indeed, in just 250 years, we’ve called ourselves the Colonies, The Great Republic, The Melting Pot, Dixie, New England, the States, the U.S. and America.
But what we call “America” is only what was made by western travelers. What they built sits atop coastlines, pine forests, prairies, mountains, deserts and hillsides that are older than the rings of Saturn. The land was here long before America was a glint in the eye of any westerner, and it will be here long after America as we know it marches out of history. Gary Snyder reminds us that the name of the land that hosts America doesn’t come from any Italian navigator, nor does it come from western personification. Its name comes from the story of how animals, not people, volunteered themselves to Nanabush to stabilize this corner of the Earth. “The United States, Canada and Mexico,” Snyder reminds us, “are passing political entities. … The mountains and rivers remain.”
