Less than three months out from arguably the most important presidential election in living memory, our democracy is in deep, deep shit.
Need we recap? Commuting Roger Stone. Gassing Lafayette Square. Suppressing the vote. Sabotaging the Postal Service. Floating the postponement—and actively undermining the credibility—of the November election. Sending federal agents to detain (read: abduct) protestors in Portland. And that’s just a topline best-of-Trump-2020 compilation.
This is America?
Let’s face it: The spirit of nihilism that animates MAGA was never about making America great again so much as it was burning the Republic to the ground. That’s what Trump’s supporters really voted for in 2016, and it’s the one big (if never quite explicit) campaign promise he might actually deliver on: reifying the very American carnage he once claimed exclusive qualification to redress. To wit: The nightly news plays like an apocalyptic bookend to the rousing founding-of-America story told in Hamilton.
While Lin-Manuel Miranda’s revolutionary masterpiece certainly challenges us to appreciate anew the value and purpose of democracy—a timely reminder if ever there was one—it somewhat less conspicuously does the same for an equally imperiled institution: narrative itself.
Hamilton has been described by its creator as “a story about America then, told by America now” (Edward Delman, “How Lin-Manuel Miranda Shapes History,” The Atlantic, September 29, 2015). But if the musical’s creative approach to its subject matter is unorthodox, its narrative structure is very much a conventional hero’s journey. (For my Save the Cat! scholars, it’s a “Real-Life Superhero” tale, and not, as some “experts” would have you believe, Golden Fleece.) The power in and of narrative is a central preoccupation of Hamilton; the show literally opens with a dramatic question posed to the audience:
How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten Spot in the Caribbean by providence, impoverished, in squalor, Grow up to be a hero and a scholar?
Alexander Hamilton is a man who imagines—who writes—his way out of poverty, and, in turn, “rewrote the game,” by “Poppin’ a squat on conventional wisdom”—meaning, the institutionalized “divine right of kings” narrative.
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