Of Monsters and Memory

Talking to other Americans about the U.S. can be disorienting, as if we’re describing different countries. 

Several of those countries were explored at the March 2026 Tilt West roundtable, “CHANGE: Deconstructing American Values.”

Participants discussed America’s optimists, who emphasize the nation’s progress. In their version of history, the optimists see successive generations of Americans invoking the “unalienable rights” proclaimed in the Declaration to bring an ever-larger number of people under the protections of the Constitution. 

This is the America that President Obama has described in his speeches, that civil rights leaders from Frederick Douglass to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. have deployed on behalf of their respective movements, and that historian Jill Lepore characterizes in her scholarship [1] (some of which was included in the roundtable’s prompt). 

For the optimists, the idea that we’re all created equal and that we all deserve equal protection under the law is leverage that Americans use to make the country uphold its promises and over time become a more perfect union. 

But there’s another story of America that for many feels much more real, and that was also discussed. This story, told by those we might call our rememberers, is of a country founded on originating sins that have never been reckoned with, their perpetrators never brought to justice, their victims never given restitution or even acknowledgment. In fact, much of the country likes to pretend it never committed any sins at all.   

But the sins were so ghastly, their scale so vast, their human impact so catastrophic, for the rememberers there is no honest way of understanding America without understanding not just the role these sins played in the country’s founding, but also the role that forgetting them has played in the country’s story since. 

In this view, America can feel like a huge multi-story house where beneficiaries of the original sins live on the upper floors, and the inheritors of the sinned-against reside below. The house has no stairs, only ladders lowered down sporadically before being yanked back up at random.

For most of our history, the upper inhabitants have gotten to tell the story of the house. When asked about the house’s history they talk about all the progress that’s been made on it – but they mostly like to talk about the house’s future. On the rare occasion they acknowledge those living below, they’re quick to point out those who have climbed up. (“Getting up only takes a willingness to climb,” those born on the upper floors like to say.) When it’s brought to their attention that there are no stairs, only occasional ladders that many are not even able to reach, the upper inhabitants calmly explain that progress takes time. Years ago the upper-floor inhabitants put up a giant sign above the front door that reads: “Indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

For two and a half centuries, these upper inhabitants have been the country’s primary storytellers – its mythmakers. 

Whether it was our extermination of the continent’s first inhabitants, our kidnapping, torture, and enslavement of millions from across the Atlantic, our century of Jim Crow apartheid and racial terror, or our half century of gutting America’s public services as soon as they became desegregated, our country’s sins have been reflected in our national architecture but not our national story.

Until we atone for those sins and make repair, our rememberers insist, we will continue pretending to be a country we are not, and we’ll be stuck having the same circular conversations, while upstairs Americans wonder why we can’t just move on. 

For those who are not treated as fully American, the original sins are plainly visible and experienced viscerally every day. But it’s other Americans’ denial that the architecture is even there – their insistence that the design is not even real – that can make living in the U.S. so bewildering, infuriating, and exhausting, and that makes talking about it across differences often seem impossible. 

"To forget a holocaust,” Elie Wiesel said, “is to kill twice.” [2] 

Americans visiting Germany today are often struck by how openly the country memorializes its sins. They encounter plaques in the sidewalks in front of buildings, engraved with the names of citizens who lived there and who were murdered by their government.

Famously, not long ago, Germany was a very different place – one unencumbered by honest memory. 

After the First World War, Germans embraced the "stab-in-the-back" myth (Dolchstoßlegende), falsely alleging that Germany only lost because it was betrayed by treacherous insiders – namely Jews. This myth encouraged Germans to ignore their own failings while also propelling anti-semitism and the public’s willingness to turn against, and eventually exterminate, their fellow citizens.

After the cataclysm of the Second World War and the slaughter of millions, the West German government wanted to make sure the past was remembered honestly, the country’s sins fully acknowledged, and its surviving victims given restitution. They wanted to avoid a repeat of the catastrophe that comes from denying past wrongs. They began building the Germany we see today.

In the U.S., those who committed treason against our government in order to protect slavery were not punished. To excuse their failure and to avoid the shame of their war’s stated purpose, after losing the war they started Confederates quickly embraced the myth that they had fought the war not on behalf of slavery, but for states’ rights. This “Lost Cause” myth replaced historical fact and encouraged the aggressors to see themselves as the victims. 

Not one Confederate who waged war against the United States was ever even tried for treason. [3]. Lincoln’s murder and the resulting abandonment of Reconstruction meant that racial segregation and subjugation continued for another 100 years and the “Lost Cause” and its related lies (e.g., “northern oppressors,” “heritage not hate,” etc.) were allowed to fester and grow in the public imagination and popular culture, where they remain to this day. 

The passage of civil and voting rights legislation in the 1960s increased the number of ladders in the house and how long they had to stay down, but it also provided an opportunity to turn white Americans against their own country. 

Since Reagan, few things are seen as more patriotic in the U.S. than hating the United States government and wanting to defund all but its military. Desegregation allowed business interests to drive a wedge between Americans, encouraging white voters to see public services not as the basic building block of any civil society, but as part of an oppressive federal government. Programs like Social Security and Medicare were merely examples of “your hard-earned tax dollars” going to an undeserving “other.” (After the 1960s, race had to be invoked implicitly instead of stated plainly, so they invented dog-whistle terms like “welfare queens” that achieve exactly what explicit racist slander does, but without the fingerprints. A coward’s bigotry.) 

Today we can see the cost of these harmful myths, of forgetting our past and denying the architecture it produces. The last half century of American life – the skyrocketing inequality, the calcification of economic mobility, the dismantling of civil and political rights – are all the product of the same toxic lies. And these myths are being propagated from those living on the highest floors of the house. 

In the current Gilded Age, the wealthy and the powerful are once again pulling up the ladders of economic and social mobility from the reach of the American public. And to get away with it, they’re stoking culture wars by putting new spins on old myths. 

Freeloading “welfare queens” have been replaced by enemies within our borders, outsiders who have infiltrated the country, aided and abetted by the traitorous “woke.” We have a critical shortage of public services such as health care and education spending but no shortage of racist hysteria, moral panics, and targeted campaigns aimed at scapegoating marginalized groups. 

It’s just the “Lost Cause” in new clothes: “out-of-touch” city dwellers trying to ruin the “true” heritage of our country by elevating un-American “others.”

The mega-rich have long understood that as long as the country stays focused on cultural provocation, the inequitable architecture of our house will not be renovated. 

And so we bleed. 

Lacking a shared origin story – a shared myth that’s both aspirational and honest – we stay trapped in a spiral of mutual hatred and misunderstanding as we backslide further from America’s promise, while failing to see any way out.

In our last Gilded Age of spiraling inequality, Jay Gatsby emerged as an embodiment of the American Dream’s double meaning, both its ambition and its illusion. Seen as having climbed America’s economic and social ladders (dream as ambition), in reality he had covered up his true history with a fictional one (dream as illusion). 

If Fitzgerald’s Gatsby embodied the American Dream, maybe it’s fitting to see Kara Walker’s Unmanned Drone [4] as the American Nightmare. Instead of a fraud we foolishly admire, Walker’s is a monster we buried and have tried desperately to forget. Now the monster is rearing its head(s) and asking us to remember.

Unmanned Drone is further evidence that Walker may be this country’s most significant living artist. Each of her pieces arrives fully formed, simultaneously unlike anything before it while also feeling strangely obvious, like being shown a color we somehow never noticed. 

Maybe the reason her works feel this way – both completely novel and plainly true – is because she’s drawing from the raw material of our buried memory. She’s showing us something that came from inside us that we’ve tried to forget. 

In this way, Walker forges new myth from honest material. And honest myths are rare in our country. 

With honest myths – ones that embody both our atrocities and our achievements, our oppressions and our liberations, our condemnation and our salvation – the past and the future don’t need to live in tension with each other. They can be bridged by stories instead of buried beneath them.

With good and honest myth, the optimists and the rememberers can tell our story together, offering both the vision and the conscience of a nation.  

When, in 1858, Lincoln said “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” it caused controversy. Many Americans at the time didn’t want to imagine that the country could rip itself apart. But he was quoting Christ’s words in the gospels because he knew his 19th century American audience would recognize the Biblical reference and as a result perhaps be more willing to consider the message.

We have no comparable shared reference today. We also don’t want to imagine our country ripping itself apart. But we have so little in the way of healthy and healing myth to compete with the poisonous lies of the “Lost Cause” and its offspring. 

This is what makes Walker’s work so immeasurably valuable. 

We’re scared and we’re angry. We feel something essential has been lost. And it seems impossible to talk to each other. 

But we have artists like Walker whose work can retrieve what’s been lost, express what words can’t, and give us a way of bearing witness to ourselves and one another. 

Whether we retain this republic or have to rebuild it, our coming work will require the vision of our optimists and the conscience of our rememberers. 

And it will take rare souls like Walker who can combine those stories into better myths so we can finally begin discussing – and building – the same country together.