On October 4, 1779, John Paul Jones, Commodore of the fledgling United States Navy, had a problem. He had arrived in Texel, in the Netherlands, the day before in a battered, captured British ship, the former HMS Serapis. In the fight that had led to the capture of Serapis and the sinking of Jones' original ship, his naval ensign had been shot clean away and lost to the waves. This meant Serapis lacked a critical feature under the agreed upon rules of naval warfare of the time (and still to this day).

It sailed under no nation's flag.

The Netherlands, to this point, had maintained neutrality during the American Revolution and thus treated American ships as they would any nation's, while also not necessarily recognizing America's status as an independent country. However, sheltering unlawful enemy combatants would be a violation. As Serapis flew no flag, British authorities in the Netherlands complained that Jones was a pirate, and he and his prize should be surrendered immediately to the United Kingdom to stand trial.

John Paul Jones needed a flag, and fast.

The United States, at the time, had passed the Flag Resolution of 1777, which specified alternate red and white stripes and stars on a field of blue, but this description was not what had been offered to the European countries of the day. Instead, ambassadors had said that the flag "consists of thirteen stripes, alternately red, white, and blue" and "a blue field, with thirteen white stars, denoting a new constellation." A hastily made flag was arranged. It has the normal blue canton with thirteen eight pointed stars, rather than the traditional five-pointed ones, and thirteen stripes of blue, red, and white, arranged in no particular order or pattern, sometimes white is sandwiched between two blue stripes, sometimes between two reds. Blue stripes might have a red below and a white above, or they might have a white below and red above. Under this flag, retroactively inserted into Dutch records of known US naval flags, the Serapis now claimed to be a lawful prize of the United States, and the Dutch recognized it as such.

Under this flag, the Serapis became American.

The story of the Serapis flag, as it has come to be known, has always stuck with me. I have a soft affection for its disorderly and unruly stripes, and it's non-standard stars. As traditionally depicted, its blue is deeper and less vibrant than what is used on most American flags. And its hasty, uneven sewing feels as though it represents the, at the time, hasty, uneven union of the young country for which it stood.

All national flags serve as a visual synecdoche for the homeland of the people who fly them, but to me, Serapis is more than that. It is a symbol not of America the Country as She Is, but of America the Idea. As she is perceived to be, both by those within and those without. Like America, Serapis is imperfect. Serapis is flawed. It exists because of the people of other nations, working from a description of what America is, what they interpret America to be based on her own description of herself. To me, it symbolizes each promise America has made, the America of Myth and Legend that have thundered down the centuries, that we tell ourselves and others and have yet to live up to entirely. The streets lined with gold. A society unburdened by class or caste. That lifts its lamp beside this golden door for the hungry and tired and poor and wretched refuse of the Old World. America the Mother of Exiles. America the Nation of Immigrants. The America where every mountainside rings of freedom. A sweet land of liberty. A home for the brave. Where life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are the natural rights of each person who calls this nation "home." A union that has formed itself in order to be more perfect.

This is the America that was taught to me as a young child. As an adult, I can recognize the hollowness of much of this. That there is a stark and real disconnect between our country’s rhetoric and our country’s reality. I do believe that, under this openly professed Ideology of Liberty exists an opposite one also native to America and and though spoken of less has, if anything, been more influential and had a stronger hand in shaping our country and its history: the Ideology of the Slaver.

Under this set of beliefs, America exists not by any highfalutin concept of its people, but exclusively as a physical place, with tightly controlled borders, a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture at its core, and a racial hierarchy in which a single race is supreme and the others are arranged in a descending order of increasing submission and service. Just as this ideology once caused America to establish a blood quantum to single out its Native populations, there exists a second quantum that determines whether or not an individual is a “real American," birthright citizenship be damned.

But though it has dominated our history, though it has captured the hearts and minds of too many Americans over our two and a half centuries of existence, the Slaver's Ideology should still ring to us as anti-American, as an alien, unnatural, idea hostile to the very foundations of our country. Our Founders were deeply compromised people, many of whom believed you could own people and worried about the actual literally collective darkness of the country's skin.¹ But at the same time, the country they agreed to build together was one in which they were determined to not establish a single identity that would bind the future to the past. No official language, because while English was and remains 250 years later, the lingua franca of the country, they allowed there might come a day when that would change. No official religion, because though much of the country was Protestant, they had knowledge of the history of violence that follows when a country determines certain religions to be anathema. No matter what ills you may rightfully think of the Founders, it is still true that the dominant belief they expressed was in the possibility that one day ideas not yet known would overtake whatever they believed in there and then.

In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, James Madison notes that there is a natural limit on how long any idea may be exist as unquestioned. He writes, "[a]ccording to the laws of mortality, a majority of those ripe at any moment for the exercise of their will do not live beyond nineteen years: To that term then is limited the validity of every act of the Society."² This exact figure may hold less true today, given the median age and mean lifespan of Americans has gone up quite considerably, but the point remains true. There is a moment at which we all must die, at which point we need to surrender our agency over the society of those who must still make their long journey into the dark.

"The earth belongs to the living," Madison says, and the living can bind themselves only. Not for the Founders was it to decide for America what America might be.

America has never reached Serapis, but we, as the People of America, can decide to make it so. We can, as Madison says is our due, pry the dead's cold fingers from our country's throat. And I believe we must. The Slaver's Ideology is cancerous. It destroys from within, it decays our country's bones, it renders our internal organs dysfunctional, malignant, dead masses. The country our Founders built was one in which the legislature, the sole popularly elected branch, sat as the First Branch, written as Article I of our Constitution. But today, Congress is a shambling corpse, unable to act as the executive and judiciary seize the prerogatives that Americans since the Founding have fought and died to give it.

When we submit to our past, we render the systems meant to shelter our citizens inoperable.

It is easy to sink into hopelessness. To declare that America has always been what it is today, and that saying otherwise is a tale told by an idiot, with all the empty sound and fury that suggests, and that nothing will change that. To my mind, though, surrendering to that nihilist impulse is to let the past rule over us, to accept this country as a sepulchral Empire of the Undead. It is tempting to decide that Serapis is an unachievable goal and exists as mere propaganda to mask our slaver nature. That America's history has shown she will always be but a moment from embracing the Slaver's Ideology, and the Ideology of Liberty always loses.

And it's true that, while fighting for the America that Serapis represents, we will lose. Perhaps even most of the time.

But not always.

For there to be low points in a history, there must also be high points. They are inextricably linked to one another, they are defined in relation to each other. And these high points exist, sometimes even at specific places and on specific hours. July 3rd, 1863, for example, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania when an army of slavers saw America's fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel and they were shattered by an army of Americans ready and willing to die to make men free. This is Serapis asserting herself. June 6, 1944, when America shed the blood of its people, Americans from every background and creed, to liberate Europe from fascism. This is the spirit of Serapis. At the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named in honor of a slaver general, on March 7, 1965 and again on March 21 of that year, when Americans of the Civil Rights Movement marched, refusing turn back even in the face of staggering violence, as part of their national effort to continue on what Abraham Lincoln termed the "great task," the unfinished work we, as Americans, must be willing to give the last full measure of devotion to nobly advance. This is what Serapis represents. The five days in late June/early July, 1969 at the Stonewall Inn when some of the most marginalized of a marginalized community refused to let the state's enforcers subject them anymore to the deprivation of their life, liberty, and happiness. This, too, is Serapis.

That nearly all of these moments where Americans reach for Liberty comes in conflict with other Americans who seek to enforce the Slaver's Ideology should not be surprising. America's greatness is defined by her struggle with herself. Indeed, no enemy America has ever fought has possessed the potency, power, and danger of America to herself, nor has it ever brought the destruction, pain, and death to our shores at any level comparable to that which America has visited on her own people. America is her own Worst Enemy.

The Americans who delivered to us these victories over ourselves, however, did not surrender to the belief that America's past was doomed to be her prologue, refused to recognize the validity of the acts of the dead society that preceded theirs. And they delivered those victories even in the midst of decades upon decades of setbacks and losses. The world will not necessarily change for the better just because people try to make it so. But it can never change if no one ever tries. It is not our job, as Americans, to live in a better country. Some of us now alive may live long enough to see an America that is closer to paying out on all its long deferred promises, but while I hope for it not to be true, in my heart I know the America that has paid down all the debts it owes its people will still be a long ways off even after I have lived all my tomorrows. The Great Task will remain unfinished. But for it to have any hope of being completed, those of us in the here and now must always be the vanguard that opens the way for those yet unborn to strive for better still. This is the birthright of every American, regardless of whether they were born or made, whether they believe it or not. It is the legacy we leave ourselves. This is the duty that falls to us, as Americans: to always fight to form our More Perfect Union.

To always strive towards Serapis.