Culture Shock Round 3: Grieving with Americans (and the Genius of Hamilton)

Photo by Mike Labrum on Unsplash

Six years ago I wrote a blog post about the culture shock involved in suddenly working overseas with primarily American teammates. Since that time, I have been generously and gently invited to understand and share in the joys and the griefs of my American friends and colleagues.

Last week the hit musical Hamilton became available for home viewing, and one of our dear friends here immediately subscribed to the relevant service and set up a watch party, to which we were invited. In keeping with responsible pandemic guidelines, it was a small group, composed of two Canadians (myself and my wife), and five Americans. Four of the five Americans I know well enough to have witnessed their conflicted feelings for their country.

They are not conflicted in their love for their country; they love their country (and their fellow Americans) enough to desire positive change. To have your heart merely swell with pride for your nation is not patriotism, but ego. To allow your heart to be pierced by the suffering within your country and to be moved to act upon it is the patriotism of the conflicted, as all true patriotism must be. These are my friends here, and I have learned a great deal from them.

What does all this have to do with Hamilton? I confess that prior to last week (and even in the first 30 minutes or so of viewing) I thought Hamilton to be overrated and a bit ridiculous. It has been criticized for its “woke” casting, for its glossing over of some historical wrongs of its protagonists, and for its targeting of the liberal elite with a feel-good message about an early America that still considered Black people to be “3/5" of a person and which identified Native Americans as “Indian Savages”.

Post George Floyd, it seems a bit twee.

Watching Hamilton with my American friends gave me new perspective. Of course, the music, choreography, and staging were all excellent, but it was hearing from friends about how the story reinterpreted the creation mythology* of the United States that helped me see some of the underlying genius.

* Here and elsewhere, I use myth not in the sense of “not true” but as an overarching narrative tradition.

As a Canadian, it has always been hard to wrap my mind around the myths of the Founding Fathers: the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and all these pieces which seemed to weave the very fabric of American identity. I’m sure I still don’t understand it correctly, and I will gratefully accept correction for anything I get wrong.

The casting for Hamilton was far from just a “politically correct” stunt. It was genius. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, et al, sit as gods in the American Pantheon. They are more myth than men at this point, known less for who they were than for what happened because of them. To cast them as historically accurately as possible would be to simply reiterate the mythology as it currently sits.

By casting People of Colour in many of these roles, Hamilton breaks the connection between whiteness and godhood. Hamilton both humanizes the gods and makes space for People of Colour, who have historically been excluded from this important piece of the American consciousness. This reinterprets the creation myth to apply to the America of today rather than that of 250 years ago. Today, the founders would not have to be universally of European descent, but could be anyone.

The genius of Hamilton is in reinterpreting a mythology that lies deep in the American psyche. In Hamilton, the myth is not debunked, it is rehabilitated. It is a course correction which allows Americans who have received this myth for generations to carry forward in a post-2020 world without jettisoning everything they believe in, but expanding the dream to include all those previously left in the cold.

It’s true that Hamilton is historically inaccurate in important ways, but the myth of the Founding Fathers always has been. In the end, the story of any nation is more important than the facts, because the facts are merely what has happened; the story is still being written.