the timboucher experience

America’s Secret Identity

Sometimes it seems like America is a super hero - capable of great feats of daring and bravery. Whereas, at other times, it appears as a pitiful weakling, completely unsure of itself and it’s direction. Which means that either America (as an entity) is psychotic or that it secret identity. (Or perhaps even more likely - both!)

Much like Superman’s secret identity, Clark Kent, it hides right out in the open and can be uncovered simply be re-formatting it’s basic appearance (like how Clark Kent takes off his glasses to become superman). It goes like this: You take the word “America” and split it apart into its component English words: “Am Erica”.

Do that and you’ll see that it’s not actually a place name at all, but a coded communication - a cipher - of identity: “I Am Erica.” The “I” in this case could be seen as a Roman Numeral for “1″ as in “#1 America” - both a patriotic statement, as well as a statement about America’s ascendancy in geopolitical affairs as the so-called “First World” of the Cold War, as well as quite possibly the most important nation on Earth.

“I Am Erica.”

So who, if anyone, is this mysterious “Erica” encoded into our nation’s very name? The name Erica is the feminine form of Eric, which comes from the Old Norse name “Eiríkr”. The component linguistic elements that make up this name are ei “ever” and ríkr “ruler”. So, in essence, the name of America means “I Am The Ever Ruler.” (see these two posts for more detailed explorations of that idea)

If that still sounds absurd to you, let’s look at the real etymology of America. It is ostensibly named after Amerigo Vespucci, who was one of the first to suggest that the New World was actually a continent of it’s own. But why name it after him just because of that? Perhaps this line from the etymological dictionary sheds some light on the subject: “The name Amerigo is Gmc. [Germanic], said to derive from Goth[ic]. Amalrich, lit[erally]. ‘work-ruler.’” An online name dictionary offers this explanation of Amalric, which is pretty similar:

Derived from the Germanic elements amal “work, labour” and ric “power”.

So from the start, the very name of the continent and country has essentially meant “the power of labour” or “work as ruler.” You could perhaps extend this to the idea of democracy and the ability of the ordinary man, the worker, to have power both over his life and of the life of the nation. This somewhat esoteric reading also dovetails ever so perfectly into the so-called Protestant work ethic upon which this country is founded, and the American Dream, which Wikipedia defines as “the faith held by many in the United States of America that through hard work, courage, and determination one can achieve a better life for oneself, usually through financial prosperity.”

And then of course there is the All-Seeing Eye of the Eye of Providence which rests atop an unfinished pyramid on the back of our dollar bill. Though various people suggest a connection to Masonic-conspiratorial imagery, we could extend our idea of the “power of labour” to this symbol as well. Since, you’ll recall, that pyramids were supposed to have been built by slave labor (Jews, the Bible tells us). So we have the Work-Ruler as the one(s) constructing the pyramid, overseen by “I Am the Ever Ruler” - the All-Seeing Eye, the “I AM THAT I AM” (”Ehyeh asher ehyeh” in Hebrew), the response God gave when Moses (of the former slave-caste) asked for His name. What we see is a symbolic union of the eternal “the ever ruler” within the field of “work” or of time…

Since we’re on the topic of Judaism and mysticism, we ought to also pull in the Kabbalistic concept of Tikkun Olam, as put forward by Isaac Luria in the 1500’s (born only two decades after Amerigo Vespucci’s death). Tikkun Olam essentially means “world repair” and relates to the hard work that is required to bring the sparks of God trapped in the material world back to liberation and re-unification with God. Though the phrase today is more commonly referred to in the sense of social justice or taking steps to improve the condition of society, it’s mystical meanings are rather more interesting:

The “repair,” that is needed, therefore, is two-fold: the gathering of light and of souls, to be achieved by human beings through the contemplative performance of religious acts. The goal of such repair, which can only be effected by humans, is to separate what is holy from the created world, thus depriving the physical world of its very existence—and causing all things return to a world before disaster within the Godhead and before human sin, thus ending history.

This in turn is reminiscent of the controversial (and possibly apocryphal) quote attributed to James G. Watt, Secretary of the Interior under Reagan in 1981, “After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.” Does this mean that the *true* esoteric work of America is, and always has been, to bring about the end of history? Such a thought has a scary mythical feeling of truthfulness to it, if nothing else. However, other sources however suggest that Luria intended “…that when the spark of divine light is freed, the world is reintegrated and restored, rather than escaped and discarded.”

And whether or not it’s absurd or needlessly esoteric, maybe this dichotomy between the rule of the eternal and the rule of work (time) is the central one which has played out through American history and through history as a whole. I don’t know. I guess we’ll have to ask Erica.

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