Loving America For What It Is

I get very tired of people professing to love the "other" America.

Usually the America of Howard Zinn and the Beat poets and Ledbelly and labour activists and Bob Dylan and college towns and Mother Jones and Allen Ginsberg...you know the drill.

Usually it's that. But choose your own "other" America. It can be Russell Kirk's America just as easily.

I love the America of Mom's apple pie and Fourth of July fireworks and "sir" and "ma'am" and Bibles in hotel rooms and the white picket fence and Norman Rockwell and cheerleaders and  shiny-suited televangelists and the Stars and Stripes on the porch and get-up-and-go. (I don't have much of the latter quality myself, so I admire it.)

You might say this is all a dream, an ideal, an idyll.

Well, you could say the same about the "other America"-- except that's more of a sour-faced ideal laced with resentment. (I'm not having a pop at labour activists, by the way, or even Bob Dylan. You know what I mean. I'm talking about the ensemble.)

Humans are such aspirational beings that it's really impossible to separate the ideal from the reality, because the reality is always striving towards an ideal.

Give me the Norman Rockwell, Happy Days ideal over the one any old day. (Yes, I know Norman Rockwell was a Democrat. Democrats used to be sane!)

I touched on this subject in this blog post ten years ago. I haven't changed my mind.

That's it. God bless America. The vulgar, dime store America.

(You can point out I have never lived in America. I can point to the millions of real Americans who are happier to chant "USA, USA" than to cheer along with "American Idiot" by Green Day.)