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.)
I remember my US History teacher in HS denigrating “Joe Sixpack” average American who “will never care about anything as long as the TV works and Walmart is open” or something like that. I’ve never met this type of alleged average American, not once, ever. On the contrary, Americans seem to stand out compared to all other peoples for our optimism, a baseline expectation that things are great or are going to be great, that the default state is happiness, that one ought to be cheerful as the norm (and why wouldn’t you be, when things are so great?). And yet this isn’t an oblivious, delusional optimism. Talking to completely random people, I am usually amazed at the awareness of issues like private equity deteriorating the quality of various industries, military-industrial complex graft, resentment-based politics, media deceptions generally, on and on. Things just aren’t how they are portrayed ever. America is a big place, a lot goes on here, but little in actual life fits these common moulds. I think there’s a Bachelor-watching girl stereotype that’s real and embarrassing, but women are embarrassing everywhere. The embarrassing working class male lout I just don’t see- not any that are actually American anyhow!
ReplyDeleteYes, that kind of automatic denigration of one's own country seems to be quite habitual with many Americans-- I mean the "Joe Sixpack" thing. On the other hand, casual patriotism (like having the flag on your porch) seems more common, too. Very few people fly national flags from their homes in Ireland. I think it's very endearing.
DeleteAnd I absolutely agree with you about this, and think it's very well put: " a baseline expectation that things are great or are going to be great, that the default state is happiness, that one ought to be cheerful as the norm (and why wouldn’t you be, when things are so great?)."