Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 When I encounter the phrase “proud to be an American,” usually I am not. I find it pasted on things like 9/11 memorials and bumpers which also urge me to support the troops and to never forget and never forgive. These arenas don’t make me prouder to be an American any more than the Crimson-Tide-like ads for enlisting in the military make me want to be all I can be in the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan. I do support the troops. I suggest we support the troops by not lying to them about why they’re risking their lives; let’s support them by not bringing them into a war we don’t have the man-power to sustain, thereby forcing them to stay on for extra terms they never signed up for. Let’s support them by creating an atmosphere in which torture is as perverse and backwards as cannibalism. (Don’t get me wrong, the torturee bears the brunt of the injustice, but we should heed Orwell’s warning that “when the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom he destroys.”) Never forgive and never forget? That’s fine with me. New Yorkers love our city, and that smoke-filled day is indelibly marked in our memories. I’m definitely not into forgiving the Taliban, per se, though the bumper stickers reminding me not to, I think, are more likely to get a brick thrown through the window of some non-Taliban store owner than they are to make sure I really, really fucking hate bin Laden until the day I die. The joke in the Chris Rock movie where he runs for president pretty much sums up the nefarious sentiment behind this brand of patriotism, wherein his opponent punctuates every statement with: “God bless America—and nowhere else.”
But you know, I do feel pride in being American. Music locates the patriot in me. That guitar intro to “Tell me something good” could not have come from any place else, and, damn it, I wanna be from the same place as that song. As soon as the strings make their low, lush entrance in Gershwin’s “Summertime,” there is no doubt what country we are in.
I’m also proud of our Constitution, and the democratic experiment Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Payne et al attempted. America’s founding moment is a contradiction-ridden history, but it did give birth to some beautiful moments, such as Benjamin Franklin, one of twelve slave-owning founders, freeing his slaves and becoming a fervent abolitionist.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
When Jefferson wrote that piece of poetry, he and his colleagues were not ready to count black people and women as folks with unalienable rights. Yet there is something profound about setting a standard that even he did not meet. Was this the birth of American hypocrisy? I think that’s a valid way of interpreting it. But equally valid is the interpretation that America is first and foremost an idea, like justice or equality, and the project of government is to close the gap between the idea and the reality as efficiently and as fairly as possible.
I am grateful for having grown up in the biggest, longest running immigrant experiment since early man walked across the Bering Strait. So many of my friends have parents or grandparents who were born very far from here, and they all have a story about getting from there to here. The stories do not all belong on a plaque on the Statue of Liberty. Many of them are fraught with unrewarded risk, confusion, loneliness, disappointment and resentment. Remarkably, though, the children have proven their resilience every time. They have both inherited that legacy of homesickness and are not bound by it. Among the issues of family history we grapple with, one of them is not, generally, why the fuck am I this and what the fuck am I doing here? The this and the here are a given, the firm platform upon which we learn to juggle everything else.
It is the most American thing is to be of many things. If we occasionally trumpet our roots, more often we ignore them--if we're lucky enough to know enough about them to ignore. This condition begs us to be self-invented or else risk foregoing the comfort of an identity. It’s tough. It makes clanism tempting on the one hand, but on the other, just plain hard to pull off. We have no sense, unlike, say, some people in Austria, of having lived in the shadow of the same castle for seventeen generations. Our version of the castle is that we find ourselves side by side, on the subway, in a taxi, in our neighborhoods, in friendships and marriages, with people whose ancestors could not have fathomed the degree of our proximity. One friend of mine is the child of an interracial marriage of a couple whose lineages trace to the same plantation, where the mother’s family owned the father’s. King’s dream is a dream in many places, but it’s a reality often enough to stir within me a deep pride at our American capacity to master being more than one thing, and to be more humane for that mastery.
My neighborhood in Brooklyn makes me proud to be an American. (Brooklyn!!) Just about all of New York makes me proud to be an American. It’s a beautiful place to live, even when it’s not. I’ve lived here for ten years, and what goes on around me blows my mind constantly. This is a great place to be young and alive and awake. I lived the first 18 years of my life in the heart of Washington D.C., but truly, I feel like this city gave birth to me, and is still doing so.
So I’m almost ready turn to Obama here. There’s something off when your notion of patriotism has virtually nothing to do with the people leading your government. Yet, it has literally never occurred to me until now that the president should stir up those sentiments. I don’t just mean the man of the moment, I mean the office of the president since I’ve been aware of its existence. (I date that initial awareness to some time in 1985; I was six and my mother corrected my impression that Ronald Reagan was the president of Washington D.C.) Today, when my thoughts turn to our government, I feel so very unpatriotic. I’m embarrassed to go abroad and be mistaken for an envoy of that ideology, that war, and that stubborn arrogance. The W. Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld crew, however, is perhaps too easy an argument for the case I’m trying to make: which is that, even having grown up in northwest Washington D.C. where respect for the power on The Hill is a given, I never, even as an impressionable little kid, loved the president. Even Bill the charmer didn’t plant the idea: now here is someone to believe in. He did not plant the thought that I might love our country more because he was the one we gave the mandate to govern us, to represent us, to lead us, and to follow us.
Which brings me, finally, to Obama. As an adult, I am giddy about his candidacy the way I was giddy for Madonna in 1989. In his victory speech in South Carolina, among the many brilliant sound bites that brought tears to my eyes, was this one:
[W]e’re also up against forces that… feed the habits that prevent us from being who we want to be as a nation. It's the politics that uses religion as a wedge, and patriotism as a bludgeon.
And I now must wonder if, in fact, I make such a point to be areligious and unpatriotic because I so resent the forces Obama bemoans here. It humiliates us, profoundly, when leaders appeal to religious and patriotic loyalties that summon our most defensive, fearful, bigoted selves. And, fine, let’s entertain those tactics in the name of pragmatism; let’s say those tactics win the day, and we learn, once again, that the surest road to the White House is the divide and conquer superhighway. Could we really love the man or woman perched in the Oval Office who brought that out in us?
Barack Obama has attracted the crowds and campaign staff he has because he reminds people to have faith in their own generosity. I think many of us are shocked to discover how hungry we have been for that side of ourselves.
Dear America,
The Obama candidacy means nothing less than this: If we elect Barack to office, it means we may well love each other more than we knew. I, for one, will beam with patriotic pride at the display of love that his victory would make manifest.
No comments:
Post a Comment