17 Aug 07 Being an American
As an answer to this question.
When I was younger, I was patriotic because I believed it was a basic virtue, like helping people cross the street. It didn’t help that I was a Boy Scout, which encourages this blind patriotism. (Don’t get me wrong: in many other ways, I’m glad I was a Scout. Just not in all ways, and I definitely wouldn’t be an adult Scout volunteer, given their newly fundamentalist tendencies.)
To me, this is what America means to me: I believe we’re the second- or third-best answer to the question of how a country should be run. We’re not the only country in the world with freedom of speech, and we are doing a lot of things wrong compared to other countries that do have that freedom of speech — particularly under the Bush administration, where I’ve seen my concept of freedom folded, mutilated and spindled until it’s barely recognizable.
The reason I think that we are the second- or third-best answer to how a country should be run is because we answer that question with a lot of good things, but nowadays with a lot of bad things as well. For one, we don’t care about our citizens’ health — the sheer disbelieving what-are-you-fuckin’-nuts look on Brits’, Canadians’, and Francophones’ faces when Moore asked them in Sicko about whether they ever had to pay for healthcare will haunt me for quite some time. And, far more importantly, all of our branches of government (possibly with the exception of the judicial branch, but given as the judicial is often an offshoot of executive appointments, perhaps not) have a base-level corruption, wherein (almost) any person elected to an executive-branch or legislative-branch role in our government is corrupted by the companies and associations that wield immense and monolithic power.
Many of the individual, “smaller” (less overreaching over time) things in our government are recent developments, though (Patriot Act, Guantanemo, unitary executive, free speech zones, federal appeals court ruling against Fourth Amendment, Supreme Court rulings against student free speech), and it is my concerted hope that later in my life, they will be undone. The course of time and effort over decades has undone similar fucked-up actions before (McCarthy, Sedition Act, Nixon, slavery, Prohibition, Civil War, etc.).
Moreover, one of the things I realized about America that came to me shortly after 9/11 was this: we’re a friggin’ big country. Canada and Mexico aren’t shabby, but, Jesus, we’re big. One of the things that gave me comfort after 9/11 was the realization that they couldn’t destroy America because ramming planes into all of our buildings would take a freakin’ armada. Now, I know that they did accomplish their goal — they won — in and of that they managed to make this country transform itself away from a democracy via legislation based upon terror (not based upon terrorism, but based upon terror — fright, fear), and they managed to make some of this country’s citizens find despotic actions (Abu Gharib) perfectly acceptible.
So what does it mean for me to be an American? I think I live in a severely flawed but not-all-bad country that has a blindness towards the large-scale improvement it needs in many areas, yet whose history features a self-correcting ability, although only when viewed at a macroscopic scale. I believe its citizenry, by sheer number, has immense power and yet is unwilling to act as one because of partisan and corporate interests. I believe that we have the power to, and indeed often do, help others in magnificent amounts and magnificent ways through our sciences and our private generosity. I think we’re in a dark time, but we’re not going to be in it forever, and that hopefully someone will look back upon the aughts and wonder what America was like during Bushism.
