"We’re All Americans Now"
by Joel Bowman
“Unknown to those born in the United States, there exists a curious momentum in America apparent only to her visitors. In the widened eyes of these newcomers, the country appears to be hurtling forward in time at blistering, maniacal pace, her citizens unconsciously bound to a collective destiny of grand, mythological proportions, a mishmash of waiters and engineers and hookers and playwrights and teachers, of slick and desperate criminals and late night T.V. evangelists, of frat boys and southern belles and Marlborough men and block-jawed G.I.s, of cowboys and surfers and poets and junkies, all marching arm in arm along a great concrete road that hasn’t quite set.”
~ From "Morris, Alive" - A novel by Joel Bowman
Buenos Aires, Argentina - “It’s still the greatest show on earth,” a friend explained recently, describing his fond attachment to the ground beneath his feet. “Whatever its faults, and there are many to be sure, there’s nothing else quite like it. The greatest [expletive] show on earth.”
That our enthusiastic interlocutor is an aspiring actor and movie director, and that the ground beneath his feet is composed mostly of Venice Beach sand and the lapping Pacific tide, only underscores his point. Like Hollywood itself, as seen on the glimmering silver screen, the “Idea of America” is part mythology, part super-sized reality.... its setting part period drama, part futuristic sci-fi... its caricatured characters part supervillains, part superheroes.
As the flood of viral videos from World Cup football fans currently on wide-eyed tour across the United States attests, there is a “curious momentum in America apparent only to her visitors.” Perhaps you’ve seen the clips circulating online? Incredulous Brits wandering around Big Box stores like they’re national museums… spellbound Norwegians entranced by America’s small town hospitality… misty-eyed Italians wondering where free refills have been all their lives… to say nothing of the modern miracle that blows the collective European mind like no other: air conditioning.
But let us come back to the genesis of this vast abundance, the kind that causes Germans to convulse in raw pleasure over the godsend that is Texas barbecue, that teleports thunderstruck Aussies into joyful conniptions in the aisles of Buc-ee's gas stations, that moves grown Scotsmen to tears while sampling breakfast at all-American diners. That is, let us come back to the Idea of America…
E Pluribus Unum: Paradoxical and unique, this “Idea,” boldly written - nay, declared - into existence 250 years ago tomorrow, concerns both notions of individual sovereignty and collective destiny, the multitude and the singular, e pluribus unum. And unlike other, comparatively modest experiments concurrently underway around the world, this particular enterprise in human action concerns both citizens at home and “aliens” abroad, making it global on a scale that even the most aspirational empires on history’s grand stage tremble, cower, and occasionally blush.
But who are we, you may be wondering, an Australian-born scribbler, writing from Argentina’s distant capital, to weigh in on what constitutes the “Idea of America?” What right have we to opine on such matters? To trespass on, much less occupy, such hallowed philosophical territory? Excellent point, Dear Patriot! Allow us, if you would kindly holster your sidearm, a moment to plead our case... or rather, to stake our humble claim.
Unique among such historical notions, the “Idea of America” to which we refer is assuredly that... an Idea. As such, it is not to be confined by any map, the imagined political borders of which ebb and flow with the vicissitudes of time. Nor is it bound up in flags, anthems, official emblems or state seals; assorted simulacra, the outward insignia of nationhood, mere representations of the real McCoy. Nor does it reside in the halls of Congress or the White House ballroom, neither at the bottom of a ballot box or even in the earnest hearts and minds of any prevailing group calling itself “the majority.”
Remember that an Idea, as Austrian-American economist, Ludwig von Mises, described it, is more powerful than all that. From "Human Action" (which he wrote and published in New York City in 1949, after emigrating to the the States at the beginning of the decade in order to escape some decidedly bad ideas back on the Continent): “All changes in the realm of human affairs are brought about by ideas. Ideas and only ideas can light the darkness. They are the main weapons in man’s struggle for survival and advancement.” And here we come to the point...
Old World, New World: Perhaps you have noticed (or not) the curious tendency of Americans to hyphenate their demonym; this teacher is an Irish-American; that nurse an African-American; this policeman is an Italian-American; that artist a Chinese-American... and so on down the line... Jewish-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Canadian-Americans, et al.
If you call yourself American (whether hyphenated or not), this may not seem anything strange. But to those of us who live, work and play in any of the other ~200 nation states on the planet, it’s more than a quirky peculiarity. It is a one-way oddity!
To borrow the phrasing of another foreign-born member of the chattering class, the late English-American essayist, Christopher Hitchens, America is unique to the extent that it is “internally international,” brimming with hyphenated patriots from sea to shining sea. She is sui generis (as the Canadian-Jewish-American author, Saul Bellow, was fond of saying) in a manner that no other nation, Old World or New, can quite claim to be.
Indeed, there are single school districts in Texas that teach and test in more languages than are spoken in many countries. All of which makes, in the end, the question of “what is American?” the more difficult to pin down.
In fact, much of what we might consider “quintessentially American” is not really of America at all. From the exuberance pouring forth in what Susan Sontag (the daughter of Lithuanian and Polish Jews) called the “spirit of Philadelphia,” to practically everything that came afterward.
Founders Alexander Hamilton and James Wilson were foreign born (Nevis and England, respectively), as were a third of George Washington’s appointees to the nation’s original Supreme Court. Thomas Paine, without whose provocative pamphlets, "Common Sense" and "The American Crisis," one could scarcely imagine the American Revolution in the same light, had not even set foot in the colonies until he was almost two score years old.
“America,” writes (our Irish-American friend) Bill Bonner in the foreword to his aptly-titled compendium of essential essays, The Idea of America, “is a nation of people who chose to become Americans. Even the oldest family tree in the New World has immigrants at its root.” Bill might well have been echoing the sentiments of another Irish-American, President John F. Kennedy, who observed that, “Every American who has ever lived, with the exception of one group, was either an immigrant himself or a descendant of immigrants.”
American Icons: From her most prominently “American” musicians... Joni Mitchell hails from Canada, so too does Neil Young; Eddie Van Haalen was born in the Netherlands; Irving Berlin, composer of such Broadway classics as "There’s No Business Like Show Business," "White Christmas", and "God Bless America," was born in the Russian Empire...
To the visionary architects who cut her emblematic city skylines... Ludwig Mies van der Rohe hyphenates as German-American; Ieoh Ming Pei as Chinese-American; César Pelli was born just down the road, here in Argentina...
From her leading entrepreneurs and inventors... Nikolai Tesla was Serbian-American while Tesla CEO and on-again, off-again trillionaire, Elon Musk, is South African-American. One half of Google, Sergey Brin, was born in Moscow, Russia, while the inventor of the original blue jeans, Levi Strauss, was raised in Bavaria, Germany...
To the stars of her glittering silver screen... Bob Hope was born in England, so too Cary Grant... Audrey Hepburn comes from Belgium... Bruce Willis from Germany... and Arnie, the former California “Governator,” from Austria...
Plenty are those who were swept along with the “Idea of America,” though they began their journey elsewhere. “I am as American as April in Arizona,” joked Russian-American émigré, Vladimir Nabokov, who also claimed he was “one-fifth American,” on account of his having gained some 40 lbs after adopting an all-American diet.
From buildings to blue jeans to bake sales, even the phrase “as American as apple pie” rests on dubious etymological grounds. The original recipe hails from England, with heavy influences from the French and the Dutch. In fact, apples themselves weren’t even native to North America, arriving as they did in the arms of European settlers. While we’re at it, wheat comes from the Middle East... cinnamon from Sri Lanka... nutmeg from Indonesia...
Where Goes the Republic: “There is a whole world in America,” observed the American-British author, Henry James (one of the few writers to journey across The Pond in the other direction, proving himself the exception to the rule). And yet, later in James’s life, in a private letter, he would confess, “If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.”
As many and varied are the pathways to the Idea of America, of equal importance is what that Idea - and its future - portends for the rest of the world, whether her destiny ends with the proverbial whimper or a bang. For whether one cares to notice or not, where goes America... so too goes the rest of the world, economically... culturally... socially... politically...
Just as there are American greenbacks changing hands from the broad avenidas of Buenos Aires to the back streets of Harare, so too do her movies and protests, fashion trends and fast food, technological marvels and social media fads reach across the globe, for better and worse.
What does this portend for the next 25… 100… 250 years? And why should the rest of us take notice? It was the Greek statesman, Pericles, who once said, “Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.” So goes for America and her noble experiment. Whether Democrat or Republican, man or woman, black or white, citizen or alien... for better and for worse, we’re all Americans now. Happy birthday, USA!"
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