We're All Americans Now
From "dead, white, male" statues to McDonald's in Moscow to the privilège exorbitant... why the American project matters to us all
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 orange-hued 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
“It’s still the greatest show on earth,” a friend explained to me, describing his fond attachment to the ground beneath his feet. “Whatever its faults, and there are many, there’s nothing else quite like it. The greatest [expletive] show on earth.”
That my enthusiastic interlocutor is a well known movie director and actor, 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 protagonist, part supervillain, part superhero.
Paradoxical and unique, this “Idea,” boldly written - nay, declared - into existence, in 1776, 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, say, east of the Urals or south of the Himalayas, west of the Nile or north of the Mekong, this particular enterprise in human action concerns both citizens “at home” and “aliens” abroad, and to an extent so as to make even the most aspirational empires on history’s grand stage tremble, cower, wince and cringe.
Over the coming weeks, we’re going to take a look under the hood of this noble experiment, at its genesis and trajectory, its conceits and concerns, its values and varied vulgarities.
We’ll look at the influence of her culture and her money, from the first McDonald’s in Moscow to the greenback’s position as the world’s reserve currency, an extraordinary position conferring on its beneficiaries what the French called a “privilège exorbitant.”
We’ll wrestle with her politics, from the ideals of the Founding Fathers through to the modern day Identitarians, who would tear them all down, one “dead, white, male” statue at a time.
We’ll examine her contributions to the human race, from Henry Ford’s Model-T motor car, to the Manhattan Project to the moment Neil Armstrong took his “giant leap for mankind.”
We’ll visit famous Americans who ventured bravely abroad as well as those huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, who found themselves, tempest tost, at the foot of America’s golden door.
All in good time...
But who are we, you may be wondering, an Australian-born scribbler, writing from Argentina’s 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 simply that... an idea. As such, it is not to be located on any map, the imagined political borders of which ebb and flow with the vicissitudes of time, and anyway could not contain it. Nor is it bound up in flags, anthems, official emblems and seals; assorted simulacra, hoary pomp, mere representations of the real McCoy. Nor does it reside in some congressional hall, at the bottom of a ballot box or in the earnest hearts and minds of any group calling itself “the majority.”
We’ll come to all that, in due course. For now, let us simply draw a line under one particularly germane attribute of this idea, one which affords it a truly universal appeal.
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-American author, Saul Bellow, was fond of saying) in a manner that no other nation, Old World or New, can quite claim to be. There are single school districts in Brooklyn that teach and test in more languages than are spoken in many countries. All of which makes, of1 course, 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 (resident Irish-American) 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.”
From her most prominently “American” musicians... Joni Mitchell hails from Canada, so too does Neil Young; Eddie Van Haalen was born in the Netherlands...
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...
From her leading entrepreneurs and inventors... Nikolai Tesla was Serbian-American while Tesla CEO, 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 silver screen... Bob Hope was born in England... Audry Hepburn in Belgium... Bruce Willis in Germany...
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 and nutmeg from Sri Lanka and Indonesia...
“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.
Whether one cares to notice or not, where goes America... so too goes the rest of the world. Economically... culturally... politically... Just as there are American greenbacks changing hands from the avenidas of Buenos Aires to the streets of Harare, so too were there Black Lives Matter protests in thousands of cities around the world last year. (An interactive map counted 4,446 marches in total.)
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 too 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.
More on the “Idea of America,” next week...
Cheers,
Joel Bowman
P.S. Faithful and unfaithful readers alike may be interested to know, I’ve just published my first novel: Morris, Alive. A classic bildungsroman in style, the fictional tale follows Morris as he journeys to the United States in search of the “Idea of America.”
On an adventure which spirits him across the prairies and over The Rockies, from the dizzying heights of New York City to the shorelines of Southern California and through Anytowns USA in between, Morris encounters a fascinating cast of characters who teach him lessons of love, loss and life.
It’s unapologetically hopeful... unfashionably optimistic... and contains plenty of “cancelable” ideas and concepts... Just a few reasons I think you might enjoy it.
Pick up a hardback edition of Morris, Alive, right here.
