I have no doubts that this post will quickly devolve into spitting incoherence, since that's what I tend to do when attempting to formulate statements like this, but what the hell.
I guess first of all it's important to note that I self-identify as an American. I happen to think that America at this moment (and for a long time) has been self consciously a nation of hyphenates (consider that for decades the question of "What are you?" regarding ethnic background was not only operative, but prone to elicit responses like "Oh, I'm French," or "I'm German" and everybody understands that we really mean "French-American," or what-have you). I know that this sits sort of at odds with America's long and continuing history of cultural xenophobia but (a) bear with me, and (b) while this is neither the time nor the place for me to indulge in my little theses about them, accept the fact that I frequently am not bothered by apparent systemic or ideological contradictions. I also think (although this observation was most recently made in my presence not by myself, but by a close friend, to give credit where its due) that the hyphenate self-IDing of America is shifting with my generation. But. Regardless of my glowing potential for hyphenate status, I self-identify first and foremost as an American. English is (unfortunately) the only language in which I have fluency, America is the only home I've ever known, numerous trappings and aspects of American culture are comforting and enjoyable to me. I like basketball, appreciate baseball and (American) football, love jazz and rock, gleefully indulge in fast food, all peculiarly American inventions. Nonetheless there are three things that I think place me to a certain extent outside of America, so to speak, or at least allow me to have a certain objective distance from it. I'm certainly joined by millions of others in each of these characteristics, and am far from alone in having all of them, but I think they give me a different perspective:
(1) I'm first generation American from my mother's side. My mother immigrated at 18, along with her parents and younger brothers. My grandparents live, for all intents and purposes, in a slightly warped Portuguese community, and have never particularly needed to learn English. My mother experienced a fair amount of both pointed and accidental prejudice about her immigrant status, particularly her position as an immigrant with a graduate degree from Harvard. Her naturalization examiner, e.g., asked her much harder questions than normal when he learned of her higher education (although it was in freaking Romance Languages and Literature); on the other hand, her neighbors were shocked to learn that she'd been to Harvard, since it was never something my mother spoke of. That's not the sort of assumption people tend to make about immigrants from countries like Portugal. So, while I'm not in any intelligible way Portuguese, I'm very close to an entirely different picture of, to select a subject, world history. I don't believe one picture more than another, but I get a breadth of perspective that I don't think you'd get if all the history you learned was taught to you in an American public school.
(2) I'm (as my handle glibly indicates) 1/4 Puerto Rican, and was in fact born in San Juan. Puerto Rico certainly occupies a somewhat peculiar position within US cosmology - it both is and isn't American, and that isn't even getting into the quite serious (to the participants) distinction and divide between American PRs (i.e., people who identify as Puerto Rican by way of heritage and were actually born in New York or Massachusetts) and island PRs (like my dad, who was born and part raised in Puerto Rico itself; the divide arises when the two sects meet in a place like law school, which was the first place my father encountered this conflict. Painting in extremely braod strokes, the USPRs came from poverty and few the islanders are snobs, while the islanders are generally children of privelige who look down their noses at the USPRs. My father, who actually had some stake in the argument, and I, who don't, both think this is incredibly stupid on everybody's part). Again, the real relevance of this goes to the same things mentioned in (1) above.
(3) I'm highly educated (I'm going to the University of Chicago, can't you tell?); that's certainly not a unique quality, but most Americans, even most college-educated ones, haven't had the luck to have the sort of scholastic experience I and my classmates have had. Better education serves to expose you to more and different ideas, hopefully gives you a broad enough palette of interdisciplinary tools to understand how ideas can work together regardless of field, and also, frankly, gives you the skills to keep yourself informed of facts. I'm just grasping at straws here, but I'll bet that among those Americans who believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11, there are extremely few graduates of Stanford, UofC, and the Ivy League. The other thing is that America At Large has a suspicion of people who seem overly educated or intellectual. This is NOT, in my opinion, the same thing as a suspicion of intelligence. I honestly believe that while it might be a tad undervalued, smarts are respected in pretty much every quarter. What is disrespected is the perceived elitism that comes with a flouncy degree from a name school. Some of that elitism is really there, and deserves contempt. For the large part, I don't think it is. I don't know what the roots of this national attitude are, I barely even feel qualified to say whether it is in fact a real phenomenon, seeing as I've lived in what are perhaps best described as nonstandard representatives of American life, but it's a meme of sufficient power that everyone believes it to be true.
Apologies for the mammoth preamble here. I was essentially trying to establish context for the following two, relatively smaller observations:
These days I watch nearly no television, partly as a matter of choice and partly because those things I would care to watch tend to be available on cable, which is no longer an operative entertainment option in my apartment (cough). I kind of like not watching TV, largely because I get frightened by how much of it I then watch when I visit my father. But when I do watch TV, I find myself increasingly baffled by the commercials, which I take to be the most convenient illustration of the pulse of American mass media culture. I can't figure out whether my increasing isolation from it has simply removed my ability to fluidly process the memes of TV advertising, or if my sabbatical has given me an objectivity that people who regularly watch TV lack. In sketching this idea out with The Virginian, he indicated that the ideas were not mutually exclusive, but the former places at worst a neutral valuation on American mass media culture, while the latter distinctly imposes a negative interpretation. All I know is that I sit in baffled paralysis trying to comprehend the methods and messages of such theoretically simple cultural artifacts as a Dr. Pepper advertisement wherein Leann Rimes and Reba McEntire careen through the badlands drinking and singing about the relevant beverage. Or that one where there are two cars driving behind two trucks which then start flinging obstacles (eventually including other cars) at the pursuing vehicles.
In a somewhat inarticulate and angry moment today, I stuttered that I thought America would be better if people were more like me. I didn't mean that hubristically, and I'm not interested in a nation full of Quartericans running about. That's perhaps a more frightening picture to me than it is to anyone else. What I was trying to say is that when I allow myself to seriously ingest information about politics, I quickly lurch into either anger or sadness at what I perceive to be the incredibly misguided perceptions that are allowed to exist out there. I'm not talking about matters of opinion or policy differences. I mean things like: folks, WE HAVEN'T FOUND ANY FUCKING WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION IN IRAQ and FOLKS, IT IS MATHEMATICALLY IMPOSSIBLE FOR THE ADMINISTRATION TO NOT TOUCH YOUR PRECIOUS SOCIAL BENEFITS AND STILL PAY FOR THE RECENT TAX CUTS, AND PEOPLE LIKE PAUL WOLFOWITZ AND G. GORDON LIDDY HAVE ADMITTED IT!!! I obviously picked evident truths that appeal to my personal political leanings, but my point is: ours is an uninformed voting public. An uninformed voting public is not a voting public capable of determining what its best interests are. I'm not politicking for moving away from democracy, I'm politicking for better access to unbiased information, I'm politicking for better education so that more people can have the advantage I've had, what I consider to be the best advantage of the best educations: the tools with which to educate yourself about those things that concern you.
I don't think I ended up exactly where I started, so what I'm trying to say is: this country infuckingfuriates me sometimes. It makes me incredibly sad or so angry that I start seeing mass murder as the only viable method of rectification. It perplexes me on a daily basis. I don't understand you, America. But I belong to you just the same, which is why I (unfortunately) give a shit.
