Sunday Morning Mockery of a Sham: Notes on being an American

Personally, I'm glad I was born, raised, have lived and will undoubtedly die here.  There was a time, around 2004 or so, following the re-election of George W. Bush, when, absolutely convinced the nation had completely gone off the deep end, I considered expatriation.  I took evening classes in conversational French at the local community college, in fact, and found myself among other Boomers who had rededicated themselves to the French of their high school years because George W. Bush had just been re-elected President.  We become inured to such lunacy as the Bush years, however, and consulting history, we recognize that other Palookas have occupied the White House throughout history and the country nevertheless survived.  James Buchanan is frequently cited, or the short, unhappy, highly controversial reign of William Warren G. Harding, who, with very little time to work with, embroiled himself in the Teapot Dome scandal and died colorfully at the Palace Hotel on Market Street in San Francisco.

As to expatriation:  I really would not want to live in Europe.  As Saul Bellow wrote in the first line of The Adventures of Augie March (perhaps the book that lays claim to the true title of The Great American Novel), "I'm an American, Chicago born and bred."

Yep, I know what he means. I've lived almost my entire life in California.  It works.  You can get the general idea of being alive by living your life in California.  I've been to Europe a fair number of times (I'm guessing about eleven such journeys, some for fairly long stretches), and what I've noted, while feigning my European-ness, becoming for a while socialized, gracious, thoughtful, all those things I rarely am at home, is that it didn't take long to want to leave.  Europeans begin getting on my nerves because they're so socialized, gracious, and thoughtful.  They're so damn cultured.  I suspect, in fact, that the reason Europeans have traditionally started massive land wars which have reduced the entire Continent to rubble on a pretty regular basis is that they get sick of it themselves.  Americans let off steam gradually by engaging in random murder.  We must remember that what is suppressed gathers force.  It's in the first chapter of every self-help book.

So I didn't leave America.  I read with bemusement the essays of Dmitry Orlov, who was born in the U.S.S.R. and now lives on a boat usually moored in Boston Harbor.  The pages of cluborlov.com are regularly filled with advice to Americans to get out of America while they can.  Dmitry has of late developed a huge bromance with Vladimir Putin, Russia's President For Life, and extols Vlad's anti-American defiance.  I note, however, that Dmitry, who holds dual citizenship, keeps his boat anchored in Massachusetts.  It's a shtick, a "branding" (as the marketers say, and Dmitry does work in that very field, which can be very lucrative in America), we have to recognize that, just as the faux-patriotism of many of America's leaders, who simply use their professed devotion to America as a way to make a living, is a shtick and a brand.

Obviously I don't think America should be above criticism.  "I love my country, but I love it in justice," as Albert Camus once said.  That's a useful touchstone.  America is a sprawling mess.  Americans are probably the descendants of ancestors with undiagnosed Adult Attention & Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).  This is an hypothesis that is au courant - restless and adventurous people are the ones who migrate, who leave their settled lives and take on the unknown world.  Still, one would imagine that 400 years after it all started that this genetic inclination would revert to the mean, with a slight bias in favor of being a little jumpy.  Mostly you can figure out America's advantages by looking at a globe.  Let's face it, look at that real estate!  In the temperate latitudes, with varied biospheres, scenic diversity, right smack dab in the middle of the world's two great oceans.  After gaining a beachhead in New England, those early ADHD cases kept looking West, kept acquiring real property (like a couple of Beverly Hills sharpies trolling for land in the 1950's - men of vision!), until they owned everything, at one point, from Maine to the Phillipines. 

And even if you find parts of America particularly repugnant, there is solace in knowing it's a federation of states with their own government systems.  Living in California is not the same thing, culturally, politically, as a matter of mental health, as living in Mississippi.  The political absurdities that afflict modern America are the result of a couple of critical miscalculations of the Founding Fathers.  In particular, democracy has gotten skewed (and screwed) by the basic arithmetic of the bicameral system coupled with the political inclinations of the (mostly sparsely-populated) hinterland, as noted here on various occasions.  Every state, even if it's mostly cows and Big Horn Sheep, gets two senators, and control of one House in Washington, D.C., is enough to wreck effective governance.  Still, when you look at guys like Mitch McConnell, John McCain, Lindsey Graham and James Inhofe, all products of our One-Cow, One-Vote system, you're glad they're not more effective.

Maybe there will come a time when the Tenth Amendment will undergo its renaissance, and the central government will revert to its basic functions of running the Post Office and...well, that ought to do it, actually.  Eliminate the income tax in favor of partnering up with Indian casinos.  Any shortfall could be made up by a National Liposuction Drive, selling the resulting 60 million or so Average-Sized Humans (represented by the surplus adiposity drained away), as a non-fossil fuel alternative to whale oil on the world market, thus sparing the actual cetaceans under duress in the world's oceans.