AMERICAN
PROGRESSIVES CAN’T ever match
conservatives in displays of febrile patriotism, and for good reason.
What Jesus told his followers about prayer is also good advice about
loving a country: “Thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are,
for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners
of the streets, that they may be seen of men.”
Moreover,
anyone who’s spent five minutes thinking about human history knows
how dangerously volatile nationalism is. This is especially important
to keep in mind in a country that has used nuclear weapons and
pondered whether to drop tungsten rods on our enemies from
orbit.
Nonetheless,
I believe it behooves all of us to consider and celebrate what is
resplendent about the United States of America.
First,
if you don’t do so, you wear blinders that prevent you from seeing
a giant chunk of reality. In Catholic theology most souls are of
middling virtue — but the ones which are not are generally not good
or evil alone but both at once. As St. Augustine put it, “my two
wills, one old and the other new, one carnal, the other spiritual,
contend within me.” The same goes for countries: If they’re not
in the middle of the bell curve they often occupy both ends
simultaneously. That is definitely the United States.
Second,
one of America’s most beautiful attributes is that we have freedom
and resources that our fellow malcontents in many other countries
could only dream of. Pretending that we don’t have this wiggle room
is — particularly for white activists — to show ourselves to be
distastefully spoiled.
Third,
being conscious of this country’s upside is the only way we’ll
ever be able to communicate with anyone outside the minute lefty
archipelago. The lived experience of millions of Americans has been
that it’s superior to where their families once came from. Trying
to convince them that it’s uniformly appalling is like trying to
convince them that they have three arms. That’s not going to work.
Finally,
it’s critical for our own psychological wellbeing. Much about
America’s past has been hideous and much about the present is grim.
But keeping that going as an endless interior monologue is a recipe
for stasis and failure. Conversely, an appreciation of the glorious
parts of the U.S. is motivation to protect and expand them. The right
loves to accusingly demand, “Do you love this country?” We need
the confidence to give the correct answer, which is “I love the
parts you’re trying to destroy.”
So
for July 4, I’ve made a list of what’s most deeply meaningful to
me about America.
Jennifer
Burbank of the Georgetown volunteer fire department, decorates a
firetruck with a 48-star U.S. flag donated by longtime Georgetown
resident Bernice Plass before the start of the Fourth of July Parade
in downtown Georgetown on Friday July, 4, 2003.
Photo:
Glenn Asakawa/The Denver Post/Getty Images
People
Have Rights, Not the Government
For
most of the time in most places, societies believed that the natural
order was to have a king who had the final word about everything. The
Declaration of Independence was one of the first attempts to flip
that on its head, and declare that individual people come first and
governments derive their power “from the consent of the governed.”
It’s
easy to forget the momentousness of this statement in an era when
Fortune 500 companies complain that governmental tyranny prevents
them from putting arsenic in their line of baby food. But it was a
giant step forward, and one of the best parts about being an American
is an instinctive understanding of the zaniness of monarchies. For
instance, Great Britain pays an old lady from some German family to
live in a gigantic house, and if you have dinner there you have
to immediately
stop eating when she does.
The
Declaration of Independence resonated so deeply with universal human
aspirations that it was copied by many other rebellions. Ho Chi
Minh used
parts of it verbatim in
1945 in a declaration of independence for Vietnam. We were so moved
by this that the Eisenhower administration offered
France two nuclear bombs to
drop on Dien Bien Phu.
Separation
of Church and State
Not
only did most places have kings in 1776, it was usually accepted that
these kings had been appointed by god. This meant that you couldn’t
question the king’s decisions even when large holes had been eaten
in his brain by syphilis.
So
establishing a wall between religion and government in the Bill of
Rights was deeply radical and positive. The corporate right has long
understood how this levels society, which is why they’ve quietly
supported efforts to
tear it down and retcon U.S. history to make the founding fathers
fervent Christians.
Anyone
From Anywhere
In
most places at most times, nationality has depended on blood and
soil. For instance, Korean-Japanese whose families have been there
for 100 years are still referred to as zainichi —
which literally means “staying in Japan,” presumably temporarily.
But in theory and to a large degree in fact, anyone can come to the
U.S. from anywhere, and when they take the oath of citizenship they
become as American as everyone else.
The
Nazis used to call the U.S. a mongrel nation. They were absolutely
right; it’s fantastic and
the source of our hybrid vigor.
We’re
So Rich
The
U.S. right likes to tout our enormous wealth as a sign of our
success. In reality, it signifies a humiliating failure of our
economic system, even leaving aside our stunning levels of
inequality.
We
have advantages possessed by no other country in history. We’re
gigantic, in the temperate zone, overflowing with natural resources,
and with neighbors so weak we generally forget that they’re there.
Yet Europe and Japan are about as rich as we are, despite having few
of these assets and regularly destroying themselves in catastrophic
wars. We should have twice as much money as they do.
Nevertheless,
by any reasonable standard the U.S. is an incredibly wealthy
place, as wealthy as any country needs to be to maximize human
happiness. If we get our act together to fight, we could use our
riches to do amazing things.
For
instance, much of our gains in economic productivity over the past 40
years have gone into the pockets of millionaires and billionaires.
The median household income in the U.S. now is about $56,500. If
flight attendants and firemen had gotten their share of economic
growth, they would be making over $70,000. Alternatively — and
even more enticingly — if we’d had the power to take our
increased productivity in time off regular people could be making
their current salaries while only working about 30 hours per week.
Who
knows what we’d do with that kind of extra time for ourselves, but
it’s thrilling to contemplate. If current trends continued there
would certainly be a lot of podcasts; once we’re only working
15 hours a week and the ratio of podcasts to podcast listeners
passes 1:1, we’ll have to invent robots to rate and review them on
iTunes.
African
American and Secular Jewish Culture
I’m
not black and, despite the enthusiastic (((feedback))) I receive
from the alt-right, I’m also not Jewish. I’m a baptized
Episcopalian, a Mischling
second degree,
and a practicing nothing. But to me, looking at black culture and
Jewish culture in America from the periphery, they seem to be
humanity’s two premiere achievements.
I
used to think that William Faulkner’s claim that
“man will not merely endure: he will prevail” was hokey and
overoptimistic. But the history of African Americans is evidence he
knew what he was talking about.
Two
hundred fifty years of kidnapping, murder, rape and chattel
slavery; “freedom” followed by 100 years of treatment that was
slavery-adjacent; a 10-year window when change seemed possible; and
then 40 years of mass incarceration that is intermittent
reenslavement. It’s incredible African Americans haven’t
collapsed in exhaustion, or simply perished.
Instead,
faced with a 1,000-foot high wall of hate, they’ve dug tunnels
under it, floated over it waving from hot air balloons, and
built transporters to dematerialize and then rematerialize on
the other side, all to the bafflement and fury of much of white
America. We understand violence and in fact rejoice when faced with
it, because we know how to respond in kind a hundred times over. What
we can’t understand is black America’s unending eruption of
invention — in politics, music, literature, sports, Twitter,
general stylishness, and a thousand other areas — that reverberates
around the world. It’s set a standard of wisdom and humanity for
everyone else on earth to aim for.
The
accomplishments of secular Jewish culture in America have been
similar, although modulated differently.
All
religions have the same essential precepts, and most religions ignore
them in practice. Judaism stands out for sometimes taking them
seriously. Both the Torah and Old Testament instruct us that “Thou
shalt neither vex a stranger, nor oppress him: for ye were strangers
in the land of Egypt.” Only Judaism builds a holiday around this
admonition, and sends participants out into the world believing that
maybe those words mean what they say.
Likewise,
I can’t help but love an ethical tradition that requires
kids to ask questions.
As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has put it, “To be a Jewish child is to
learn how to question.” I.I. Rabi, an American Nobel Prize-winning
physicist, said he became a scientist because when he came home
from school each day his mother would ask him not what he’d
learned, but whether he’d asked a good question. Polls have
shown that
American Jews value “thinking for oneself” as the most critical
quality to encourage in children.
The
collision of this perspective with the openness of American culture
has exploded in every direction. It’s impossible to imagine how
different, and how much worse, the U.S. would be without the
influence of secular Judaism.
Then
there’s what is, for me, the dazzling summit of African American
and Jewish culture: the collaborative creation of American
comedy.
Comedy
of the powerful tends to take this structure: “Wouldn’t it be
funny if…” You can see this clearly in Monty Python, whose main
five performers went to Oxford and Cambridge. Wouldn’t it be
funny if a
pet store owner refused to acknowledge a parrot he’d just sold to a
customer had
died?
Wouldn’t it be funny if the
head of a mountaineering expedition had
double vision?
But
the comedy of the powerless usually says something else: “Isn’t
it funny that…” The powerless don’t need to invent
surrealistically absurd situations, they live them. So a Chris Rock
joke is: Isn’t it funny that that
train’s never late?
And
the comedy of reality will always be superior to the comedy of
imagination, no matter how well executed. That’s why American
comedy, created by African Americans and Jews (with an assist from
Irish Catholics) is the current reigning world champion.
Of
course, I understand that the individual humans involved in all this
did not do so as a hobby or to make America better, but to survive in
the face of monstrous cruelty. Billie Holiday would have traded
“Strange Fruit” for an end to lynchings. Our goal should be to
make this country so good that we end up with a bland, Swiss-like
pudding of a culture.
Baseball
I
can’t honestly claim I like baseball that much. But all lists like
this by liberals seem to include it, so I feel peer pressure to do so
too. You’re also supposed to be super into jazz.
SO
THAT’S WHY I love America. I
encourage you to think about it yourself today in between the
cookout, beach, and fireworks. Writing it down made me feel much
better about being alive right here right now, and it could do the
same for you.
Top
photo: A Liberty Bell float looms high over spectators in the 2015
Fourth of July Parade in Pittsfield, Mass. on Saturday, July 4, 2015.
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