Tag: american exceptionalism

July 4, 1976

~ ginsu ~ Leave a comment

Scotch Plains, New Jersey, was the perfect American town. I’m sure that some of you feel that you grew up in the best small town in America, and if you’re lucky enough to feel that way, I’m not trying to tell you that you’re wrong. I’m just saying, I feel the same way.

Obviously, I’m reminiscing here rather than convincing. But especially when I think about growing up, I talk and often think like a guy from Jersey, so maybe some of this will sound like an argument. Or maybe I can say, Cali-style where I live now, that I’m just stating my personal inner truth: The 1970s were the perfect time to grow up in America, because it was then that you had the best chance of realizing the American dream.

A hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, just past the transformative Civil Rights Era, heading into decades of American peace and domination. If you were an American child in the Seventies, came of age in the Eighties, started your career in the Nineties, boomed with the internet in the Aughts – you at least had a chance of a rising tide lifting your boat, if you were lucky enough to be born in the right place at the right time. I don’t care what kind of crappy boat we’re talking about here: Even your little dinghy, rusty and full of holes, tattered sail and busted motor and all, even that sad water jalopy could take you somewhere worth the time at sea.

Just 25 miles from New York City, Scotch Plains was a perfect suburban repository of the immigration influx of the late 19th Century that came through Ellis Island. The first couple of generations clawed out a new life on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. By the third generation, people who cared more about assimilating went to Long Island or, as a reach, to Connecticut. But if you embraced your ethnic roots, you went to New Jersey. So to me, Scotch Plains, NJ was the perfect melting pot, a stew of Irish Catholics, Italians, Jews and Poles, Blacks and Puerto Ricans, and a few Orientals. (The term “Asian American” wasn’t a thing back then.) Everyone could be proud of who we were, but everyone still had to figure out how to live together despite how different we were.

No one in my town knew what Korea was, not really, including me. But by six years old, I could not avoid an education on what America was, or wanted to be. All of us in town that age learned our first five-syllable word: Bicentennial. In July, it would be the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. I remember how hot it was that summer, but at least it was sandwiched between the two oil crises of that decade, and we could afford to run air conditioning in our split level ranch through the worst of the sweltering summer.

The red, white, and blue was everywhere leading up to that July. Bunting draped all over the downtown main streets, flags flapping from every other house, men with lapel pins and women with ribbons of old glory. A six year old can’t distinguish between genuine pride and community conformity, but the unavoidable displays of patriotism worked on my malleable little mind. I didn’t have to wonder whether America was exceptional, I knew it must be true because everyone in town was telling me so.

And I said it to my father, while taking refuge one brutally humid afternoon of the summer of 1976, sitting in my parents bedroom, the window air conditioner barely able to keep up with the modest demands of the little room. I sat on the bed while my father puttered around the dressing table, and I asked him: Isn’t it great? Isn’t it great that we live here, in the strongest, proudest, best country in the history of all the world? Isn’t it amazing what we’ve achieved in 200 years?

He said:

Well, it’s a good start, maybe.

I couldn’t believe my ears. What did this fresh of the boat Korean know about the Great United States of America?

He answered as best as he could. I’m not gonna pretend that I remember his explanation word for word; he spoke for a long time that afternoon. He spoke in broken English and never used memorable words. But I remember everything. Because he communicated all of his meaning and his intent through his broken language, through his pauses, elisions and silences, and through his face and his body. I remember exactly what he communicated to me, not word for word, but in his full meaning, in his intent, and in his insistence on the lesson:

Yeah, it’s a good start. The people you now call “Korean” have a four thousand year history. And that recently included two consecutive 500-year dynasties. It’s always the same pattern: around half a century of figuring out how the nation works, a century or so of rising to the good times, maybe a century of actual great times, and then a troubled period of decades where the infighting allows the outside in to destroy your nation. But it’s a long slow decline, could be another century or two. The first of those 500-year Korean dynasties ended in dominance by the Mongols, the second in dominance by Japan. In both cases, the same pattern.

Roughly: 50 years of construction, 100 years of rise, 100 years of good times, 50 years of infighting, and then 200 years to the end. In each period, give or take a few decades.

I thought the old man was batty. In the 1970’s in Scotch Plains, New Jersey, nobody knew anything about Korea, not really, not like my father did. But he didn’t have a clue about America. Surely this fresh off the boat Korean knew nothing about the future of my birthland, the United States of America.

Well …

That was coming on fifty years ago, I’m over a decade older now than my father was that summer afternoon, I’ve lived a whole lotta life and I’ve seen some things. I’ve even absorbed a little history, something I shoulda soaked up more from the pride of my paisanos back in Jersey: Rome had a 500 year Republic followed by a 500 year Empire. And both followed the pattern. If you know only last century’s history, the phrase “a thousand year dynasty” might sound a little chilling to you. But that was only recent history. In the really long run, perhaps it’s not so terrible to imagine two consecutive 500 year dynasties. There is a thousand years of glory in such a history even existing, no matter the ups and downs.

The 250th anniversary of July 4, 1976 is within our sight, as is the current state of our nation, laid bare for anyone to interpret. I leave the details of math and pattern matching as an exercise for the reader and for X. Just a closing thought: I think people these days worry a lot about American decline. But nobody gets good times forever. You can have good times and bad times and still last a long time; rise and fall and recovery and try again. It’s not easy. It doesn’t happen a lot of times in history. But it does happen, in the exceptional cases.

American experimentalism

~ ginsu ~ Leave a comment

I’m proud to be an American, always have been. What I’ve always loved about this country is that the truest test of citizenship is about ideas, not history or genealogy. The USA is special in this way, that you can be most authentically American by internalizing and adhering to certain ideals. You can’t become more French by reading Sartre, more Irish by drinking whiskey, or more Korean by eating kimchee. In nearly all countries, the strongest claim to belonging is made by tracing family lineage. Only in America can you make an insuperable claim to belonging merely by believing the right things.

Though a popular view, the idea that the United States is special in this way is strongly disputed in academic circles. “American exceptionalism” is regarded as a naive worldview that has served primarily as a rationalization for imperialism, discrimination and arrogance. While I don’t agree with that critique, I have finally come to understand that the American experiment has always included genocide, and always will. The nature of pursuing ideals above all apparently includes the plowing of actual humans into the ground like so much fertilizer.

There’s no disputing that the establishment of this country by European settlers included the genocide of Native Americans. There’s no way of excusing such carnage; the best anyone can say is that the founding of the nation in blood was regrettable but unavoidable. As if one original sin weren’t enough, our country additionally built its economic strength on the backs of slavery, perhaps the most profitable genocide in history, one that continues to pay dividends to some privileged classes up to this very day.

This carnage can’t be defended. We can only promise to do better in the future. In looking ahead, we try to draw a through line to the past, saying that our nation was founded on the correct ideas, those of liberty and equality, freedom and justice. Although only a very few truly participated in the American ideal at the start, the course of bloody history has painfully expanded the benefits as we’ve expanded our understanding of common humanity. The most charitable view is that we’ve always had the right ideals, but the challenge has always been improving our implementation. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

The hope is, I suppose, that each successive genocide is less bloody than the last.

Fleeing Europeans established this country by killing Native Americans. Early Americans grew the country with the slavery of Africans. We are getting closer and closer to a country where our ideals are truly extended to African-Americans, along with previously disenfranchised and disadvantaged women and LBGT people, immigrants and religious adherents of all kinds and creeds. Life is getting better for everyone, on average. And though our conflicts may be impassioned, they are no longer openly murderous. Perhaps genocide is no longer part of the cycle of the American experiment.

But as life gets better for everyone on average, it gets worse for some in particular. Now it seems that many male Americans of European heritage, in losing their privilege, are suffering a kind of slow death. “Genocide” may be too dramatic a term, held too dear by those who have suffered the most from it. But we can still talk about death, we can see that the greatest increase in suicide rate in recent years is among uneducated white male Americans. Here is a class of people who will slowly lose everything they hold dear.

And who will miss it – when what they hold dear is so often tribalism, jingoism, racism, all manner of deplorable -isms – doesn’t such savagery deserve extinction? They deserve to be left behind, for they are malformed and often malicious, substandard and nearly subhuman … Never mind that these are the same judgments that “true” Americans have always made in the name of reforming this nation ever closer to the deathless ideals. Let’s ignore the echoes of of our bloody past, for this time we are so sure we are right.

That is the price of progress, we say, those of us who are on the winning side of the historical moment. Like every other set of Americans who believed that the evolution of our country requires regrettable-but-unavoidable bloodshed, we believe that this is the last forced extinction of a way of life. Once the deplorables are finally put in their place, surely we will have justice for all.

Is there an end to the American experiment? What would that look like? American ideals may outlive America. The institutions of statehood may only be a temporary infrastructure in the eternal pursuit of abstract ideals. For example, democracy outlived and evolved long beyond the historical city-state of Athens.

Stranger still would be an end involving expanded recognition of consciousness. There have long been a tiny minority of people who would extend consciousness and its attendant rights to certain animals, or even plants. If this notion ever becomes mainstream, what are the consequences to expanding American ideals to all conscious beings? More fantastically and yet more plausibly, what will happen when machines have processing capability such that their operations are indistinguishable from human consciousness? Our notions of liberty and equality, freedom and justice, even the pursuit of happiness, may continue to become increasingly abstract, until these ideals are no longer be tethered to any particular people, or to any people at all.

The repeated refrain in the American songbook is the collapse of the way of life of those who thought they controlled the music. Custer had his last stand. The South lost the Civil War, and really isn’t rising again. MLK Jr. is more alive than his assassins, Trumpism is the last gasp of a dying breed. Today we seem to be in yet another war for the soul of our nation. No matter who emerges as the victor, I doubt it will be the last.