In a month and a half, I should be back in the United States. I have a lot of mixed feelings when I think about the United States. Chuck Klosterman wrote that he once sent out a mass email asking about patriotism:
I gave everyone two potential options for a hypothetical blind date and asked them to pick who they'd prefer. The only things they knew about the first candidate was that he or she was attractive and successful. The only things they knew about the second candidate was that he or she was attractive, successful, and 'extremely patriotic.' No other details were provided or could be ascertained.
He continues writing, "Just about everyone immediately responded by selecting the first individual. They viewed patriotism as a downside. I wasn't too surprised; in fact, I was mostly just amused by how everyone seemed to think extremely patriotic people weren't just undateable, but totally fucking insane. One of them wrote that the quality of 'patriotism' was on par with 'regularly listening to Cat Stevens' and 'loves Robin Williams movies.'"
I have an uncle who likes to remind me that the United States is the best country in the world. Generally it seems like he makes this claim on the basis of wealth and opportunity. Of course, we don't think a person is a good person simply because of wealth. If we did, we'd think highly of Kenneth Lay (of Enron infamy) or your average drug kingpin. It is not, quite frankly, all about the Benjamins and even if it were, Luxembourg has the highest GDP per capita in the world. To me the United States just seems like spoiled eleven year old -- full of energy, possessing money without understanding responsibility, culturally unrefined, and burning ants with a magnifying glass without any semblance of a good reason. Most parents will admit, however, that they love their eleven year olds even if they periodically having the flashing desire to sell them into slavery and move to the Bahamas.
However, it would be dishonest to fall into the rhetoric of those who cannot recognize the civic virtues of United States. It would be wrong to lose hope that the United States will grow up and wrong not to work towards forming, as the preamble of the US Constitution says, a more perfect union. One should not fall into silly optimism, the steady diet of campaign speeches, but stubbornly refuse to give up, to be lazy, to confuse pecuniary gain with human flourishing. Often I may sound like an exasperated parent when I talk about the United States, yet it is hard to witness silly antics and not occasionally smile. I was reminded of that by Barbara Hamby's poem "Ode to American English."
Ode to American English
I was missing English one day, American, really,
with its pill-popping Hungarian goulash of everything
from Anglo-Saxon to Zulu, because British English
is not the same, if the paperback dictionary
I bought at Brentano's on the Avenue de l'Opéra
is any indication, too cultured by half. Oh, the English
know their dahlias, but what about doowop, donuts,
Dick Tracy, Tricky Dick? With their elegant Oxfordian
accents, how could they understand my yearning for the hotrod,
hotdog, hot flash vocabulary of the U. S. of A.,
the fragmented fandango of Dagwood's everyday flattening
of Mr. Beasley on the sidewalk, fetuses floating
on billboards, drive-by monster hip-hop stereos shaking
the windows of my dining room like a 7.5 earthquake,
Ebonics, Spanglish, "you know" used as comma and period,
the inability of 90% of the population to get the present perfect:
I have went, I have saw, I have tooken Jesus into my heart,
the battle cry of the Bible Belt, but no one uses
the King James anymore, only plain-speak versions,
in which Jesus, raising Lazarus from the dead, says,
"Dude, wake up," and the L-man bolts up like a B-movie
mummy. "Whoa, I was toasted." Yes, ma'am
I miss the mongrel plentitude of American English, its fall-guy,
rat-terrier, dog-pound neologisms, the bomb of it all,
the rushing River Jordan backwoods mutability of it, the low-rider,
boom-box cruise of it, from New Joisey to Ha-wah-ya
with its sly dog, malasada-scarfing beach blanket lingo
to the ubiquitous Valley Girl's
like-like stuttering,
shopaholic rant. I miss its quotidian beauty, its querulous
back-biting indignation, its preening rotgut
flag-waving cowardice.
Suffering Succotash, sputters
Sylvester the Cat;
sine die, say the pork-bellied legislators
of the swamps and plains. I miss all those guys, their Tweety-bird
resilience, their Doris Day optimism, the candid unguent
of utter happiness on every channel, the midnight televangelist
euphoric stew, the junk mail, voice mail vernacular.
On every
boulevard and
rue I miss the Tarzan cry of Johnny
Weismueller, Johnny Cash, Johnny B. Goode,
and all the smart-talking, gum-snapping hard-girl dialogue,
finger-popping x-rated street talk, sports babble,
Cheetoes, Cheerios, chili dog diatribes. Yeah, I miss them all,
sitting here on my sidewalk throne sipping champagne
verses lined up like hearses, metaphors juking, nouns zipping
in my head like Corvettes on Dexedrine, French verbs
slitting my throat, yearning for James Dean to jump my curb.
Bob Dylan once said, "I like America, just as everybody else does. I love America, I gotta say that. But America will be judged." I could say the same, but just the same, I'm looking forward to being back in the U. S. of A.
