I love this country and I can’t stand George W. Bush, and both those feelings are as American as apple pie. But it’s almost the Fourth of July, which means it’s time for the mindless, gnat-like buzzing of conservatives calling opponents of Bush’s disastrous war “traitors” or “America haters.” Never mind that millions and millions of Americans oppose the war in Iraq because they see Bush’s policies as damaging to America, its future and its ideals.
For many conservatives, loving your country seems to be all about sharing a robotic submission to government foreign policy b.s. Raise the flag, pound your chest, have faith in the old national myths and believe that anyone with another view of the nation is probably dangerous. It’s beyond me how that kind of lemming-think can be construed as loving America — or, for that matter, as American.
Let me suggest another way to love the US. It’s all about celebrating our heritage of independent thought, and our nation’s underlying, wild, democratic thrust. It’s about our exhilarating popular culture and our role as a haven for other countries’ renegades; our vulgar expansiveness and our astonishing cultural variety.
So, for the third time in CL’s 19-year history, here’s a list of some great things about America. Think of it as a way to reclaim the flag from the jingoist screamers — and to help us remember that it belongs to all of us.
20. Backyard barbecues: get together with old and new friends, grill some dogs — burn a few, drop a few, eat ’em anyway.
19. America’s great college towns like Chapel Hill, Ann Arbor, Amherst, Madison, Lexington, Bellingham, Ithaca, Northampton, Berkeley, Oxford and lots of others: Places where the sense of open-mindedness and possibility is palpable.
18. The Social Gospel: Religion has never been a progressive social force in Europe the way it has often been here.
17. Apple computers.
16. The beauty of Western landscapes, particularly the sweeping desert vistas of the Southwest and the sight of the Rockies rising up out of the plains as you head west.
15. The brave women who defied some of our deepest taboos and fought ferociously for, and won, the right to vote. In the 1970s, their descendants would launch the wrenching, liberating dialogues of women’s groups that revitalized feminism and changed the country for the better.
14. The Vietnam War Memorial, for its egalitarianism, the ambience of loss and the way it ennobles war deaths without glorifying the politicians who caused them.
13. Independent bookstores.
12. All-American Athlete Heroes: Babe Ruth, Shaq, Muhammad Ali, Babe Didrikson Zacharias, Joe Namath, Reggie Jackson, Mia Hamm, Michael Jordan, Serena Williams, Jack Nicklaus, Jack Dempsey, Roger Clemens, Billie Jean King, Mickey Mantle, Joe Montana, Tiger Woods, Johnny Unitas, Wilt Chamberlain, etc.
11. Glorious skyscrapers from the 1930s, particularly the Empire State and Chrysler buildings in New York.
10. Popular design of the late-1950s and early-1960s — cars, radios, refrigerators and even coffee tables that all looked like variations on rockets, full of energy and tacky exuberance.
9. American cranks and quirky thinkers with transformative visions: Henry Thoreau, Margaret Sanger, Martin Luther King Jr., Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Cady Staton, Thomas Jefferson, Jack Kerouac, Gertrude Stein, Thomas Edison, Dorothy Day, Sam Phillips, Thomas Dorsey, Dorothy Parker, Hunter S. Thompson, Josephine Baker, Lenny Bruce.
8. The richness of speech and the subtle variations in accents as you cross from state to state, region to region, sometimes from town to town.
7. New Orleans. Beyond the current post-Katrina politics, this tacky, muggy and bug-ridden city is a national treasure, jam-packed with entrancing music, extraordinary food, oddly singular architecture and great writers. Our oldest living example of real cultural pluralism.
6. Hollywood and American movies, which for a century have been a kind of surrogate imagination for the whole world.
5. The wide variety of our gorgeous coastlines: Maine’s rocky terrain, the Outer Banks, southern sea islands, Florida’s sugary Gulf Coast, Malibu and the rugged beauty of Big Sur.
4. American food: Fried chicken, cheeseburgers, corn on the cob, North Carolina barbecue, Philly cheesesteaks, Chicago hotdogs, New York pizza, Tabasco sauce, gumbo, peanut butter, grits, Wisconsin cheese curds, candied yams and, yes, sugary, fizzy colas.
3. Indigenous American music. All of it: jazz, country, rock & roll, R&B, hip-hop, folk, pop, gospel, bluegrass, zydeco and blues. Is this stuff in our bones, or what?
2. Our hybrid nature. Our country, our culture and most of our people are mutts, and that’s great. Everything we produce, including our music, art and cuisine, is a mix of something with something else — some British here, some Polish there, mix it with some Irish, Italian, Haitian, French, Chinese or American Indian, add a dash of Vietnamese and Greek, and voila — that’s all-American.
1. The Bill of Rights. The legal basis of our freedoms, and our main protection from the likes of authoritarian dimwits like Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzalez.
This article appears in Jun 28 – Jul 4, 2006.
