Post #197: America the Beautiful

A Tribute on the Fourth of July (250 Years Later)

America! America!

God shed his grace on thee

Till selfish gain no longer stain

The banner of the free!

—From the third verse of the patriotic lyrics by Katherine Lee Bates, 1893 (originally “America: A Poem for July 4th”)

     When JFK visited my hometown after the Wall had just been built on the Eastern side (before my time), he famously declared himself a fellow Berliner. Sticklers for grammar heard him likening himself to a jelly doughnut, but nobody in the city took it that way; they adopted him for one of their own. (How many of the local sweets he found time to sample during his visit, history has not recorded.)

     One of the eventual consequences of his visit was the establishment of the school I would attend a generation later, when the Cold War was thawing, but when the American sector still existed in full bloom, soldiers on the streets and all (see no. 101). And we were proud of it too, we American Berliners, and no one more so than my classmates and I—almost to the point of being “insufferable little snobs,” as Orwell described his younger self, though along very different lines than those of a British public school. (On the German side there were plenty of teacher parents and such, post-1968, though with conservative family accents too, while on the American side the tone was robustly GI. It was a curious mix, but it worked tolerably well, except when it didn’t. Admission for the German kids was by lot: I got lucky.)

     In sixth grade, for the 25th anniversary of the school’s founding—named for the great man himself, of course—there was much replaying of well-rehearsed oratory, culminating in the jelly-doughnut scene. He looked an obvious hero to me, and I could not have imagined then that I might ever see him, or his country, in any different light. In that early spirit of innocence, which has its place even if it is bound to be lost eventually, let me return Kennedy’s tribute to Berlin (I mean Jack’s not Joe’s) and say, Ich bin ein Amerikaner.

     No sticky complications there, and the indefinite article makes the German sound, to my native ear at least, less a factual claim of citizenship than a profession of sympathy or even conditional allegiance, as in the original. Not for me the stark American recitations before the flag, or talk of renouncing and abjuring “absolutely and entirely” all foreign allegiances and fidelities such as the citizenship oath requires. But I will gladly declare myself the doughnut hole, as it were, thus both inextricably linked to the real thing, separate at the same time, and occasionally apart.

     One of the newly fashionable nationalist loudmouths in Germany has recently proclaimed that all West Germans who grew up on the benign side of the postwar occupational regime are in effect German-speaking Americans. I can’t say that this trumpeting matches how I see my erstwhile compatriots, if they can be called that, but on the island upon an island that was my little “friendship school” community, the proposition may be closer to the truth. We started speaking English in kindergarten, to true red-white-and-blue Army brats, and while it didn’t quite make us brothers and sisters, we became friends and cousins, so to speak.

     The threads soon got more tangled when I realized, in my early teens, that British history was also fascinating, and quite different in texture. Both my favorite American teachers were passionate students of the subject: the first (Mr. Halperin, thank you!) introduced me to it in ninth grade, the other had written his thesis on the Boer War and taught American History from the most remarkable textbook I ever encountered in school, a collection of myth-busting academic journal articles (in 11th grade!) arranged around key historical episodes—which yielded, among other things, a first clue that my idolized JFK was not quite what he appeared.*

     Mr. Pagaard was from San Diego and not lacking in patriotic feelings, but he gave me a memorable introduction to the great tradition of intrepid truth-telling in the new-world style. Only much later would I encounter the splendid old-world counterpart, the ideal of a worthy historian “holding the balance with a clear eye and a firm hand,” courtesy of Edward Gibbon (ch. 54 in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 5), a particularly dissatisfied undergraduate at my college in his day, as was Thomas Hobbes. But all these discoveries would come belatedly, not when I was still a maudlin malcontent in more or less the same environs, though centuries later, but when I had gone up to, and gone down from, and left the place behind for good.

     My favorite German teacher illustrated the peculiar school dynamic the other way around: he was our theater director, and we tackled both Brecht’s Dreigroschenoper and Goethe’s Faust, no less. But he had also studied at Chicago for a year and made us read Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom in its entirety for our intensive course in politics. (During the very weeks when we were covering “The German Question” in class, the Wall came down!)

     I also began noticing, over the years, that although Dungeons and Dragons, The Great Gatsby, and The Catcher in the Rye were all splendid reads in their way, the Brits at their finest were better writers. This a revelation I owed specifically to George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Joseph Conrad (in order of discovery), with G.V. Carey thrown in on Minding the Stop, that is to say, the arcane mysteries of English punctuation treated in the superior island style. From there to Magdalen College was still an unimaginable leap at the time, but a first breach had been made.

     When I found myself, marveling at the unexpected turn, in the three-year crucible of Oxford, the trial by fire and ice had the peculiar effect of calling both my German and my American sides once more into question. My proudly Atlantic accent receded and my vocal cords went decidedly native for a while (the effect reversed again later, to my regret), and I was now out of a satisfactory home thrice over: never unambiguously German owing to the complex confluence of factors described above; nor quite American, obviously; and then, while dyed in the full-blue deeply enough during those strange three years, never taking the color enough there either to have any chance of belonging, if anyone not to-the-island-born ever does. (Warming to England remains, in my doleful experience, a contradiction in terms.)

     At the next juncture, on the way to grad school, the very sense of not having a proper home anywhere made the U.S. appear particularly congenial again (not to mention the funding angle), as a place that had long welcomed energetic misfits and rebellious types. And to this day I cannot say that I ever had much trouble relating to Americans individually. On the contrary, the overwhelming sense I got in my dealings with them, throughout my life, was of their personal generosity, and this was much in evidence at graduate school, especially on the part of the many teachers and hospitable institutions that I got to spend time with.

     So I ended up living “stateside” for ten years, on and off (Los Angeles, Denver, “Inland Empire,” Bay Area, and New York, both the city and the upstate countryside). Only Gotham gave me any trouble, and this not because I found it so typically American, but more nearly for the opposite reason. I was charmed by the Moloch, as Europeans invariably are, but living there on a student budget was less enchanting, and my sympathies continued to lie further west.

     Nonetheless, when I escaped from NYU, driving a U-Haul, it was not back to California, but upwards and onwards to the Great North and Toronto the Good—or so I had encountered Canada on the page, since apart from some very rudimentary reading, I knew practically nothing of the country. (This at the tail end of the nineties, when a bit of the old Dominion was still visible.) Like many an American, I had never fully registered—though I knew about the grievances of the loyalists from my myth-debunking class—that the British colonies in North America did not all revolt, and that the Northerners built a rival society that compares not unfavorably with what their more unruly neighbors have bequeathed to us. In the Canadian West, the law arrived first, in the shape of the Mounties, and unlike the freewheeling heirs to the Declaration of Independence, the Canucks have traditionally prized peace, order, and good government over more restive qualities. If the country also proved a repository for history’s defeated parties (as my University of Toronto mentor likes to say), then at least they are beautiful losers, as Leonard Cohen rhapsodized—a concept that Americans seem to have trouble grasping, much to their loss (see no. 21).

     So I happened to be in Toronto, on the last stretch of writing my dissertation, on a day when workers were wreaking havoc on the roof of my beloved little apartment building on Dalton Street in the Annex (thank you Keith!), when the Twin Towers were brought down in the place I had left only two years earlier. The morning after, the editors at Le Monde declared themselves, and all of us stunned sympathizers, Americans in spirit, and I agreed with them. Perhaps something similar could be said today in a more joyful tone, inasmuch as we have all imbibed, via the pen of Thomas Jefferson, the notion of being “endowed with an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

     Granted, it was little more than a Lockean trope at the time, but Jefferson’s thrilling substitution of happiness for property gave the document a ring it would not otherwise have had. The pursuit: now there’s something to linger over, since it has too often been treated as if it conferred any right to the thing itself—or perhaps even an obligation, as in the requisite answer, among Americans, to the ubiquitous question how one is doing. Nor does being free necessarily imply a realistic chance of getting things right: what freedom we truly have in our inner deliberations continues to be a riddle whose solution eludes me (no. 30). To put it bluntly, liberty can mean being free to fail, as well as to succeed, or even, in extreme cases, having just enough of the proverbial rope to hang oneself with, alongside cheerier possibilities. Not for nothing did the old Christians speak of a vale of tears, and of the valley of the shadow of death. The luminaries of the 18th century, though free-thinking in their religion, were still wise to this recalcitrant and tragic dimension of life, and the fatal conceit that managing the welfare of a population, let alone their happiness, might be part of a government’s remit, was still far from their minds.

     What follows after the Declaration’s rousing introductory paragraphs tends to receive less attention and rarely has as edifying an effect upon the modern reader. Not only are the omissions obvious and the glossings-over glaring, but not everyone will be pleased to encounter “the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” The charges against the ostensible tyrant-king across the sea must be understood in much the same way, as hyperbole and special pleading, not incontestable historical veracity.

     But let us not quibble unduly today, and stick to the broad brush. It remains a very fine and most timely sentiment that when, in the course of human events, peoples and countries are variously agitated to contention, claiming their separate and equal station among the powers of the earth, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should give a proper account of themselves. Hear, hear! Whether the enumerated truths that follow are really so self-evident; what part any Creator had and has in our earthly dealings; where the lines of equality really run; whether experience has indeed shown, as alleged, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed; and of course, on the political issues of the day, whether the colonists were in fact facing such a long and repeated history of abuses and usurpations as to threaten them with an absolute despotism, or word-for-word, “works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages”—all this remains eminently debatable and can only be raised here in passing. Let facts be submitted, indeed, to a candid world…

     (Nitpickers may be pleased to note that the Fischer Weltalmanach, long the prime resource in German for country data in paperback format, recorded from its 1989 edition on—in the US entry’s section on the country’s independence—that nothing of great consequence happened, in truth, on that celebrated day. The final version of the famous text was approved and a date was affixed, true, but the fateful decision itself had already been taken two days earlier (which is why John Adams believed July 2nd to be the obvious date to commemorate), and the proclamation to the people was not made until July 8th. (Nor did the custom of formally marking the occasion get widely established until after many of the founders had already passed away.) And this slightly pedantic correction of the historical record was submitted to the publisher—you guessed it—by one over-eager sixteen-year-old high school student in Berlin, writing under the urgent impression of a debunking academic article he had just covered in his American history class. Who says that school does not give us skills for life?)

     On such a day as this, factoids cannot be the main thing, however, nor the finer points of myth-making that go into self-celebration. One may concede to the critic that we have before us a people disposed to celebrating themselves at such a pitch—under the current dispensation especially—that one might well hesitate before adding anything to the already deafening self-applause. But let such qualms be set aside for the day, and let us see only what is best about America, even if doing so will require more than a little squinting. It would be the same with similar occasions elsewhere: we celebrate the beau ideal, never the sordid realities, or the party would be spoiled anywhere. So let us give the Americans their due today, or a little more, even if they have a less than endearing habit of helping themselves to much more as if it were a matter of manifest destiny.

     We who know nothing of such higher manifestations, but have enjoyed the bounty of this remarkable land and its people, join the celebration today not as its champions, nor as judges, but as friends of the United States. And in that spirit we say, Thank you, America, for all that you have done right, and blessings on your further paths through history.

*Even at almost forty years’ distance, I remember the vivid account, in one of the textbook articles, of JFK “swearing like a sailor” right in the Oval Office, at a time when such blatant obscenity was still shocking. What he was up to in more secluded corners was kept discreetly out of the picture, or it would not have made for publishable classroom material. For some passing reflections on the subterranean aspects of the Kennedy complex, see my notes to the text I posted here last week, no. 148.

(Dedicated to Stephen Pagaard)

PS: Whether the Articles of Confederation that governed the newly independent Americans for the first dozen years already constituted a republic is an interesting, though largely academic question. The republican project proper was formulated in the Federalist Papers, then given shape in what we know as The Constitution. It tends to get overlooked today, though it was a central feature of the design, that the federalist founders took pains to distance themselves explicitly from democracy, which they took to be majority tyranny and historically discredited. To what extent this second founding was vitiated when the original model of the mixed constitution was compromised by the direct election of senators (instead of selection by state legislatures), by the emasculation of the electoral college, and by the advent of mass democracy more generally, to say nothing of the corruptions that must accompany super-power sway with an imperial presidency at its head, is yet another question that can only be raised, not answered here.