My friend Nick has his obssession, not a slight one, but a full hard-on obsession with Craig Ferguson. Ferguson is this Scottish comic and writer who does the late night tv thing and has taken out American citizenship and all that. Nick sometime ago sent me this really intriguing clip of Craig Ferguson and my alarm clock (Stephen Fry) discussing their mutual love of America.
Nick later flushed out this opinion in his e-mail to me about how America is a land of adventurers and Europe lands of settlers and this is what makes America such a fascination, that it is rooted in adventure.
Let me then being by saying I hate America. Let me being again by saying I love America.
This polarity of thought and emotion towards America, informs, colours, biases my outlook on the American state and its people. This seeming incongruity of feeling is the foundation of my rationale on America.
You should know that my favourite band is still an American one. The books that most influenced and informed me growing up, that really fostered my love of literature were mainly American books, American stories and American thoughts. My favourite movies are American movies. To this day the best cinema in the world mainly comes from American hands or at least hands that get washed and shaped in America to some extent. The main parts of my culture growing up were unabashedly American - fast food, consumerism, saturday morning cartoons. The best parts of my childhood were American, - Sesame Street, cartoons, sugar with a side of cereal.
All this I know. and perhaps from some resentment I began as I got older to grit my teeth at America. Of all I had been presented and loved about America, most of it was false, a cover-up, deflections. The band I loved mad a mockery of the American dream and values. The cartoons I adored were either made for kids to buy toys or to promote ideas of violence and American philosophy, specifically Reaganism to young minds. Cereals with sugar we know are like giving kids a bowl of cigarettes, and fast food, well you might as well just have a cigarette.
America was two-faced. Evil.
Then I began to get interested in politics and then America became even more insidious. The foreign policy of the "Empire" was startling. When one says America is a land of adventurits it may be so, but it is often an adventure at the expense of other races, tribes, lands and nations.
It is easy to love America and it is easy to hateAmerica and for the same reasons. The promise of America, the idea of America is perhaps one the most fascinating ideas that ever came about. A revolt for freedom from taxes, from God, from anything but free association. This is the grandest statement of liberty ever concocted. The seeds of this thought come from England but are grown in the Americas and in particular the United States of. The very idea of individual liberty is so threatening and enticing that it still serves as a beacon for the sick, poor, hungry and tired of the world.
The experiment however failed.
America is not free. It has not been free for some time. Granted the policies and spirit are still in place for success under the original principles, but often one needs a certain net worth or claim to be able to exercise the original dream of America. The founding fathers of the United States were mainly atheists or deists, not believers in the predominant Christian thought of the day. How has that evolved in America? If a congressman so much as hints towards agnoticism, they no longer publicly qualify to lead people. God has become such an ingrained thought of the American psyche, that the very notion of American freedom is laughable.
In that clip with Ferguson and Fry, Fry mentions how with exception to the Natives and Blacks, people who chose to come to America did just that, they chose. And this he argues makes it so great, that they one day decided in favour of adventure, decided to leave what they had while others said they were content to settle. The analogy here is misleading. Yes people came to America once because of that dream to adventure. Many now come because the American adventure has forced them from their lives and lands to seek a place for refuge which ironically is the very place that has displaced them. From the drug wars of Central America and the American meddle within it, the puppet governments of Central and South America, the puppet governments of the middle east and so forth, the American state has displaced so many people, they they've become what the British were once when their Empire began to venture outwards. The American people have become settlers. In perhaps less of the way since migration in America is still part of its great story whereas migration within the UK was never really as much of an appeal.
The same advenutre is happening in Europe however. After their disastrous attempts at colonization, immigrants have begun to flood Europe. The displaced souls of the world are gritting their teeth and finding a place to call home within the places that tore their homelands apart. Sure they are choosing to be there (and in Canada as well, especially in the major cities of this country). They are changing the very fabric of the societies that once changed the very fabric of theirs. This is the great adventure, the migration of cultures and the trumping of cultures by either sheer number or homeland legislations.
Once the British were adventurists. They set sail to conquer the world, piece by piece, human heart by human heart, then settled for their lot. America is on the brink of this same collapse. The adventure is no longer worthy of dying for. Soon they will settle and the adventure will pass to another place and nation, perhaps the Chinese, perhaps the Indians, anywhere there are numbers, there are consumers and when one place becomes too crowded, the people in that place want more space to be free. They will venture out to conquer adn re-align once more.
The advenutre itself isn't dead. Nor are the adventurists dead. They just look different now. Even your adventure Nick, outside tis country to the one you are in is similar. It is the transfer of thought and the desire to be free. Wanderlust.
America still has that lust to wander, only they do it through grenades and guns, they know no other way. The promise of that land is dying. Fry said that he can't understand how American cannot still be a land of optimists. Fry only has to look at his own National history to see how optimism, arrogance and cheek can easily over time mold itself into weariness, embarassment and a long sigh.
America was once the greatest experiment in the world, the greatest show on earth.
We will draw the curtain soon.
(yes I have a Stephen Fry alarm clock. That just may be the most important part of this piece)
What I was particularly taken with in the Fry clip was the vague suggestion that there may be a genetics to it: that the genetic stock of America was that of adventurers (if there is an adventurous gene), while the genetic stock of Europe was that of settlers.
ReplyDeleteHa! And I guess, by extension, the genetic stock of Canada would be that of fence-sitters as we were so intrepid as to come to our snowy north, but we weren't intrepid enough to disown our european roots as the yanks did.
Anyway, so long as the myth of the "American Dream" persists, America may still be attracting adventurous souls who subscribe to this perhaps-outdated ideal.
Of course, being of adventurous stock can have its downsides, as you mention with Americans being adventurous these days in the conquest of foreign lands, under the banner of freedom. For good or ill, it speaks of a colonizing mindset.
But I also think you're right that America may now have passed her prime. The adventure has gone out of the descendants of those intrepid founding fathers. We now see a nation, the lion's share of whom seem to fear roaming beyond their borders: both physically, as we can see in the alarming number of Americans who do not currently and have never possessed a passport, as well as mentally, as we see in a general disinterest in/ignorance toward the world beyond The States.
And I'm not saying this international ignorance is a unique thing. I see it in my Japanese kids all the time. Some are so oblivious to the rest of the world that not only can they not locate America on a map, they can't even place Japan. The difference, however, is that Japan is neither playing a significant role on the political world stage, nor are they trying to profess the wonderful cultural acceptance of their society.
Oh and your comment on how America started as a means of escaping the ponderous, overpowering presence of the Church, and yet it has evolved into the NeoChristian Holy Land got my gears going. Were you to compare the two, I imagine you would find that there are FAR MORE individuals, per capita, who self-identify as "Christian" in the States than in the UK. And, should you look into it further, you'd likely find that the Yanks are, likely, far more rabid about their religion than the Brits.
And what the devil is a Stephen Fry alarm clock? When you made that comment I assumed you were referring to some philosophical thing: like Stephen Fry being your barometer for when the world has gone to the dogs.