America the Weird
I came of age in the 60’s. Meaning, I didn’t trust government. Johnson lied about the Gulf of Tonkin, Nixon lied about pretty much everything, the FBI murdered the Black Panthers, legitimate governments were overthrown by the CIA, all of this playing out while me and my hippie cronies were smoking dope, being tear gassed and growing increasingly paranoid. In the 70’s, after McGovern was annihilated by the Nixon win, followed shortly by Watergate, I gave up on politics and moved to a ramshackle farm in Northern Wisconsin with some fellow dropouts, only to discover the Posse Comitatus were our fun and scary neighbors. You can run but you cannot hide.
Fast forward 50 years. I find myself run to ground on the tail end of a skinny ass island at the edge of the American continent. My boat is moored down at the bulkhead and the furthest I’m going these days isn’t far at all, not with the Pacific Ocean as my moat and two oars for propulsion. I’m here in an America I no longer recognize. Maybe I never have. I taught history to 8th graders for a brief time back in my more radical daze so trust me, I’m not one of those people with illusions about some of our darker past. But the older I get, the more I realize that America, despite its sins and its flaws, is a grand experiment, a rowdy wild place where individuals can thrive, where the outliers can become success stories, where non-conformity is tolerated and sometimes even heralded.
It has room for transgenders, neo-Nazis, punk artists, heavy metal musicians, the avant-garde, tattoos, skateboards, the KKK, poets, hedge fund managers, Fox News, illegal immigrants, you name it you can probably find a mailbox for it here. Maybe it was just complacency, possibly old age, but I had sort of made my peace with America. I could accept the mixture of the good with the bad, the greedy with the philanthropic, the cynical politicians with the working stiff. We could find cures for AIDS in Africa and then fight a war in Iraq over weapons of mass destruction that we knew didn’t exist. We could shoot unarmed black men in our cities and still try to lift people out of poverty. It wasn’t black and white, good or bad, right or left. It was America, kind of crazy, fairly whacked, ready and eager to try something new and different, ready to retreat to the bunkers and close off the borders. It was evangelicals and Jonestown, Elon Musk on acid, Donald Trump grabbing genitalia, American Idol and Wheel of Fortune, it was John Glenn in space and Ollie North in Nicaragua, it was Dirty Harry and the Peace Corps, throw in the Hubble Telescope and bunker busting bombs, Hiroshima and the Panama Canal, internment camps and children’s hospitals. We’re the bully of the world and the culture most emulated. Go figure.
We may not be the greatest country in the world, that shining ‘city on the hill’, not even the nation that protects its most vulnerable … but we are the most experimental, the most daring, the craziest bunch of yahoos on the planet, for better and often times for worse. We did, after all, elect Donald J. Trump as our Leader. It’s been a long strange trip. And I would claim for the record, maybe these times aren’t really much stranger than they’ve always been.
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Tags: America the Melted Pot, Revisionist History
Well, that is an interesting perspective. It made me think about the fact that the country has been settled by religious and political refugees, criminals and malcontents pretty much since Jamestown in 1607. Yee ha!
We’re going to get a dose of reality in a week. I’m mostly expecting a backlash to our Naked Emperor, but … half the country likes the guy. Half my neighbors like the guy. I figure he makes their lives more interesting. Ours too, like it or not, and if America likes one thing, it’s reality TV. When he sets up the Trump Network, hopefully in two years after he’s left the Oval, get ready for ratings like Fox can only dream about.