America the Beautiful?

A belated July 4^th blog entry, on a fairly esoteric topic. I’ve noticed some competing theories on what America and Americans are all about. 

 Slacker.  In the movie “Stripes”, the platoon has to pull an all-nighter to pass parade inspection, and the cramming isn’t going too well.  Winger (Bill Murray) finally whips the team into shape with an inspiring speech invoking “Old Yeller”, and claiming that Americans are basically slackers who represent the worst of every nation, rejected, ostracized and cast out by everyone else, and combined to form our own country of rebellious losers.  The rejuvenated and inspired platoon succeeds in impressing the general and gets assigned to the EM-50 project.  Woohoo!

            This “theory” finds itself repeated over and over again, countless times in countless movies, in American cinema, with the good guys starting out as hopeless losers who somehow manage to get their act together at the 11^th hour and pull off a dramatic victory – in such varied contexts as “Miracle on Ice” (the story of the 1980 US hockey team in Lake Placid), “The Dirty Dozen”, and “The Bad News Bears”.  “Stripes” was merely the film which finally distilled this theory, which was implicit in all those other stories, into an articulated theory and shoved it down our throats. 

 Elite.  The science fiction writer Robert Heinlein would beg to differ.  His view was that the immigrants who came to the US from Europe – with the obvious exception of the slaves – were the cream of the crop, the ambitious go-getters with the balls and courage to take the risks of settling in a new world which had no guarantees but plenty of opportunity.  The losers are the lazy idiots who stayed back in the mother country.  It’s certainly a more appealing view than the slacker view. 

 Southern.  (vs. Northern, aka Yankee).  I recently read The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War, another one of these “the South was right!” deals.  To hear this talk, every male from south of the Mason-Dixon line is a chivalrous gentleman, and every male north of that line is an arrogant, deceitful slimebag.  What an interesting theory: the South has a monopoly on virtue, the North on vice.  Complete and utter bullshit.  While New Jersey may have no shortage of northern assholes, your average tractor pull or Klan rally will attract an equal amount of white trash.  Neither side of the Mason-Dixon line has a monopoly on anything. 

  The other funny thing is how often Southerners appear to describe themselves as true Americans.  It's as if, having been denied the CSA, they then decided that, "well, if I'm stuck with these damn Yankees, I'll at least claim that I'm a better American than they are."  The truth is...well, in the next paragraph.

 Eclectic.  Probably the most appropriate.  We’ve got blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Midwesterners, rednecks (from all parts of the country, not just the South), guidos, effete wine-loving yuppies, “What Would Wellstone Do?” liberals, Flying Monkeys, slackers, hard chargers, bums, crack addicts, crooks, saints, Ned Flanders, etc.  And the CSA types too - who are no more, but no less, American than anyone else.  Anyone who looks at the entire picture has to come away from the whole thing realizing that the #1 element which defines “America” is diversity and heterogeneity.  We’re all different.  We are mutts (as Murray indicated) but that doesn’t mean we’re necessarily slackers.  Gordon Gekko is no more – or less – American than Zonker Harris, Andrew Dice Clay, George Washington, or Pauly Shore.