The End of the American Honeymoon

A week or so ago, when he was interviewed on several American media outlets, such as Larry King, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stated implicitly and explicitly that he believed that the period of the American Empire was at an end. For a demagogue and false populist like Ahmadinejad, who is trying to please his electorate by taking a slice out of America’s pride and security, I don’t know exactly what to make out of his proposition. Does he believe that America is going to lose all influence in the world, in which case the second-tier states and nations would step in to fill our regional role? Or was he simply trying to rub our noses in our own misfortunes due to our greed and avarice? Is this like when he constantly jabs us in the ribs for our troubles in Iraq and Afghanistan, basically saying to the world, “See? They can’t do everything that they claim they can do.” It’s probably a combination of all of the above. Now, God forbid that I would agree wholesale with Ahmadinejad, a thoroughly disreputable Holocaust denier, religious fanatic and possible sponsor of Hizbullah and other miltant groups in the Middle East, but I do introduce my note with his views as a sort of segway for my own beliefs on the future of America. In one narrow respect, I would tentatively agree with the unbalanced, Iranian: America is mortal. If you hit us hard enough, we will bleed. I believe furthermore that the sky is not the limit, we do not have manifest destiny from God because of the “nobleness” of our institutions, and we cannot go on spiraling upwards towards infinite prosperity. Let’s face it, America’s honeymoon is long over.

What do I mean by “honeymoon”? I mean that great immigrant urge and ideal from the 19th century that hard work, high moral standing and a wing and a prayer would take you all the way to the top. It was certainly true for America during most of that century and most of the twentieth even, but I think we’re witnessing the end of it at the beginning of the 21st. When I think of this immigrant ideal, I tend to have this image come to mind of wagon trains of immigrants surging towards the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevadas, their tools ready to tame the wilderness and their voices raised in a rousing chorus of “who gives a damn, we’re on our way!.” OK, so that is the last part was from “Paint Your Wagon,” but you get the idea. I have even seen their legacy first-hand on my trips out west. In the southwest corner of Colorado, in the San Juan mountains, there are holes in the mountains everywhere above tree line. These are the hard-rock mines that the miners desperately created by hand that go hundreds of feet into the spine of the Rockies. These miners often hailed from towns that were built above 10,000 feet, where the temperature on a sunny day in July rarely exceeds 60 degrees. One such town had a post office, a theater and a bowling alley at its height in the 1880s. One can either admire their ingenuity and persistence or you can pity their arrogance and idiocy in the face of Nature’s might. I tend to swing between the two poles.

I see a lot of the immigrant spirit in the conservatives of America today. They are religious, optimistic in the face of daunting evidence, opportunistic, stubborn, down-to-earth. They are also inclusive of outsiders only to a point, have no qualms about “striking it rich” at the expense of others, and are voraciously individualistic. These are generalizations, but they are generalizations with a grounding in some fact, I believe. There is something so deliciously cavalier and charismatic about the Republican Party’s optimism and sureness, I must admit. It would be charming, if it weren’t becoming so dangerously out-of-touch. Conservatives tend to get so angry by what they see as the “Europeanization” (am I coining a cultural term here?) of America, and the “frenchifying” and softening of American pioneers into lazy elites and intellectuals. What I really think underlies these stereotypes is a fear and a refusal to believe that the America of today is not quite the same America of the Founding Fathers or of even a century ago. We have run out of free land to exploit without harming ourselves or our natural resources in the process. American laissez-faire policies (for those of you despise French words so much, it means “let it go,” or “let it do it’s thing”) have exposed their ugly side, not once, but several times, in the last one hundred years, and most times, government intervention was a God-send. Americans are no longer (for the most part) fleeing religious persecution and now have found plenty of things to keep them happy and fulfilled besides organized religion. I may be unfairly called a turncoat for this one especially, but America can no longer win wars by tweaking out our armed forces with the latest gadgets and drones or by the “righteousness” of our cause or because “God is on our side.” We have experienced that the idea of the uneducated, down-to-earth man rising through the ranks to the highest positions of power is not always such a rosy American myth. Not everyman on the street should become a leader, and sometimes you need elite “intellectuals” to run elite “intellectual” enterprises, like businesses and whole countries. Lastly, and I state this one with some sincere sadness, the institutions of the American farm and small business are in serious jeopardy, oddly enough because of the very competitive, globalizing tendencies of American business which are so very familiar to the Republican Party platform. We are largely no longer a resourceful, do-it-yourself society of immigrants living on a “Main Street,” insuring that our childrens’ tomorrows will be better than our yesterdays simply because they’re “good, hard-working people.” Like it or not, America now has more in common with all the opulent, decaying empires of the past than with the robust, thriving democracy which we started out as. We need to accept the changes and reinvent ourselves without losing the better angels of our American character.

I think that two of the greatest assets which we can pull out from our old pioneer tool belt are our diversity and our adaptability. At a time when we’re so concerned about how people are getting into this country, perhaps we would do well to ask ourselves what these people can contribute to the American experience. Sometimes, when a group is bogged down in its own quagmire, the best solution is for an outsider to offer his/her perspective. American history is replete with examples of emigrant populations offering their two cents worth on the problems that this country has faced throughout its history. Definitely related is the idea of the individualistic, free-wheelin’, free-thinkin’ American inventor. Just as the American pioneers viewed a pristine valley in the San Juan Mountains of southwest Colorado during the 1870s and envisioned a town called “Tomboy” at the very edges of what is humanly possible, so can someone today convert that same old attitude to a healthier direction by taking a fresh and optimistic attitude to the economic, demographic, financial, societal and political problems which we face today. I like to believe that even though America has changed, and not always for the best, we still have a common cultural heritage to draw from to go forward in the future. After all, the immigrant spirit transformed the spot which I am sitting on in southwestern Michigan from a sandy wilderness into the comfortable apartment and town that I know today. Being a heady pioneer doesn’t have to be all bad.

Do I believe that America is going to turn into a nation of decadent and lazy couch potatoes, more intent on what’s on their iPods and reality shows than the suffering that’s going in their own inner cities? Not exactly, no. I have more faith in us than that. Do I believe that there is nothing good in cherishing the tenets of the past and that all conservatives are ostriches with their heads stuck in the ground? As I said, that was a generalization on my part. But I do firmly believe that America has changed significantly from its youth, and that there are those whose refusal to adapt to those changes who may be holding the rest of us back. The old idea of “expansive horizons” in every sense of the image is gone. We have run out of breathing room in virtually every aspect of American life. If America is to have hope and room to grow, it will have to come through with some ingenuity and painful compromises. I certainly hope that we’re up to the challenge.