Auld Lang Syne for the (belated) 4th of July

I’ve been fiddling with this thought all month, and actually drafted most of this before the 4th of July – that seeming an appropriate date for overall thoughts on the past and future of the country. But I don’t know… it never came together. The 4th in reality was sort of a forced holiday for the sentiment anyway. New Years Eve, with its mix of reflection and nostalgia and hope would’ve been better. This is a change year we keep hearing, as though change exists in a vacuum and is confined only to public policies of the past seven years. Bush is bad, so change is good. The last months of political coverage have seen so much of both: so much potential for a future legacy; so much Hope for Change, and so neatly juxtaposed with a loss of Things That Have Been.

Somehow that thought mixed in my mind with a pet peeve of mine regarding expressions of patriotism: the focus on opportunity. As in, “I love my country because of the opportunities I have had” or “Only in America could someone who started at x end up at y.” But I’ll get back to that.

So, ok… change.

We (and I don’t quite know if by “we” I mean Americans or humans) embrace the things we think we can count on to last, and never get over it when they don’t. I live in a city still bitter by the loss of the Colts almost a quarter century ago. One of the promotions last month at Camden Yards was an Orioles T-shirt with the number 34 on the back just below the name Hagy. The most loved athlete in the city’s history is a guy known less for performance than he is for simply being there every game, every season for about 20% of a person’s average life expectancy. People here mourn when restaurants close. And that’s easy for anyone to relate to: we deal in everyday life with death, divorce, career-hopping and geographic transience. There’s a national ethic of upward mobility, damn the roots you leave behind. Even if you don’t want that life – it happens. In the last five years, I’ve moved five times, lived in five different states, and worked in four different organizations. So at least as much as anyone else, I hold onto the things that seem familiar, and I strive to be wonderfully predictable in the name of stability.

Maybe that’s one thing I don’t like about the American West. They don’t seem to care if they put themselves in a larger context. The uninterrupted miles of desert and the shear starkness of the landscape appeals to people who seek new beginnings, seek… something. That’s how it was when I lived in Albuquerque. My friend used to tell me how much he loved driving halfway up the Sandias and looking down at the city below; he claimed it gave him perspective. I hated it. Beyond the scattered (and sprawling) lights of the city was nothingness. That isn’t comfort, it’s isolation. It’s a complete removal of the individual from the community – or even the context of time and place. What was it the old quote? “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country?” Horace Greeley, I believe. Problem is that the people who followed the command didn’t “grow up” with the country, but continued to seek newness, and in my mind, rootlessness.

I don’t mean that to suggest that I am incapable of appreciating change. I’m like anyone else – completely suscesptible to hope and hype and vision and promise. I can be inspired, and I am inspired. You have to try pretty hard to not be moved by Barack Obama, his supporters, the crowd of 200,000 he drew in Berlin this week. I don’t know if I feel that “thrill going up my leg,” but I’m not so cynical as to want to step on that enthusiasm either. But that really isn’t the way to win me over. Yeah, you can get me on your side, but that’s fleeting. You wanna mark an era, it’s going to take more than that. It’s going to take stickability.

There are already too many pioneers in this country – people who place their wages on something new that may mark the future. They buy stock in a trend; in a political party or candidate; in a brand. Me? I’m contented being a part of a much larger and longer story, even if I don’t have a starring role, even if I can’t claim prescience for its success. More than contentedness for my role in the story, I appreciate the importance of the others who played a role – who stuck around an old game for so long that almost through osmosis they changed the rules. It ain’t all that glamorous but hey, it’s honest and respectable.

We (and I think this time I definitely mean humans) live with competing needs for progress and continuity. Yes, we embrace change, but we also want to believe that some things never change and that the links between past and present will be seamless, ushered in by the same familiar faces. Most people pick a point on the sliding scale and define themselves in that way – adventure seekers or homebodies; radicals or traditionalists or more likely somewhere in the middle of each.

I was talking with my mother the other night about one of her favorite people: Helen Thomas. Helen has been out of the White House press room for the past couple of months – sidelined by an unspecified stomach ailment. It’s hard to imagine the White House press corps without Helen Thomas; she’s been there since 1961 (is she the longest serving White House correspondent in the history of the Republic?) Anyway, in two weeks she turns 88 years old, and this is key: she is expected to recover from her illness and return to work. Right… because, what else would she do? She’s a permanent fixture in the White House briefing room. There are just some people without whom it is impossible to imagine the American Universe.

I write a lot about William Jennings Bryan, and for the most part that’s political: I think the Democratic Party needs to embrace Bryan’s unabashed populist message. But a small part of my appreciation of Bryan is just that he was always there. He was a public figure for an entire era, and when he died suddenly only days after prosecuting the Scopes Monkey Trial, his contemporaries found it almost inconceivable that politics and American life would go on without him. History tends to rightfully leave out the one-hit wonders of our national consciousness.

And that somehow brings me back to that pet peeve; love of country = opportunities afforded by said country. Call them the Opportunity Patriots. To my mind, that’s a pretty shallow and egotistical view of patriotism. I don’t know that I can pinpoint specific, personal opportunities I have received by virtue of being an American. But I am able to claim some measure of ownership of all those things that are so iconic in this country: a little Dewey Defeats Truman mixed in with Rosa Parks sitting on a bus; FDR pledging Freedom from Want; Adlai Stevenson not waiting for the translation; Chevy Chase’s “Live From New York,” Elvis on Ed Sullivan, a bit of “Heeeere’s Johnny!;” the numbers on the warehouse unfurling 2131. All of those people and events belong to my country, and in that context it’s humbling just to be along for the ride.

Benefit of the doubt time.

I think most of the people praying for, working for, and screaming for change in this country do mean it in the public policy sphere. There’s a lot of “the country should live up to its ideals” theorists, and though that may be empty rhetoric, and the “ideals” are almost always extensions of the speakers’ ideology, at least it acknowledges that there are in fact, American ideals, and that we are something more than just a geographic spot on the planet. Most of the people who demand change are simply tired of waiting for the next link on that chain of iconic Americans.

For those people (and I’d probably include myself in this group), they may be in luck. If you squint a little and engage in a bit of mental time travel ahead 50 years, it’s easy to picture watching nostalgic old clips of Obama’s convention or inauguration speech; or reflect on a major initiative of the Obama Administration, something equivalent to the G.I. Bill. I think that’s what most people mean when they talk about change… passing that torch to a new generation – which is of course, in itself an Old American Tradition.

So, those people I can understand. But, some people bypass change and aim for revolution. I guess they feel that change is too slow, or that the change moves in the wrong direction. Almost certainly they view revolution as an American tradition in itself. But revolution is much more common in other countries than it is in ours, so excepting our founding, I don’t know that it really is much of an American Tradition. What I don’t get about the revolutionaries (of any ideology) is that they seem to take such joy in the act of rebellion that they don’t want to build something that lasts. Simple longevity becomes evidence of an emerging establishment that needs to be toppled.

And that I don’t understand. All of the great American rebellions have definable resolutions: Striking workers return to their jobs after negotiating for higher wages and better working conditions; African Americans got back on Montgomery buses when the Supreme Court affirmed their right to choose their seat. To the activists who led these movements, change was achievable.

Not to sound all First Year PoliSci, but today’s revolutionaries seem to follow more of the Hegelian (or Marxist) dialectic of change: thesis, antithesis, synthesis – the outcome of every struggle serving only as the stage for the next. No desire to play a role in that larger story, no appreciation for Things That Have Been. The only celebrations of the country’s history are celebrations of past struggles: a history of protests/uprisings/marches/revolutions. Kinda overlooks the Dewey Defeats Truman/Freedom From Want/”Don’t Wait For The Translation” side of American history. And in that way, they’re not much different than the Opportunity Patriots.

So I don’t know… as I said at the top, this is a change year. And that’s fine, that’s good. But when the subject of America comes up, so many people spend their energy thinking only of the opportunities provided or ideals unrealized. And yeah, we need to do a lot of things better… and there are probably a fair number of things that we couldn’t do much worse. But it’s also nice to stand still for a minute and recognize not only what we have, but what we have had – and most importantly the very few things that fit into both categories.