What does it mean to be an American?
I've been thinking, today, about our national character--what it means to be American in this moment. Growing up, we all read books or watched movies about moments of crisis that required everyone to focus up on the same task--the same objective. There is no well-known text, film, play, TV series--nothing--in which the American public faced with a survival type threat becomes a bunch of complaining, self-centered and unwilling participants in the challenge of the moment. No--every story is about a moment of crisis that brings out the best in everyone. Enemies rise above their differences. Divorced spouses risk their lives together to save their children. Alcoholics rise to the task and defeat the enemy!
I can't think of a single American narrative that comes close to describing the fucked up situation we're in right now. And here's the situation, boiled down to it's most basic dynamic: this country is facing several existential threats for survival and multiple factions are actively pushing back against the obvious and rational way to defeat these threats. An objective fact is killing people--a virus--and at least half of the population has decided to say "fuck you" to helping defeat it with a methodology that has 100 years of tested science behind it. A charlatan has seized control of one branch of our government, and half the population has decided that no matter what he does or says, they will join in his flailing, constantly changing lies and egocentric grift. At the same time, that sane part of the population remaining--a third refuse to join hands to defeat the charlatan because of grievances brought on by losing a contest. And within that, a sizable percentage believe science has been thoroughly and irredeemably coopted by capitalism, to the point that they insist on rejecting a century of life-saving treatments.
What constitutes "American" in this hour is not found anywhere in the entire creative cannon that we teach our children. There is no sociology of this moment. There is no expert on this condition. We are stuck in the most dangerous of possible passages and our national character is mired in division, conspiracy, and self-centered xenophobia. On top of all this, we have all been forced to sit home for months on end--forced into a situation that should bring us some measure of introspection, after which any imagined fictionalized version of these events would have us all coming together to defeat the threats we face. But no. That is not happening. Instead, there is an absence of introspection. Whining and selfishness have spiked, instead of civic obligation. Honest to fucking god, the people who call themselves "patriots" in this moment have stormed our statehouses with heavy weapons demanding the right to get haircuts and wait in line for bottomless salad and endless breadsticks.
How have we become so utterly useless and contemptible as a nation? How has "American" descended so quickly into the depths of ridicule and absurdity? What will we tell our children twenty years from now about this time?
I cannot shake the idea that CV-19 is the episode where this country saw it's baseless, totally unredeemable nature in stark light for the first time. Division, lack of commitment to common goals, refusal to compromise over anything, wallowing in resentment, burgeoning violent racism and sexism, flagrantly anti-science. This country has become a toxic stew of cynicism and hatred, barely kept afloat by what feels like the last, tattered life raft of idealism and dedication to collective well-being--the goddamned principles on which this nation was founded.
Tell me I'm wrong. Tell me this has been known since the beginning. Tell me this is not an experiment in self-governing that has become little more than a fight over toilet paper and crab cakes at a strip mall.
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