By John Ballard
Evert Cilliers writes one of this week's Monday Essays at 3 Quarks, in search of an elusive quest for an "American Character."
Who is the quintessential American character?
Honest Abe Lincoln, whose war killed more Americans than Hitler? Founding father Jefferson, who bonked his favorite slave in secret? Jaunty FDR, who betrayed his own class? Preacher MLK, that oddest of American leaders: a fellow driven by morality? Genial Ronald Reagan, a stalwart stooge for the rich? Muhammad Ali, once the most famous American on earth? Or face-shifting Michael Jackson, now the most famous American on earth?
Maybe 30 years ago, one or two of them might have qualified. Now it's not so easy to define the American character anymore, what with white people set to become a minority by 2042 and WASP domination shrinking fast as all the Micks and Guineas and Hymies and Wops and Wogs take over from Buzz and Skip and Topsy. Then there's our new melting-pot-in-one-person President Obama, so frightfully un-American that 50 million Americans believe he was born elsewhere.
Get ready for bullet points, in both senses of the word. The essay unfolds in power-point fashion but with language pictures instead of graphs or graphics. It's a roller coaster fusillade of rhetorical bullets down a steep incline, leaving the reader dizzy with contradictions and a chance of whiplash. Ready. Set. Go!
We Americans are violent, with a profound indifference to the death we cause others. Other people's lives just don't mean that much to us. We're kind of backward and primitive in that respect. For example, we have a wonderful Vietnam Monument inscribed with the names of the 55,000 Americans who died over there, but most Americans wouldn't be able to tell you that we snuffed around a million and a half Vietnamese. In Iraq we've been responsible for the deaths of over a million Iraqis, while we've lost a little over 4,000 of our own, whose weekly toll is retailed on George Stephanopoulos's �This Week� every Sunday morning, underscored with solemn music. No such solemnity for the whacked Iraqis. Let's face it, we are a nation of killers -- more to the point, THE nation of killers. Since WW2, we've started over 30 wars. We spend more money on weapons than the rest of the world combined. We have over 700 military bases overseas. Our domestic murder rate is five times the murder rate of the UK. Is it because we have lax gun laws? No. We kill three times more people per capita than the Canadians, who have more guns per capita than we do. So what is it with us? Are we just totally paranoid, or extremely touchy and quick to take offense, or trigger-happy? In love with Thanatos -- the death instinct? Are we the heirs of Keats, as he sang in his Ode to a Nightingale:
�Darkling I listen; and, for many a time?
I have been half in love with easeful Death,?
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,?
To take into the air my quiet breath;
an ever seems it rich to die,?
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,?
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad?
In such an ecstasy!?�
We've been holding off on executing people, thank heavens, though unlike other Western nations, we're still into it -- heck, our leading death penalty state, Texas, may be hooking up some dude's temples to a Con-Ed outlet even as I write. But with 4% of the world's population, we have 25% of the world's prisoners. We lock up more people than Russia did under communism, or South Africa under apartheid, which means one of two things: we either imprison people for much longer than other nations, or we're just a far more criminal, felonious, violent and wilder bunch than any other nation. Violence is as American as apple-pie, they say. Still, it is as peculiar as nostrils on an octopus that we're the world's leading exporter of violence. Not only in arms, but in games. Our videogames are mostly shoot-'em-ups -- a very sensible, humane occupation for the world's youth to while away their summer hours, don't you think? Our movies afford us a rich fantasy life of killings in many ingenious ways, with bodies leaking blood all over the screen from various punctured moorings. What is it about us Americans and killing? Is it the result of a 'frontier' mentality? Did it start with our cowboys offing the Indians, and we just haven't been able to stop ourselves ever since?
I stopped reading this one after the asinine comment: "Honest Abe Lincoln, whose war killed more Americans than Hitler?" I mean, like, it would have been so much better if the North had let the South secede and keep its "peculiar institution."
ReplyDeleteYou were wise to stop. Had you continued you would have suffered an apoplexy.
ReplyDeleteI give you Europe: te Thirty Years War, perhaps 50% of adult population dead; The French Revolution and the Committee of Pubic Safety; The Colonial Wars and the Belgian Congo; WWI and WWII with 70 million dead or displaced (Tony Junt, Post War). After all this blood, the Europeans may have settled down a bit but Tony Blair was real big on Iraq. And the new British Conservatives are filled with neocons. And don't get me started on the history of Asia and the Middle East and South America and How about Mexico today? and Africa. We're talking about the human condition. I think I'll just take a nap. And you should too.
ReplyDelete