Defending America

I always had a job.  When I was fourteen I got a position as a candy concessions girl at our local movie theater, but really I’d babysat long before that and would waitress for many years thereafter.  Because I loved to travel more than anything I lived in a perpetual state of earning money for my next trip.  During my twenties, instead of eating in swank restaurants, buying designer shoes or having a nice one-bedroom apartment to myself, I ate at diners, wore second-hand shoes I bought off the street, and lived in inhumanely small apartments with strange roommates in lousy neighborhoods.  I spent the money I earned on plane tickets—chiefly to Europe—patiently watching the airlines for fare wars then pouncing when prices fell.  Any time a friend of mine or a friend-of-a-friend ended up anywhere in Europe on a student visa, a work visa or—in the case of my Philippina girlfriend, long story, stuck in Paris and unable to return to the states for five years-- I visited.  If I met you on the F train, or at a roof party or waited on your table, and you lived outside of America, then I’d come visit you.  It didn’t matter where.  I just wanted to be not here.

The more countries I visited and the further afield I traveled the more often I found myself in the peculiar position of Defender of All Things American: Including but Not Limited to All the People, their Customs, their Many Foibles, the Government and its Stunning Catalogue of Incompetency, the Ineptitude of the Educational System, All Crass Major Motion Pictures, Delinquent Rock Stars, a 20 Year Span of Bad Television Re-runs and Fast Food.  The onslaught could be overwhelming.  What might start out as a modest get-together of gracious locals looking forward to practicing their English with an American visitor often ended up with me getting the third degree.  “You Americans all think you’re so…” or “You don’t even bother to learn…” or “Your president is so…” pelted me through my smile.  Sometimes I would try to defend Whatever it Was they were so irked by and sometimes I let them vent.  But, I wasn’t there to get lambasted and I had no interest in proselytizing.  I was there to flirt with cute guys, look at cool clothes, check out architecture and eat cheese.  But they were going to make me work for that cheese.  I would have to earn that hazelnut chocolate, the Belgian beer, the kugel and fresh figs.   

I had not majored in political science and was a naturally feeble debater.  I knew I should have an eloquent show-stopping speech ready where I would wax about our constitution and the genius of it’s forethought, its exquisite malleability via the amendment process, and our peaceful transition of power every four or eight years.  What a marvel is America!  Why do you trash-talk it so?  But to be honest, I sometimes agreed with what they were saying.  They occasionally had a point.  So, I suffered through these awkward diatribes until my next run in and eventually became inured. 

What was curious to me, though, was the reaction I seemed to have, time and again, upon my return home.  Sometimes it came to me as early as my wait at the luggage carousel at JFK.  Some old broad with a voice like gravel, resplendent in leopard would say something absurd to a cabbie in a thick Brooklyn accent and my heart would sing.  Or some wry graffiti would catch my eye my on first day back and make me laugh out loud in a public restroom.  Or I would bite into a slice of local pizza and swoon.  Each of these moments caused me to relish another singularly American phenomenon.  I was home again, at long last, and with each return, I fell more deeply in love with America. 

We are a grand experiment still—a great collaboration between the educated and the instinctual, an unlikely amalgam of the exquisite and the crass.  We are doing the best we can, except for when we could be doing so much more, which is nearly always.  But we know that about ourselves and we’re working on it.  We are a national work in progress, yes, but one teaming with such creativity and humor—and passion.  Our freedom of expression informs us in some way, everyday, in so many tiny little ways that we can’t help but take it for granted.  So when our President is inaugurated and my son asks me about our government and constitution, I want to yank him off the couch and put him on a plane.  I want to take him somewhere where he will see how people eat fresh food in small portions and live at a reasonable pace among the carefully carved stone facades of beautiful, majestic buildings, then I will return him home, to where it’s complicated and messy, sometimes ugly and often uneven.  And so implausibly great to be American.