It Must Be America

Last year, The Indelicates played a few gigs in New York. Shortly before then, we had released a single called ‘America’ – which, along with being vaguely intended as a correction of the record following Razorlight’s astoundingly graceless song of the same title, was unequivocally pro-American. It addressed what I saw as a distressing tendency among the British, middle-class left to view the world entirely through an ill thought out and fatuous anti-Americanism. It had, as its chorus, the assertion that ‘with godless America’, I would ‘stand and fall’. In Jersey City, In Springsteen’s home state, dressed in an American flag shirt with an American flag guitar strap holding up my American guitar, I performed the song, confident that I was, in some small way, paying due (if arrogant) homage to a country that I like and admire. It is a source of some dismay to me that, the following week, I found myself attacked on the Brooklyn Vegan forum on a charge of being anti-American. It was hardly the first time that the song’s meaning had been misconstrued. Numerous reviews had characterised it as an attack on the country – usually the same reviews that had thought we wanted to be sixteen and kill Pete Doherty – and I had always had a sense that people were assuming a non-existent irony in the lyrics. But still, I was surprised. Hard as it is to contradict any ideology that has attained axiomatic status, I had assumed that it was at least possible to go against the grain. But no: that non-Americans should be anti-American by default has reached the status of assumed fact. Making a pro-American statement is almost impossible. It is similar to, say, the RSC attempting to stage an anti-semitic production of the Merchant of Venice. They could do anything – give Shylock a comedy giant nose, have him wheedle and shrug like a nazi beermat while muttering the ‘hath not a Jew eyes’ speech in a bath of money and children’s tears – still critics would happily praise the brave examination of racial stereotyping and go about their business. So it is with liking Uncle Sam. There is nothing so overbearing as settled middle class opinion. But still, I am eager to try. I could spend an eternity tracing the source of the problem. I could probe the motivations of French academics from the seventies and eighties who decided America was a ‘desert of the real’, that the Iranian theocracy was a vibrant challenge to the hegemon or, in the special case of Jean Baudrillard, that he experienced ‘prodigious jubilation’ watching the events of 9/11. I could examine the educational history of the media commentariat, rich in English lit degrees and deficient in any training in basic science or reason. I could attempt to identify the moment when the view of America as an imperial source of all the world’s evil ‘tipped’ from being a fashionable theory to being accepted, self-reinforcing truth. I could describe at length the spectacle of free, charming and conscientious westerners demonstrating uncritical shoulder to uncritical shoulder with dangerous right wing fanatics screaming ‘death to the west’ and ‘we are all hezbollah now!’. I could point out that, far from being stupid, backward morons: Americans win many more Nobel prizes than anyone else; make better television shows than anyone else and extend more democratic power to more areas of public life than anyone else. I could tell you about the national park service which preserves more perfectly the beautiful places within its borders than anywhere else on earth. I could tell you about the French Quarter in New Orleans which has no MacDonald’s restaurants. I could tell you about Thomas Keller or Steven Pinker or Gawker.com. I could remind you of Apollo 11 and Barack Obama. I could extensively chart how the much-maligned American health-care and pharmaceutical industries have despite everything presided over nearly every beneficial breakthrough in public health since World War 2. I could tell you about the museum in Austin that shows, every hour, a film to the children passing through it explaining explicitly and beautifully that the land into which they will emerge is theirs – all of theirs, and that they are free, inalianably, to pursue happiness upon it. But I won’t, There really isn’t space. I shall, instead, tell you a few things about New York. If you have never taken the Staten Island ferry back to Manhattan at sunset, do anything, sell anything to get a chance. With the Statue of Liberty to your left and the Brooklyn Bridge to your right and the sun blazing on the mirrored fascias of the financial district’s skyscrapers in front of you – it is an astonishing, humbling experience. Rome may be ancient, Paris monumental but the island of Manhattan is awesome. It glows. It is huge and it is magnificent and, here’s the thing: people made it on their own. Unlike the palaces of Europe, built on the proceeds of conquest and erected to the glory of all-powerful monarchs; unlike the cathedrals of a distant sovereign church; unlike the flaccidly intimidating boulevards dictated by communism – New York was built by free people acting freely. No Duke deigned its majesty, no initiative encouraged its immigrants, just freedom and a willingness to do meaningful work. It is miraculous and wonderful, it is the proof of the American experiment’s validity and it is something you can feel everywhere in the city. It is built by and belongs to its people in a way that is quite alien to Europe. In London, there are British Asians. In the US there are Asian Americans. In London the tube is shiny but horribly expensive. In New York the subway is functional and unattractive, but almost everybody can afford to ride it. In London, the mayor has (so far) been selected from a narrow field of political in-jokes. In New York, ex-mayors can run for president. In London, Hyde park extends from the enormously exclusive Park Lane to the similarly monied Kensington. It was established, largely, so that the King could hunt wild boar in it and now houses a fountain as a memorial to a dead aristocrat who married the heir to the throne. It is used with the queen’s permission and has as much to do with, say, Peckham as it does with Manchester. Central park extends from Columbus circle at its southwest corner (home to the Time Warner centre and the fanciest, most exclusive restaurants in the city) to Spanish Harlem (the only area of Manhattan still rough enough to merit a warning in a guidebook) at its northeast. It was created as a public park at the urging of a poet and now houses a memorial to Duke Ellington, a black ragtime pianist who used to work as a ‘soda jerk’ in the poodle dog café. It is used routinely by the broad spectrum of New Yorkers and is integral to the city. New Yorkers flood to it daily, acting, quite literally, like they own the place. And that right there is why I love America. It stands and falls on its people. Its flaws are its people’s flaws – democracy’s flaws. And democracy does have flaws. It is, in Churchills phrase, ‘the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time’. It can see the cheap rantings of demagogues given credence they don’t deserve, it can see stupid people doing well in debates over abortion and the death penalty, it can, occasionally elevate deeply inadequate men to the position of president. But inherent in democracy’s O’Reilly is democracy’s Colbert. Inherent in its pro-lifers is Roe v. Wade and in its pro-deathers a future resolution I hope for, argue for and believe in. Inherent in its President Bush is its President Barack Obama. It’s the best we’ve got, the shining city on a hill, the last best hope, and I love it, I really do. Simon Indelicate Links to the other Amor-ica posts: <a href="#" onclick="new Ajax.Request('/commentaries/open-ideas-amorica-the-land-you-love-to-love-a-dialogue-2-2', {asynchronous:true, evalScripts:true, method: 'get', parameters: {authenticity_token: encodeURIComponent(AUTH_TOKEN), display:'center'}}); return false;" title="Amorica: The land you love to love. A Dialogue">Amorica: The land you love to love. A Dialogue</a> <a href="#" onclick="new Ajax.Request('/commentaries/johnnyothers-indieoma-why-do-people-in-the-uk-hate-america', {asynchronous:true, evalScripts:true, method: 'get', parameters: {authenticity_token: encodeURIComponent(AUTH_TOKEN), display:'center'}}); return false;" title="Why Do People &#8211; in the UK &#8211; Hate America?">Why Do People (in the UK) Hate America?</a> <a href="#" onclick="new Ajax.Request('/commentaries/jacki-canadatown', {asynchronous:true, evalScripts:true, method: 'get', parameters: {authenticity_token: encodeURIComponent(AUTH_TOKEN), display:'center'}}); return false;" title="Canadatown">Canadatown</a> <a href="#" onclick="new Ajax.Request('/commentaries/farryl-last-the-executioner-s-love-song', {asynchronous:true, evalScripts:true, method: 'get', parameters: {authenticity_token: encodeURIComponent(AUTH_TOKEN), display:'center'}}); return false;" title="The Executioner’s Love Song">The Executioner’s Love Song</a> <a href="#" onclick="new Ajax.Request('/commentaries/kittyblanche-the-two-hearts-of-valentina-diaz', {asynchronous:true, evalScripts:true, method: 'get', parameters: {authenticity_token: encodeURIComponent(AUTH_TOKEN), display:'center'}}); return false;" title="The Two Hearts of Valentina Diaz">The Two Hearts of Valentina Diaz</a> <a href="#" onclick="new Ajax.Request('/commentaries/ricrawlins-today-is-your-lucky-day', {asynchronous:true, evalScripts:true, method: 'get', parameters: {authenticity_token: encodeURIComponent(AUTH_TOKEN), display:'center'}}); return false;" title="Today Is Your Lucky Day">Today Is Your Lucky Day</a> <a href="#" onclick="new Ajax.Request('/commentaries/karim-julien-your-cultural-horoscope', {asynchronous:true, evalScripts:true, method: 'get', parameters: {authenticity_token: encodeURIComponent(AUTH_TOKEN), display:'center'}}); return false;" title="Your Cultural Horoscope">Your Cultural Horoscope</a> 2009-06-29T08:38:10-04:00 false false 796

simon-indelicate-it-must-be-america

13334

Last year, The Indelicates played a few gigs in New York. Shortly before then, we had released a single called ‘America’ – which, along with being vaguely intended as a correction of the record following Razorlight’s astoundingly graceless song of the same title, was unequivocally pro-American. It addressed what I saw as a distressing tendency among the British, middle-class left to view the world entirely through an ill thought out and fatuous anti-Americanism. It had, as its chorus, the assertion that ‘with godless America’, I would ‘stand and fall’. In Jersey City, In Springsteen’s home state, dressed in an American flag shirt with an American flag guitar strap holding up my American guitar, I performed the song, confident that I was, in some small way, paying due (if arrogant) homage to a country that I like and admire. It is a source of some dismay to me that, the following week, I found myself attacked on the Brooklyn Vegan forum on a charge of being anti-American. It was hardly the first time that the song’s meaning had been misconstrued. Numerous reviews had characterised it as an attack on the country – usually the same reviews that had thought we wanted to be sixteen and kill Pete Doherty – and I had always had a sense that people were assuming a non-existent irony in the lyrics. But still, I was surprised. Hard as it is to contradict any ideology that has attained axiomatic status, I had assumed that it was at least possible to go against the grain. But no: that non-Americans should be anti-American by default has reached the status of assumed fact. Making a pro-American statement is almost impossible. It is similar to, say, the RSC attempting to stage an anti-semitic production of the Merchant of Venice. They could do anything – give Shylock a comedy giant nose, have him wheedle and shrug like a nazi beermat while muttering the ‘hath not a Jew eyes’ speech in a bath of money and children’s tears – still critics would happily praise the brave examination of racial stereotyping and go about their business. So it is with liking Uncle Sam. There is nothing so overbearing as settled middle class opinion. But still, I am eager to try. I could spend an eternity tracing the source of the problem. I could probe the motivations of French academics from the seventies and eighties who decided America was a ‘desert of the real’, that the Iranian theocracy was a vibrant challenge to the hegemon or, in the special case of Jean Baudrillard, that he experienced ‘prodigious jubilation’ watching the events of 9/11. I could examine the educational history of the media commentariat, rich in English lit degrees and deficient in any training in basic science or reason. I could attempt to identify the moment when the view of America as an imperial source of all the world’s evil ‘tipped’ from being a fashionable theory to being accepted, self-reinforcing truth. I could describe at length the spectacle of free, charming and conscientious westerners demonstrating uncritical shoulder to uncritical shoulder with dangerous right wing fanatics screaming ‘death to the west’ and ‘we are all hezbollah now!’. I could point out that, far from being stupid, backward morons: Americans win many more Nobel prizes than anyone else; make better television shows than anyone else and extend more democratic power to more areas of public life than anyone else. I could tell you about the national park service which preserves more perfectly the beautiful places within its borders than anywhere else on earth. I could tell you about the French Quarter in New Orleans which has no MacDonald’s restaurants. I could tell you about Thomas Keller or Steven Pinker or Gawker.com. I could remind you of Apollo 11 and Barack Obama. I could extensively chart how the much-maligned American health-care and pharmaceutical industries have despite everything presided over nearly every beneficial breakthrough in public health since World War 2. I could tell you about the museum in Austin that shows, every hour, a film to the children passing through it explaining explicitly and beautifully that the land into which they will emerge is theirs – all of theirs, and that they are free, inalianably, to pursue happiness upon it. But I won’t, There really isn’t space. I shall, instead, tell you a few things about New York. If you have never taken the Staten Island ferry back to Manhattan at sunset, do anything, sell anything to get a chance. With the Statue of Liberty to your left and the Brooklyn Bridge to your right and the sun blazing on the mirrored fascias of the financial district’s skyscrapers in front of you – it is an astonishing, humbling experience. Rome may be ancient, Paris monumental but the island of Manhattan is awesome. It glows. It is huge and it is magnificent and, here’s the thing: people made it on their own. Unlike the palaces of Europe, built on the proceeds of conquest and erected to the glory of all-powerful monarchs; unlike the cathedrals of a distant sovereign church; unlike the flaccidly intimidating boulevards dictated by communism – New York was built by free people acting freely. No Duke deigned its majesty, no initiative encouraged its immigrants, just freedom and a willingness to do meaningful work. It is miraculous and wonderful, it is the proof of the American experiment’s validity and it is something you can feel everywhere in the city. It is built by and belongs to its people in a way that is quite alien to Europe. In London, there are British Asians. In the US there are Asian Americans. In London the tube is shiny but horribly expensive. In New York the subway is functional and unattractive, but almost everybody can afford to ride it. In London, the mayor has (so far) been selected from a narrow field of political in-jokes. In New York, ex-mayors can run for president. In London, Hyde park extends from the enormously exclusive Park Lane to the similarly monied Kensington. It was established, largely, so that the King could hunt wild boar in it and now houses a fountain as a memorial to a dead aristocrat who married the heir to the throne. It is used with the queen’s permission and has as much to do with, say, Peckham as it does with Manchester. Central park extends from Columbus circle at its southwest corner (home to the Time Warner centre and the fanciest, most exclusive restaurants in the city) to Spanish Harlem (the only area of Manhattan still rough enough to merit a warning in a guidebook) at its northeast. It was created as a public park at the urging of a poet and now houses a memorial to Duke Ellington, a black ragtime pianist who used to work as a ‘soda jerk’ in the poodle dog café. It is used routinely by the broad spectrum of New Yorkers and is integral to the city. New Yorkers flood to it daily, acting, quite literally, like they own the place. And that right there is why I love America. It stands and falls on its people. Its flaws are its people’s flaws – democracy’s flaws. And democracy does have flaws. It is, in Churchills phrase, ‘the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time’. It can see the cheap rantings of demagogues given credence they don’t deserve, it can see stupid people doing well in debates over abortion and the death penalty, it can, occasionally elevate deeply inadequate men to the position of president. But inherent in democracy’s O’Reilly is democracy’s Colbert. Inherent in its pro-lifers is Roe v. Wade and in its pro-deathers a future resolution I hope for, argue for and believe in. Inherent in its President Bush is its President Barack Obama. It’s the best we’ve got, the shining city on a hill, the last best hope, and I love it, I really do. Simon Indelicate Links to the other Amor-ica posts: Amorica: The land you love to love. A Dialogue Why Do People (in the UK) Hate America? Canadatown The Executioner’s Love Song The Two Hearts of Valentina Diaz Today Is Your Lucky Day Your Cultural Horoscope

Last year, The Indelicates played a few gigs in New York. Shortly before then, we had released a single called ‘America’ – which, along with being vaguely intended as a correction of the record following Razorlight’s astoundingly graceless song of the same title, was unequivocally pro-American. It addressed what I saw as a distressing tendency among the British, middle-class left to view the world entirely through an ill thought out and fatuous anti-Americanism. It had, as its chorus, the assertion that ‘with godless America’, I would ‘stand and fall’. In Jersey City, In Springsteen’s home state, dressed in an American flag shirt with an American flag guitar strap holding up my American guitar, I performed the song, confident that I was, in some small way, paying due (if arrogant) homage to a country that I like and admire. It is a source of some dismay to me that, the following week, I found myself attacked on the Brooklyn Vegan forum on a charge of being anti-American. It was hardly the first time that the song’s meaning had been misconstrued. Numerous reviews had characterised it as an attack on the country – usually the same reviews that had thought we wanted to be sixteen and kill Pete Doherty – and I had always had a sense that people were assuming a non-existent irony in the lyrics. But still, I was surprised. Hard as it is to contradict any ideology that has attained axiomatic status, I had assumed that it was at least possible to go against the grain. But no: that non-Americans should be anti-American by default has reached the status of assumed fact. Making a pro-American statement is almost impossible. It is similar to, say, the RSC attempting to stage an anti-semitic production of the Merchant of Venice. They could do anything - give Shylock a comedy giant nose, have him wheedle and shrug like a nazi beermat while muttering the ‘hath not a Jew eyes’ speech in a bath of money and children’s tears - still critics would happily praise the brave examination of racial stereotyping and go about their business. So it is with liking Uncle Sam. There is nothing so overbearing as settled middle class opinion. But still, I am eager to try. I could spend an eternity tracing the source of the problem. I could probe the motivations of French academics from the seventies and eighties who decided America was a ‘desert of the real’, that the Iranian theocracy was a vibrant challenge to the hegemon or, in the special case of Jean Baudrillard, that he experienced ‘prodigious jubilation’ watching the events of 9/11. I could examine the educational history of the media commentariat, rich in English lit degrees and deficient in any training in basic science or reason. I could attempt to identify the moment when the view of America as an imperial source of all the world’s evil ‘tipped’ from being a fashionable theory to being accepted, self-reinforcing truth. I could describe at length the spectacle of free, charming and conscientious westerners demonstrating uncritical shoulder to uncritical shoulder with dangerous right wing fanatics screaming ‘death to the west’ and ‘we are all hezbollah now!’. I could point out that, far from being stupid, backward morons: Americans win many more Nobel prizes than anyone else; make better television shows than anyone else and extend more democratic power to more areas of public life than anyone else. I could tell you about the national park service which preserves more perfectly the beautiful places within its borders than anywhere else on earth. I could tell you about the French Quarter in New Orleans which has no MacDonald's restaurants. I could tell you about Thomas Keller or Steven Pinker or Gawker.com. I could remind you of Apollo 11 and Barack Obama. I could extensively chart how the much-maligned American health-care and pharmaceutical industries have despite everything presided over nearly every beneficial breakthrough in public health since World War 2. I could tell you about the museum in Austin that shows, every hour, a film to the children passing through it explaining explicitly and beautifully that the land into which they will emerge is theirs – all of theirs, and that they are free, inalianably, to pursue happiness upon it. But I won’t, There really isn't space. I shall, instead, tell you a few things about New York. If you have never taken the Staten Island ferry back to Manhattan at sunset, do anything, sell anything to get a chance. With the Statue of Liberty to your left and the Brooklyn Bridge to your right and the sun blazing on the mirrored fascias of the financial district’s skyscrapers in front of you – it is an astonishing, humbling experience. Rome may be ancient, Paris monumental but the island of Manhattan is awesome. It glows. It is huge and it is magnificent and, here’s the thing: people made it on their own. Unlike the palaces of Europe, built on the proceeds of conquest and erected to the glory of all-powerful monarchs; unlike the cathedrals of a distant sovereign church; unlike the flaccidly intimidating boulevards dictated by communism – New York was built by free people acting freely. No Duke deigned its majesty, no initiative encouraged its immigrants, just freedom and a willingness to do meaningful work. It is miraculous and wonderful, it is the proof of the American experiment’s validity and it is something you can feel everywhere in the city. It is built by and belongs to its people in a way that is quite alien to Europe. In London, there are British Asians. In the US there are Asian Americans. In London the tube is shiny but horribly expensive. In New York the subway is functional and unattractive, but almost everybody can afford to ride it. In London, the mayor has (so far) been selected from a narrow field of political in-jokes. In New York, ex-mayors can run for president. In London, Hyde park extends from the enormously exclusive Park Lane to the similarly monied Kensington. It was established, largely, so that the King could hunt wild boar in it and now houses a fountain as a memorial to a dead aristocrat who married the heir to the throne. It is used with the queen’s permission and has as much to do with, say, Peckham as it does with Manchester. Central park extends from Columbus circle at its southwest corner (home to the Time Warner centre and the fanciest, most exclusive restaurants in the city) to Spanish Harlem (the only area of Manhattan still rough enough to merit a warning in a guidebook) at its northeast. It was created as a public park at the urging of a poet and now houses a memorial to Duke Ellington, a black ragtime pianist who used to work as a ‘soda jerk’ in the poodle dog café. It is used routinely by the broad spectrum of New Yorkers and is integral to the city. New Yorkers flood to it daily, acting, quite literally, like they own the place. And that right there is why I love America. It stands and falls on its people. Its flaws are its people’s flaws – democracy’s flaws. And democracy does have flaws. It is, in Churchills phrase, ‘the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time’. It can see the cheap rantings of demagogues given credence they don’t deserve, it can see stupid people doing well in debates over abortion and the death penalty, it can, occasionally elevate deeply inadequate men to the position of president. But inherent in democracy’s O’Reilly is democracy’s Colbert. Inherent in its pro-lifers is Roe v. Wade and in its pro-deathers a future resolution I hope for, argue for and believe in. Inherent in its President Bush is its President Barack Obama. It’s the best we’ve got, the shining city on a hill, the last best hope, and I love it, I really do. Simon Indelicate Links to the other Amor-ica posts: "Amorica: The land you love to love. A Dialogue(Amorica: The land you love to love. A Dialogue)":/commentaries/open-ideas-amorica-the-land-you-love-to-love-a-dialogue-2-2 "Why Do People (in the UK) Hate America?(Why Do People - in the UK - Hate America?)":/commentaries/johnnyothers-indieoma-why-do-people-in-the-uk-hate-america "Canadatown(Canadatown)":/commentaries/jacki-canadatown "The Executioner’s Love Song(The Executioner’s Love Song)":/commentaries/farryl-last-the-executioner-s-love-song "The Two Hearts of Valentina Diaz(The Two Hearts of Valentina Diaz)":/commentaries/kittyblanche-the-two-hearts-of-valentina-diaz "Today Is Your Lucky Day(Today Is Your Lucky Day)":/commentaries/ricrawlins-today-is-your-lucky-day "Your Cultural Horoscope(Your Cultural Horoscope)":/commentaries/karim-julien-your-cultural-horoscope

active

It Must Be America false

2009-07-01T08:48:30-04:00

770