“The sunlight that brought light and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me.” – Frederick Douglass
On Wednesday, as I watched Joey Chestnut get a world record for most hot dogs and buns eaten in twelve minutes, I thought about how to assess my identity as an American. It is a confusing thing for me.
There are so many things about this place I love without fully understanding why I love them.
Why do I love the Western, a literary aesthetic celebrating many concepts in opposition to my sociopolitical ideology: isolationism, power through brute force, Manifest Destiny, etc.?
Why am I obsessed with baseball, a game that has grown more and more inextricably coupled with consumerism, drug use, and public funding for private business?
Why would I, a strict vegetarian, become so enthralled with a hot-dog-eating contest that I scour multiple news sources for details about a threatening jaw injury two weeks before the event?
But there are many American creations I love for good reasons.
Because of different policies, both horrifying and far-sighted, the United States is the most diverse nation on the planet. The inter-meshing of previously homogenous cultures provided us with a huge economic advantage and unparalleled cultural invention.
Tap dance, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, and countless other creations in fashion, visual art, literature, and cuisine would not have been possible anywhere else. Part of the reason it is hard for me to understand what it means to be an American is because it means so many things.
We are not a breed. We are mutts. Even the pureblood Cherokee or the WASP with a pedigree stretching back to the Mayflower has been infiltrated one with the other, if not by blood then by common geography.
I believe America, more than anything else, represents the idea of power through inclusion. We have arguably dominated this planet as well as any other empire on record, and we have not done it through military conquest (at least from 1898 – 2003), but through persuasion and co-option.
We have reaped the resources of other nations, spread our economic wealth to a lucky few, and brought the majority of the world into the fold. For good or ill, the economic system we champion has made it inevitable that A) the future of the world will be closely aligned with the way of America and B) we will continue to fight wars with those who wish to remain economically and culturally independent.
The American idea of Manifest Destiny has evolved beyond geographical boundaries. Now we move to create one international community in order to imbibe the nectar of global production.
“The culture and gluttony of America is so appealing, we have not had to fight to dominate.”
That’s why it’s interesting that on the Fourth of July, we celebrate a sundering. The fireworks we watch, the symbolic bombs bursting in air, represent our struggle against imperialism for an independent American identity.
The Founding Fathers went to war with a belief that Americans should dictate their own destiny and reap the rewards of their own labor. The idea behind the American Revolution was that it is not right for a people to work for the benefit of a power in another hemisphere.
Average colonists risked their lives to free themselves of British power, not necessarily because they though they would be better off (many were jaded enough to see they were simply trading British bosses for American bosses), but because Britain offered little in exchange for American subordination.
Colonial Americans paid taxes to a government that did not allow colonial representation, instituted unfair trade policies, and was associated with luxury, corruption, and inherited aristocracy. And now nations on every continent willingly offer their economic futures to an American government with eerily similar characteristics.
Why?
Because in exchange for cooperation, cheap labor, and an enormous consumer market, we offer something they cannot decline. We offer our music, our fashion, our cuisine, our cinema, our culture both high and low, our hunger for product, and our need to consume. We offer our identity and the potential to become a part of us. We offer what we love.
And because the culture and gluttony of America is so appealing, we have not had to fight to dominate. The majority of the planet rightly or wrongly has walked straight into our all-embracing hug.
But there are those who oppose an American infestation of their culture, their government, and especially their land. They are the ones who see nothing of value in what we offer, and according to the United States intelligence community, their numbers are growing.
They are willing to kill and die for their independence. And the American government has made it a point not to let their insolence go unnoticed. But we don’t know what to do. The tactics of the Bush administration have failed, and the party of opposition has yet to prove it has a plan at all.
Meanwhile, for their own benefit or detriment, those currently fighting for independence are satisfied watching the bombs bursting in air.
-Andrew Williams
Andrew Williams lives in Brooklyn and battles entropy in Manhattan. He enjoys epic sagas and bicycling.