My American Dream

30
Ha ha! Europeans knew it was there, you see, but they kept it quiet. Why? Because the inhabitants are so frightfully uncouth, daaahling. Here’s another one: “America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.” That’s from Oscar Wilde, too. And it’s funny because somebody witty and sophisticated said it, and because everybody just knows that Americans aren’t witty or sophisticated. Indeed, even witty and sophisticated Americans are happy to confirm this . . . Casual discourtesy of this sort has been a staple of the European chattering classes since pre-Revolutionary days. The most famous European scientist of the 18th century, the spectacularly named Count Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon, wrote earnestly in his seminal Histoire Naturelle that North America’s climate must inevitably make all of its animals and people weak, diminutive, and degenerate. Beyond anecdote, Buffon had no evidence for this—something that an irritated (and tall) Thomas Jefferson pointed out masterfully in Notes on the State of Virginia—but that didn’t really matter because Buffon’s audience, possessed of the same powdered-wig derision that led
In one form or another, I suppose, I have been in love with the United States for as long as I have been in love with anything at all.
my peers ever much resonated with me—even when it was justified with what I believed to be legitimate criticism. At six, at ten, at thirteen, at fifteen . . . I just never bought into the disdain. I would think, “Well that’s not true.” In one form or another, I suppose, I have been in love with the United States for as long as I have been in love with anything at all. As a small child, I watched in awe as the Space Shuttle took off from Cape Canaveral in Florida. I had a stencil of Apollo 11 on my lunchbox and a photograph of the Grand Canyon on my bedroom wall. We took regular family holidays to California and Arizona to see a couple of retired sisters, both of whom I called “Grandma” even though they were not blood relations. I collected postcards featuring skyscrapers. Insofar as I was political at all, as a teenager I was probably of the Left. As my mother puts it, I had “some pretty funny ideas” in my awkward phase, and I found the aesthetic of socialism and of leftist rebellion to be pleasing. The national Health Service made perfect sense to me when I knew nothing else, and I believed the politicians who told me that it was the “envy of the world.” I wasn’t really sure why anybody “needed” a big military, and I instinctively sided with those who would have traded guns for butter. I never questioned whether global warming was real or inquired as to the motives of those for whom it was an obsession. I didn’t like school. All told, I absorbed the British distaste for America’s politics even as I continued to love the country. Until I took the time to look into the issue, I believed as a matter of course that America’s gun laws were inherently ridiculous; until I bothered to know better, I thought that Americans routinely died on the steps of hospitals; until I was a young adult, I accepted that American presidents were all both insipid and dangerous. But, I suppose, I never much cared. thing but full-throated support for the United States in the aftermath. At first, I was correct. Most people I knew were respectful, and most of my friends were horrified. We knew something big had happened when even the French national newspaper Le Monde took a break from worrying about “Anglo-Saxon economics” and ran an astonishing headline: Nous sommes tous Américains, or “We are all Americans.” I remember writing to my American “grandmother” with a similar sentiment—and meaning it more than ever. But, as we moved toward the end of September, I started to hear ugly comments here and there. “It was awful,” people would clarify, “but you have to wonder if the United States had it coming.” By October, voices on the radio that was always on in my parents’ kitchen began to articulate this sentiment less guardedly—sometimes to applause, sometimes to boos. I found to my surprise that the public figures who were supposed to be “stupid” and “simple-minded” were the ones who were making sense, while the people I was supposed to look up to were not. I heard a lot about “nuance.” I was still stunned, and I suppose I was looking for leaders who shared my disposition. Rudy Giuliani’s defiant speech to the United nations is burned into my mind: