James Baldwin wrote in one of his novels that it is a complex fate to be an American. Baldwin loved America, but understood that he couldn’t live here and either be free or sane.
We think our pain and anger and heartbreak are new to the world and unprecedented, said Baldwin, but then we read. All of the things we feel and want connect us to all of the people who are alive, or have ever been alive.
These days, a very classic American figure named Donald Trump has given us all the gift of having to answer the greatest question any democracy can ask its citizens to consider:
What does it mean to be an American?
I suppose, in a nation of so many diverse individuals, that it means something different to almost all of us, and the fact that we have lived together for so long without trying to continuously and violently overthrow one another ever since the Civil War is a great testament to us.
But perhaps it is a struggle that is never really won or resolved.
My own view of the question is shaped, of course by the fact that I was born a Jew, the grandson of Russian immigrants, a survivor in a family decimated in the most horrific ways for as long as anyone can remember. My grandmother escaped from Russia with her life, she brought little but a thick scrapbook of massacred, murdered and traumatized people she loved and she lived to see her tragic scrapbook grow tenfold, and in even worse ways than she imagined.
But none of it happened in her new country, and she gave thanks for that every day.
All during her life, whenever she saw a police car cruising by, she would throw herself in front of it, between them and me, so they might take her instead of me. Don’t ever take America for granted, she said.
Don’t ever hate, she said. It kills and kills and kills.
Baldwin wrote that one of the reasons people cling to their hatred so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain. If you accept the idea that pain and fear is the mother of hatred, then the politics of America always makes sense.
Thomas Jefferson would have agreed with my grandmother. The world around him was drenched in the blood of conflicts resolved by hatred and violence. He and his colleagues worked hard to construct a system built on compromise and negotiation so that violence would not be necessary. Everybody got something, no one got everything. It was the best system anyone had yet thought of.
I know my view of America has been shaped by my own experience, as the experience of so many others has been shaped by theirs. Not once in my life have I been given cause to fear my government, or have I been unjustly persecuted, or deprived of my work and freedom because of who I am.
Yet I am acutely aware that this is not the story of many other people.
Being an American is something very different for other Americans, including Baldwin, many women, immigrants, African-American children, refugees who flock to us illegally. For them, it means being angry and fearful, even persecuted and oppressed. There is no one way to be an American, and that, I suppose is the big idea. We are free to find our own way.
Almost everyone I know is asking themselves what it means to be an American these days, and that may ultimately be a great boon to a troubled and confused political system. We will all have to decide, and pretty soon, unless we take Baldwin’s path and flee to some other place. As my grandmother cautioned, it is easy to take this kind of freedom for granted, it is rare in the world, then and now.
When I need to pull me out of myself and my work and think about what it means to be an American, one of the people I turn to is H.L. Mencken, a writer and political observer from the past. Despite the hysteria raging around us, history teaches us that nothing is really new, things just appear and re-appear in different guise. Mencken knew the Trumps of the world very well, he wrote often about a strain of politician and citizen he called Boobus Americanus.
They come around every generation or so, they tape into the deep wells of human anger and frustration, scare the hell out of everybody, and then usually self-destruct or fade away. Somehow – I believe this – the better spirits of Americans always rise up to carry the day
One day, I suppose, one of them will emerge, and the forces of humanity will be overwhelmed. That will be a different story. In a democracy, wrote Mencken, the people sometimes get what they want, good and hard.
I have always been a follower of the political perceptions of Mencken, a bitter, anti-semitic and brilliant political thinker. He was a cynic, but also a prophet, he wrote so powerfully about that dark strain in American political life that has always existed, and he prophesized, always will exist. It is as much a part of America as the Mississippi. Because we all came from different places, we have different ideas.
We are, he wrote, an angry and often quite hateful and divided people. Most of us are not paying much attention, and know little of what we speak. This is what challenges us to redefine and give rebirth to ourselves and to what it means to be American, again and again.
“The most dangerous man to any government,” Mencken wrote, “is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable.”
The second most dangerous man was the gullible America, the member of the herd Mencken called “boobus Americanus.”
The boobus Americanus, he wrote, “is a bird that knows no closed season—and if he won’t come down to Texas oil stock, or one-night cancer cures, or building lots in Swampshurst, he will always come down to Inspiration and Optimism, whether political, theological, pedagogical, literary, or economic.”
Thus the Boobus americanus is lead and watched over by zealous men, all of them highly skilled at training him in the way that he should think and act.
Mencken was not into sensitivity or politically correct thinking. He was a fierce advocate for making people think.
This is not a time where people seem to be thinking or speaking for themselves. Individuality struggles to breathe in the the big herds. People hide in their own herds, herd of the right, the herd of the left, the Trump Herd, The Cruz Herd, the Sanders Herd, the Hilary Herd. No one can fathom what anyone in the other herds are talking about, they are one and all the enemy.
Once in the herd, people are no longer able to listen, learn or reason.
The boobus Americanus knows no season. The survival of the herd is all that they know, just like the sheep and the horses and the cows. Just what did boobus Americanus mean to Mencken? Arrogant though he was, he wasn’t suggesting people are stupid, only that they had given up thinking for themselves, and had become addicted to believing what the most unworthy people told them to believe.
The idea seems more timely than ever.
My idea on being an American is to stand outside of the herds and try to think. At some point, I will have to commit, and I will. But it will be about what I think, not what they think, what I say to myself, not what they say to me, what I believe, not what they tell me I must believe. That is the heart of it, really, what it means for me to be an American. Very few people in this world get to do that and live.
Thomas Paine said we don’t need to love the idea of government, it is a necessity, not an ideal. He wrote that “government even in its best state is a necessary evil; in its worst an intolerable one.” Jefferson hated the idea of government, he thought farmers were the only people in America who could be entrusted with the vote because of the literal stake they had in the land.
In a sense, the revolution is eternal, wrote many of the founders, we will never stop trying to curb government, control it, define it or protect ourselves from it. We will never love it or be too comfortable with it. We have always been wary of centralized power.
Mencken’s hard view of government seems more popular than ever. “As democracy is perfected,” he wrote, “the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
I don’t know if this is an inevitability or not, I am not a seer. It is certainly fascinating to think about.
If we have to decide what it means to be an American, we also have to decide of we choose between cynicism and idealism, perhaps the most difficult and personal choice of all.
The cynic, wrote Mencken, is a man or woman who, when he or she smells flowers, looks around for a coffin. An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.
I have, in my life, always veered between cynicism and idealism. When I think about what it means to be an American, I choose idealism. Freedom is one of the very great inventions of humanity, I cherish it.
I am one of those people in the world who has had the luxury of stepping away from the raucous madness of the political system. It just didn’t matter much to me.
I am not in the left or the right, I do not surrender my mind to any label, so I have no choice but to try and think for myself. I am outside the system, until, of course, the system comes for me. I guess I am one of those dangerous men. Either side would have reason to come after me once one or the other finally prevails, history tells us the writers and the artists are the first ones they always come after and shoot, or worse. My grandmother is long gone and cannot protect me. Words and ideas still have power, especially far from the herds.
What it means for me to to be an American is to first and foremost, reject such narrow-minded labels. We are so busy hating one another we have lost touch with any ideas or sensibilities but our own. We seem to be turning into a nation not of boobs, but of angry narcissists, incapable of change or compassion, two of the holy lights of life.
As someone who lives by my mind, I know that when I can’t listen, it is a kind of death of the spirit. You can see it on cable news every night, in presidential debates, and all over Facebook.
We are all human beings, and we can be frightened, manipulated, frustrated by the way the world works, and by the always imperfect and ugly process of governing. We can be the idealist or the cynic. We can be angry or thoughtful. We can pay attention or paste a label on our heads and spare ourselves the hard democratic work of thinking. Somewhere, Jefferson is weeping.
For all his cynicism, Mencken has given me a way to think about being an American. His words, if sometimes harsh, are timeless.
“In the present case it is a little inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible to any public office or trust or profit in the Republic.”
I think I know what it means to be an American for me, I look in the mirror every morning. The person I have to stand with is him. Behind hatred, pain. Beyond them both, mercy and compassion, the warm light of generous spirits.