American Best

By Roger Rosenblatt

We celebrate ourselves and sing ourselves. We've sung ourselves so often we may have forgotten the reasons why. Open your eyes and take it in. The quiet little towns sit like drowsy dogs at the sides of the rivers. The city office buildings mirror one another in walls of blackened glass. Sing airport noises, freeway noises and broad smiles and arm-wrestling matches in a Minnesota diner with the President watching Rocky on T.V. and Bix Beiderbecke tooting blues in the corner. How about them Mets? O Kissinger. O Cher. The bellowing variety, the great mixed bag of nations. Of course we celebrate ourselves. The fact of our existence is reason enough to shout.

But can you pin it down precisely? In a week or two, a hundred million citizens will be cooing at the Statue of Liberty and popping Chinese firecrackers like machine guns far away. Another Fourth. Can anyone say why, exactly, we think we're something special? After all, the Chinese made more than firecrackers, and the Greeks and the Romans ran the world once too (not that we really do). In a heavenly accounting, those civilizations could provide a hefty list of what they offered to the world. If St. Peter asked Americans what they have offered, what would we say? Do car phones count?

In fact, the list of contributions is impressive, if something of a mess. We have our inventiveness to celebrate, our efficiency, the dollars. Old pluck and luck, hard work, can do. We have our generosity to celebrate, our respect for the rights of others, fair play--in principle, if not always in our conduct. We celebrate the principle. National good nature; we have that to think about as well, and laughter at ourselves. "Don't get the idea that I'm one of these goddam radicals. Don't get the idea that I'm knocking the American system," said Al Capone. Celebrate the contradiction, the ironies. Celebrate the changes: the church becomes the bank becomes the alehouse becomes the madhouse becomes the whorehouse becomes the church. Celebrate the mobility, that we are a people in perpetual motion, whose motion is not aimlessness but optimism. A dreamy lot.

Some things are not to celebrate: the poor and desperate grow poorer and more desperate as the rich get richer. Children have children. Old , industries grow feeble. Families dissolve. The waste. Illiteracy--here, where everyone is supposed to go to college. Ignorance, televised superstition, intolerance, race hatred, the discarding of the past. Almost every cause of shame is a consequence of the freedom that we celebrate above all things. Take the evil with the good, but keep the freedom; that's our motto. The trick is to spread the bounty of freedom around to correct the evil. When there is an effort to do that, one has something to celebrate. And still, can you pin it down? Sitting cross-legged on the green, sucking on your McDonald's vanilla shake, listening to the American Legion band play Dolly Parton songs on tubas, can you say what makes you feel different, special, pleased? Maybe it's because you are in a place where the self came to discover what it could do on its own. Because of an unspoken awareness that all people everywhere are alone with their possibilities and that you live where that fact, both the menace and the dream of it, is the message of the land. Because the country is inside you: better or worse as you are better or worse; fairer, saner, kinder as you are any of those things. At night lie still and feel the struggles of your countrymen to make the progress of the nation fit the progress of their souls. They celebrate themselves and sing themselves.