Home is the place where you grew up. There is no escaping this. Believe me, I've tried. The smells of cigarettes and black coffee will always place me in the suburbs of North London on an early morning in the mid-eighties, five or six years old and watching my dad make breakfast. That late autumn, early winter scent of smoke from a hundred chimneys will always remind me of walking in the Lake District with my grandfather just a few years later. And there will forever be unlikely songs* and images and feelings that take me back to being a child with a specificity adult memories cannot hope to match.
I still suffer these strange moments of dislocation sometimes. On my way to work, on my bike, bright sunshine, flanked by palm trees, I look up and I'm momentarily overwhelmed, feeling every mile of the distance between where I came from and where I am. To others, my day-to-day existence in California, in America, is often defined by my Englishness, by my strange accent and my funny ways, but never do I feel more foreign than when I'm alone. I am keenly aware of having traveled very far, and I am both proud of and humbled by this in a way that's so visceral as to be slightly embarrassing.
How I feel about America is quite literally the difference between who I was at eighteen and who I am at thirty-two. I was a particularly angry young man, an enthusiastic opponent of Capitalism and all it represented. I marched and protested and occupied. I went to very serious meetings with very serious people. I debated the finer points of Marx and Trotsky and Gramsci. And I hated. I hated in the abstract, easy way of anybody who opposes an entire dogma. Looking back now, those leanings were always - though never consciously so at the time - somewhat insincere on my part, a vehicle for cleansing myself of my far more genuine emotional baggage. Even then, I realized there was both absurdity and hypocrisy in blaming and hating ill-defined concepts or groups of people for society's problems, and there's an enjoyable irony in finding myself in the country that probably represents such behavior better than any other and loving it.
Don't get me wrong. What I said just then was that I love being in America. I love that this is where I live. Please don't confuse that with being a patriot, which appears to be when you claim a country long heralded as a melting pot represents specifically your values, take pride in accomplishments that have nothing at all to do with you**, and basically hate, dismiss, or patronize anybody who disagrees or is different.
Sadly, it's the blind flag-waving that most represents America to the rest of the world, and it's a big part*** of why America - still the world's mightiest nation - is generally viewed as something of a necessary evil, a fat, stupid, greedy bully that is nonetheless still pretty damn handy in a fight. That impression arguably peaked during the Bush administration, and the election of Barack Obama went some way to allaying the world's fears. This is the singular achievement of his time in office, and it happened before he so much as looked at a policy document.
In a roundabout way, that brings me to my point. My America, the America I love living in, isn't about who the President is. In fact, it really doesn't make much of a difference. I couldn't find the exact quote, but Hunter S. Thompson, covering the presidential campaign back in '72, wrote that Americans would never elect a man more than 10% different in either direction from what's generally considered normal in a President. This still holds true. Aside from the color of his skin, there is nothing tremendously revolutionary about Barack Obama. His presidency, purely from a policy perspective, has been unremarkable and disappointing, and the hope he spoke of on the campaign trail as illusory as it was under Bush. An America where these two men represent opposite ends of the spectrum is extraordinarily narrow in scope and completely unrepresentative. I'd venture that Thompson is right in the sense that on a scale of traditional political values of 'left' and 'right', there is less than 20% difference between Barack Obama and George W. Bush. Politics as we understand it in 2011 is basically everybody herded into that very small space, reduced to scoring points and pointing fingers in a culture where you win by drawing attention to yourself by being the loudest, the slickest, or the dumbest.
That's not my America. That's a sad and increasingly irrelevant America reduced to a parody of itself. I was recently struck by the opening paragraph of Thoreau's essay, Civil Disobedience, in which he states that 'the government itself is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will'. Only the truly naive could possibly believe that this has been the case under any government - Democrat or Republican - in a very long time. The failure of our elected representatives to actually represent us exacerbates the increasing homogenization of our politics and culture, and that results in an ever-blander environment where the window of opportunity for real change on a structural level gets smaller with each passing day.
The America I live in is vast by comparison, though it's geographically far smaller. My America embraces the principles this country was founded on. In my America, the people are male and female and sometimes somewhere in the gray area between. They are gay and straight and bisexual. They believe in a hundred different gods or no god at all, and they understand that the concept of freedom of religion means all dogmas should be equal, including atheism, and that we do not and should not place one faith above another. They come from different countries and different cultures and they have stories to tell that can't and shouldn't be reduced to soundbites and archetypes and cliches. For a hundred different reasons they support war or vilify it. They wish less innocents would die and they hope our soldiers are safe and that they make it home. Sometimes, they find the time to hope the other side's soldiers make it home safe, too.
Nobody has ever been told to love or leave my America.
So here's how I'll celebrate July 4th. I'll take a few moments to remind myself of all the amazing people I've known and the amazing life I've had since I came here. I'll think how lucky I am to have a beautiful wife, an ever-growing family, and some pretty awesome friends. I'll remind myself that the people I interact with every day, no matter their spiritual, political, sexual, racial, or gender alignment are all Americans, and that makes them a part of every America, not just mine.
It may never be home for me, never be that place where my father smoked and my grandfather walked, but my particular vision of America belongs to me every bit as yours belongs to you. I love it, in my own peculiar way, and I'm not leaving.
Happy fourth.
*The opening of Tom's Diner by Suzanne Vega is always, always a punch in the gut for me. The reasons why would take many paragraphs to explain
**That's right, you don't get to celebrate winning World War 2 when the closest you've been to Europe is Olive Garden and your most compelling observation of Asians is the I'm-Not-Racist-But classic that they're bad drivers.
***Along with the weird and still prevalent belief that all corporations are automatically and inherently evil and all the world's ills are caused by this and this alone.
posted at 3:11 PM