Apologetically American

He had the sense that he still had to do some clarifying in his own mind in relation to what he thought of people. Growing up, becoming an adult, was perhaps about holding two opposing ideas in one’s head without letting it explode. Someone had said something along those lines, though they’d left out the part about the head exploding, which was obviously just a figure of speech. He should have worn a scarf, though he’d always thought they looked effeminate. It was his idea about everyone, about America that was problematic. And he understood that a person had to have a certain kind of background, educated, at least middle class, or at least that he was not unique in thinking this way, in thinking of America as an abstraction, as a thing which a young person could consider in its entirety. This vast space of land, filled with hundreds of millions of people and make pronouncements. That it was hubris, of the vast sort that always had Greek heroes ripping out their eyes or making love to their mothers, and yet he did it; everyone he knew did it, made vast pronunciations about the state of American discourse, of American literature, about American art, the American psyche, the American conservative, as if such a thing were that easy to define. He heard, in the distance a cat in heat, or perhaps a cat being hurt, or giving birth. He suspected that the cat was in heat, but didn’t really know.

                He had this idea, strongly held, that America was a pretty damn fine place, that a place that had its roots in ideas like democracy and freedom of religion and speech was the sort of place that he should be proud of, that the ideals should be emulated, and, if he was feeling especially brazen, what would be so bad about exporting these very same ideals to other nations? Not under the banner of war, but in peace, in home building. He knew that the financial situation was much more complicated and that organizations like the IMF really dicked people over, but couldn’t it be simpler? And yet, like most of his friends, he simultaneously held the idea that America was a deeply troubled place, full of ignorant bastards who couldn’t find their asses with two hands, people who called in to radio talk shows yelling about gun rights, people who hadn’t read a book in over a year, people who thought that the government was out to get them, people who considered education to be for the “elite,” people who considered mass transit and inconvenient tax burden, people who would argue with him vociferously about things that were in their own self-interest like nationalized health care or exporting peace rather than some fake democracy contingent upon repaying loans to multinational corporations. How could these people argue against their own self interest? Why did they?

And therein lay the problem. He saw two girls on a small culvert, or thin skein of cement that slid out into the water, passing a bottle of what he guessed was wine back and forth between them, their shoes off, toes stretching and dipping down into the inky water. He thought of calling out to them, inviting them somewhere. He couldn’t even see their faces. It was his strong wish, often, to not be alone. And yet, often when he was with people, he found that he wished he were alone that the idea of spending time with people was somehow better than the thing itself. He didn’t know if it had always been that way or whether there was something more complex like the relationship between actual sex and that of pornography, if the one came to resemble or replace the other, carved out a new space in a person, or filled a space improperly, but changed its shape in a way that was irrevocable. Some sort of animal probably existed that did just such a thing.