“America’s greatest strength, and its greatest weakness, is our belief in second chances, our belief that we can always start over, that things can be made better.”
—Anthony Walton
“America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair.”
—Arnold Toynbee
“America is the greatest, freest and most decent society in existence. It is an oasis of goodness in a desert of cynicism and barbarism. This country, once an experiment unique in the world, is now the last best hope for the world.”
—Dinesh D’Souza
“The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.”
—Frank Zappa
“America is a country that doesn’t know where it is going but is determined to set a speed record getting there.”
—Laurence Peter
“Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.”
—Margaret Thatcher
“I don’t measure America by its achievement but by its potential.”
—Shirley Chisholm
“Intellectually, I know that America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know she is better than every other country.”
—Sinclair Lewis
“The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges, or churches, or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people.”
—Walt Whitman
Just based on the small sampling of quotes below, America can inspire a wide range of emotions, shrugs, and degrees of anger. We are seen as the blind, raging pit bull of the world by some and as a legitimate beacon of hope and greatness by others. In between all of this is the view of America by Americans: it can be just as fractured or just as inspired as everyone else’s. And these passions exist even when it is not an election year. But because it is an election year there is really no better time to examine some of the things that make America such a curious, flawed, and ultimately great place to live in.
The term “American ingenuity” is one that, to me, holds real weight and real value. Since the creation of the United States and its rise to power there have always been “unsolvable problems” that are solved by way of American ingenuity. America has certainly not invented everything or played a sole hand in all research and development of everything but other countries do marvel at our inherent ability to always come up with new ways of producing things.
China, France, Italy, India, South Africa, Spain, Mexico, and many, many other countries have, in some way, put up boundaries between their people and true innovation. Though we sometimes like to think of ourselves as helpless Orwellian victims and always succumbing to the drought of moral choices our consumerist economy dictates, America is an overall great country. We have our flaws and some of them are gaping. But, at the end of the day, do the flaws greatly outweigh the positives? I do not think so. Which leads me to what this post is really about.
For the remainder of the year, every week or two, I will write about something that, to me, represents America in some way. One post will be about a piece of candy, a painting, a building, maybe even a book, a car, a stadium or an author. Whatever the object of the piece may be, it will have something to do with our ingenuity, our culture, and maybe even our strengths and weaknesses.
America is a country filled to its eyeballs with equal parts fear and hope and sometimes I think we forget to look at ourselves from a 5,000 foot birds-eye view. For a country that was founded on the idea of making money freely we have fared amazingly well. You no doubt are saying to yourself now, “But the price of everything is high and banks are being bailed out…” Yes, our economy has had a rough go of it but does anything that you read or see make you think that a depression is around the corner? (And by depression, I mean huge swaths of poverty and starvation intertwined with a dollar that is literally worthless and not some hyperbolic description an isolationist would use.)
The biggest problem facing America is that so many people have become complacent. Banks fall apart and the economy nosedives every now and then but it is all cyclical. So too is human behavior—ask Europe why some countries simply cannot resist invading one another even though history’s lessons show that only disaster will be the end result. In our modern times too many people take too much for granted, we constantly look for only cause and effect as if everything follows a 1:1 ratio and everything in between is an argument based on biases (“Deregulation will be the death of us all! Don’t believe me? Well, you must be a Conservative…”) We have collectively lost focus on things so much so that people were legitimately surprised that the housing market took a tumble and that the NASDAQ stumbled shortly after Pets.com stock hit $50 a share.
I do not mean to suggest that the following posts will in anyway change whatever opinion you may already have of America, to purport to do so would be indescribably naive. But I do think that from time to time we need to be reminded of our past ingenuities so that if, for nothing else, we are reminded that our country is wildly diverse and that past inhabitants would do anything to make sure that their creations and desire for change were seen and felt.
Finally, while I do have some reservations about her overall philosophy it is hard to argue with the last quote cited here from Ayn Rand by way of Francisco d’Anconia in Atlas Shrugged:
“If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose—because it contains all the others—the fact that they were the people who created the phrase ‘to make money.’ No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity—to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words ‘to make money’ hold the essence of human morality.”
And on that capitalist note the first part of this series will commence later this week and it will be about a piece of candy from which its inspiration was derived from the Spanish Civil War.