NN "Why I'm Not Ashamed to be an American"

[pynchonoid]

June 25, 2003

Why I'm Not Ashamed to be an American
My America vs. the Empire

By BILL KAUFFMAN

In the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, John Fogerty of
the terrific (if weather-mad) band Creedence
Clearwater Revival recalled "feeling this shame just
sweep over me...I was terribly ashamed of our
country."

He needn't have been, as he soon realized. For Richard
Nixon was "not my country. He's those guys--over in
Washington. First thing I thought about was the Grand
Canyon and my friends and neighbors--and the people
all across the country. The people in power aren't my
country any more than a bunch of gangsters are my
country."

Nor is the Fortunate Son in his fortified bunker on
Pennsylvania Avenue my country--or your country,
either, unless you are as thin and insubstantial as
one of those vapid wraiths hissing of empire on CNN or
MSNBC or any of the other alphabetical collisions in
our corporate-media soup.

There are two Americas: the televised America, known
and hated by the world, and the rest of us. The former
is a factitious creation whose strange gods include
"Sex and the City," accentless TV anchorpeople, Dick
Cheney, Rosie O'Donnell, "Friends," and the Department
of Homeland Security. It is real enough--cross it and
you'll learn more than you want to know about weapons
of mass destruction--but it has no heart, no soul, no
connection to the thousand and one real Americas that
produced Zora Neale Hurston and Jack Kerouac and Saint
Dorothy Day and the Mighty Casey who has struck out.

I am of the other America, the unseen America, the
America undreamt of by the foreigners who hate my
country without knowing a single thing about it. Ours
is a land of volunteer fire departments, of baseball,
of wizened spinsters who instead of sitting around
whining about their goddamned osteoporosis write and
self-publish books on the histories of their little
towns, of the farmwives and grain merchants and
parsons and drunkards who made their places live.

We are the America that suffers in wartime: we do the
dying, the paying of taxes, we supply the million
unfortunate sons (and now daughters) who are sent
hither and yon in what amounts to a vast government
uprooting of the populace. Militarism and empire are
the enemies of small-town America, not only because
some native sons come home in bodybags but also for
the desolating fact that many never come home at all.
They are scattered to the winds, sent out--by force or
enticement of state--in the great American diaspora,
never to return to the places that gave them nurture.
[...] 

continues:
<http://www.counterpunch.org/>

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