I (Heart) America

I (Heart) Americahttp://www.good.is/"I Heart America." Depending upon your perspective (or perhaps your zip code), that's either an ironic statement, full of doubt and self-loathing, or it's an earnestly patriotic one, imbued with the certainty of American infallibility. Neither perspective satisfies us.Sun, 27 May 2012 12:44:40 -0700CakePHPhourly1en-us <![CDATA[The American Family Grows Up]]> http://www.good.is/post/the-american-family-grows-up/ http://www.good.is/post/the-american-family-grows-up/

Exactly one year ago today as I'm writing this, I was sitting in my home office, in my underwear, when my wife Regina burst through the door. It was a different office, a different home, and a different city than we live in now, though it very well might have been the same pair of underwear. Regardless, her news punctured the false cocoon of peace and security I'd woven around myself.

She was on her cell phone.

"Elijah put a rock up his nose at school!" she said. "They can't get it out!"

I shot up and ran into the other room, because that's where my pants were.

"Call his doctor!" I said, forcefully.

On the way to school, I talked to the physician's assistant at the pediatrician's office. She was very sympathetic. She made us an emergency appointment. We got to school, and there was Elijah, two and a half years old, looking totally fine, if sounding a bit nasal.

"I put a rock up my nose, Daddy."

"That's what I heard."

"We have to go to the doctor," Regina said.

"No! I don't want to go doctor with a rock up my nose! I want a popsicle!"

"Well, we have to."

So we did that, but the rock was so far up Elijah's nose that the P.A. couldn't extract it; apparently, the only doctor who could was 10 miles north, in a dreadful suburb where we never dared to tread.

Whereas Elijah's usual pediatrician's office had a decorating scheme revolving around Beanie Babies and Green Eggs and Ham posters, this specialist's office mostly had photos of punctured eardrums. Elijah's face took on a thin film of fear.

The doctor came in. He was a tall, goofy guy who was wearing one of those metal headbands with the big circle on it. I couldn't tell if he was trying to be funny.

"Is this our Rocky?" he said.

I concluded that he was probably trying to be funny. He asked me to sit in his examination chair and to put Elijah in my lap. My chair was for a kid and his chair wasn't, so when he leaned in, our thighs were touching. This was quite awkward for me, as I'm sure it was for him, but I tried to focus on keeping Elijah still.

The doctor put drops up Elijah's nose. Elijah flinched, but he didn't lose his mind. This was reserved for when the doctor inserted an inch-thick suction tube up Elijah's left nostril. Elijah screamed like he was dying. The other sound in the room was that of my heart breaking. The rock popped out.

The doctor showed it to me. It was no more than an inch in diameter, reddish brown with little white flecks, basically circular, with some irregularities. Upon a closer look, it resembled a tiny hamburger patty.

After we were done, I gave Elijah a little talking-to.

How did this happen? When I was a kid, my parents certainly had their financial problems. But there was never any doubt that they'd be able to afford to send me to the doctor.

"You're never going to put a rock up your nose again, are you?"

"No, Daddy."

"Are you going to put anything up your nose again?"

"Hercules!"

Hercules is our Boston terrier.

"OK. Besides Hercules."

"Hercules sits on my butt!"

"Elijah, I'm serious¦"

"Let it go," Regina said. "I think he gets it."

That ended up being an expensive little lesson. Our health insurance, which cost us a few hundred a month, had a "surgery deductible." If any of us required surgery, we had to pay the first $1,000-each. We knew about the deductible, which is pretty much standard in most of the crappy health plans Americans have these days. But we weren't aware that, according to Blue Cross, sticking a tube up a child's nose to extract a rock is "surgery." Elijah's little escapade cost us $600.

Since I've become a family man, I've suspected that the family, such as it stands, is under attack. Many politicians claim this as well, though their claims are based mostly on scanty anecdotal evidence gleaned from watching bad TV, combined with a fear of poor people. Instead, I've had to learn through hard experience that middle-class American families are being forced to live, almost entirely, without a net.

Let's go back to health insurance. We recently moved from Texas to California, for various reasons. Blue Cross denied us coverage because Regina had a little thyroid problem and because I was on antidepressants, both problems that had been treated in Texas, while we were under Blue Cross insurance. Somehow, we've managed to retain our prescriptions under the Texas coverage, but that's only because the bureaucracy hasn't caught up with us yet.

Meanwhile, we bought Elijah a policy here, but we just got word that his premiums have gone up. Also, certain things that were previously covered aren't covered anymore, or are only covered partially. We haven't even used the coverage yet, and we're already being denied. The message here is that health care, for all but the richest families, is an unaffordable luxury.

How did this happen? When I was a kid, my parents certainly had their financial problems. But there was never any doubt that they'd be able to afford to send me to the doctor. They also raised me in one of the nicest parts in the country, in a town that permitted no commercial real estate, in a dead-silent neighborhood where you could see the stars at night, in a house with a kidney-shaped swimming pool and copious fruit trees.

I make as much money, even in relative terms, as my father did at my age. But until recently I'd never lived in a house that didn't have city buses rumbling down the street at all hours. We brought my son home from the hospital to a house down the street from the city's only day-labor center. I regularly chased prostitutes off my front lawn.

In Los Angeles, our situation is somewhat better. The neighborhood is a little nicer than before. But we rent. Affording to buy an even remotely tolerable house is beyond our means. If we wanted a fixer-upper next to an auto-body shop-which we don't-we'd still have to find a way to finance $550,000. The beer trucks only drive down our street if there's construction on the main commercial road. Because of that, my son thinks this is a "quiet" neighborhood, and that breaks my heart.

Education is another source of continual anxiety. My parents may have worried that I wasn't being stimulated quite enough in school, or that I had some lazy teachers, but they didn't have much doubt, overall, that I'd get a decent public education that would prepare me for college. They certainly didn't have to worry about financing my education before college.

My wife and I, on the other hand, have had to make serious cutbacks in order to send our son to preschool. We rarely get babysitters, we don't go out to eat, and we don't buy new shoes. None of this is tragic, but let me emphasize this again: We're making sacrifices to send our son to preschool. When it comes to sending him to elementary school, we're faced with even more difficult choices. Our current neighborhood, which we don't like that much anyway, has one decent charter school and a bunch of unacceptable options. There are neighborhoods and suburbs nearby with better schools, but we can't afford to buy houses there. We don't even know if we can afford to rent in those neighborhoods.

All of this adds up to an increasingly empty feeling that I'm not going to be able to provide for my kid like my parents did for me. The conclusion I've reached, one that I never even considered before I had a kid, is that society has failed the family. No structures exist to help us, and no, the marriage deduction doesn't count.

The nuclear family, a mostly modern creation to begin with, seems like it's begun to fade into the realm of myth. Regina and I had Elijah in Austin, Texas, a perfectly fun, laid-back place to have a kid, but also 1,000 miles from any extended family. Any larger sense of community we felt was limited to an occasional babysitting swap night we did with another couple that we liked. This hardly formed the basis of a revolution.

But we had no idea that we were living at the front of a wave. A quiet reinvention of the whole idea of the American family was underway. Out of our struggles, and those of thousands of families like us, Family 2.0 was being born.

The current generation of parents is laid-back but not permissive, strict but not authoritarian, involved but not hyper-involved. We're reacting, in large part, to the dual excesses of the Baby Boomers. We have neither the means nor the desire to spoil our children, and we lack the energy to become full-on Soccer Moms and Dads. The parenting norms of the past don't seem to apply to our lives. Instead, we've begun to pull together a new parenting culture.

As it does with almost everything else in the contemporary world, the internet is leading the way. When we had Elijah, the online parenting community had just begun to flower. Regina spent a lot of time on the urbanbaby.com message boards, seeking friends, tips, and support. But what she found, while occasionally helpful, was mostly anonymous complaining and backstabbing. There was something impersonal, and even a little sinister, about the whole thing.

This manifested itself most fully when I published an article on Salon about how Elijah got expelled from his first preschool for biting. It was a nasty episode full of mistakes on our part, and on the school's. But it didn't warrant the explosion of vitriol against us. We were called "people who shouldn't have children," and Regina got an email that compared Elijah with a serial killer and threatened to call child welfare on us.

But that was two years ago, a lifetime on the internet. Online parenting culture has evolved. "Mommyblogs," with their confessional style and easy access to family photos, put faces to the previously anonymous posters, and made nasty side commenting much more difficult, and much less likely. The "daddyblogs" appeared later, but they, too, presented a different side of fatherhood, self-effacing and cynical, but also nurturing. Suddenly, thousands of mothers were publicly relating their doubts, fears, and joys, and fathers were publicly trying to figure out their own changing roles in a world where family is constantly in flux.

Blog coalitions evolved naturally. Mommyblogs evolved into group blogs, and then daddyblogs followed suit. Soon, families in Seattle and Boston, Utah and Los Angeles, and all points in between, were sharing experiences, stories, and resources. The culture continues to evolve. Websites openly calling themselves part of the "Family 2.0" movement have begun to spring up, online parenting communities that mimic MySpace in their intention, but are slowly starting to find their own way.

In the physical world, the social life of families is slowly but inexorably changing as well. An organization called Baby Loves Disco, started by a Philadelphia record producer and stay-at-home dad, has been, for the last year, staging massive parties in a half-dozen cities. Hundreds of families from San Francisco to Boulder to Brooklyn gather in nightclubs. A DJ spins dance hits from the '70s and '80s. The parents drink at an open bar, while the kids eat healthy snacks and drink from juice boxes. There's a "chill-out room" full of books and puzzles, bubble machines, balloons, and lots of other surprises. It's a simple concept that's perfect for its time. Parents and kids are having fun together, and meeting other families, under the innocent guise of a party.

At best, it's the basis for a new kind of community. At the very least, it's a hell of a lot better than having to watch your kid throw himself around a jumpy castle for an hour.

I don't know where all this is leading. Will it just be easier for families to meet other families that are "like" them? Will babysitting co-ops and community gardens emerge? Will there be a family-oriented nightclub party circuit? Any number of directions is possible.

An organization called Moms Rising presents one possibility. Through their website, momsrising.org, they're leading the political component of the Family 2.0 movement, campaigning for affordable health care and schooling, flex time and fair wages for work-at-home parents, and better after-school programs. Their comprehensive, thoughtful campaign was born out of the same sort of quiet desperation that my wife and I felt upon discovering that society would offer us no help in finding an affordable place to live, locating a school, or vacuuming stones out of our kid's nose.

I imagine, or dream of, a society where my kid can live in a safe, comfortable neighborhood, be assured of decent, affordable health care, and attend a good public school. The institutions of our society may be moving against those desires, but the people aren't. We're very early in the process, but a generation is rallying itself, slowly but steadily.

I'll be joining them as soon as I pay my $400 gasoline bill from last month. For that, I don't blame anyone but myself. It's my own damn fault for moving to L.A.]]>

Exactly one year ago today as I'm writing this, I was sitting in my home office, in my underwear, when my wife Regina burst through the door. It was a different office, a different home, and a different city than we live in now, though it very well might have been the same pair of underwear. Regardless, her news punctured the false cocoon of peace and security I'd woven around myself.

She was on her cell phone.

"Elijah put a rock up his nose at school!" she said. "They can't get it out!"

I shot up and ran into the other room, because that's where my pants were.

"Call his doctor!" I said, forcefully.

On the way to school, I talked to the physician's assistant at the pediatrician's office. She was very sympathetic. She made us an emergency appointment. We got to school, and there was Elijah, two and a half years old, looking totally fine, if sounding a bit nasal.

"I put a rock up my nose, Daddy."

"That's what I heard."

"We have to go to the doctor," Regina said.

"No! I don't want to go doctor with a rock up my nose! I want a popsicle!"

"Well, we have to."

So we did that, but the rock was so far up Elijah's nose that the P.A. couldn't extract it; apparently, the only doctor who could was 10 miles north, in a dreadful suburb where we never dared to tread.

Whereas Elijah's usual pediatrician's office had a decorating scheme revolving around Beanie Babies and Green Eggs and Ham posters, this specialist's office mostly had photos of punctured eardrums. Elijah's face took on a thin film of fear.

The doctor came in. He was a tall, goofy guy who was wearing one of those metal headbands with the big circle on it. I couldn't tell if he was trying to be funny.

"Is this our Rocky?" he said.

I concluded that he was probably trying to be funny. He asked me to sit in his examination chair and to put Elijah in my lap. My chair was for a kid and his chair wasn't, so when he leaned in, our thighs were touching. This was quite awkward for me, as I'm sure it was for him, but I tried to focus on keeping Elijah still.

The doctor put drops up Elijah's nose. Elijah flinched, but he didn't lose his mind. This was reserved for when the doctor inserted an inch-thick suction tube up Elijah's left nostril. Elijah screamed like he was dying. The other sound in the room was that of my heart breaking. The rock popped out.

The doctor showed it to me. It was no more than an inch in diameter, reddish brown with little white flecks, basically circular, with some irregularities. Upon a closer look, it resembled a tiny hamburger patty.

After we were done, I gave Elijah a little talking-to.

How did this happen? When I was a kid, my parents certainly had their financial problems. But there was never any doubt that they'd be able to afford to send me to the doctor.

"You're never going to put a rock up your nose again, are you?"

"No, Daddy."

"Are you going to put anything up your nose again?"

"Hercules!"

Hercules is our Boston terrier.

"OK. Besides Hercules."

"Hercules sits on my butt!"

"Elijah, I'm serious¦"

"Let it go," Regina said. "I think he gets it."

That ended up being an expensive little lesson. Our health insurance, which cost us a few hundred a month, had a "surgery deductible." If any of us required surgery, we had to pay the first $1,000-each. We knew about the deductible, which is pretty much standard in most of the crappy health plans Americans have these days. But we weren't aware that, according to Blue Cross, sticking a tube up a child's nose to extract a rock is "surgery." Elijah's little escapade cost us $600.

Since I've become a family man, I've suspected that the family, such as it stands, is under attack. Many politicians claim this as well, though their claims are based mostly on scanty anecdotal evidence gleaned from watching bad TV, combined with a fear of poor people. Instead, I've had to learn through hard experience that middle-class American families are being forced to live, almost entirely, without a net.

Let's go back to health insurance. We recently moved from Texas to California, for various reasons. Blue Cross denied us coverage because Regina had a little thyroid problem and because I was on antidepressants, both problems that had been treated in Texas, while we were under Blue Cross insurance. Somehow, we've managed to retain our prescriptions under the Texas coverage, but that's only because the bureaucracy hasn't caught up with us yet.

Meanwhile, we bought Elijah a policy here, but we just got word that his premiums have gone up. Also, certain things that were previously covered aren't covered anymore, or are only covered partially. We haven't even used the coverage yet, and we're already being denied. The message here is that health care, for all but the richest families, is an unaffordable luxury.

How did this happen? When I was a kid, my parents certainly had their financial problems. But there was never any doubt that they'd be able to afford to send me to the doctor. They also raised me in one of the nicest parts in the country, in a town that permitted no commercial real estate, in a dead-silent neighborhood where you could see the stars at night, in a house with a kidney-shaped swimming pool and copious fruit trees.

I make as much money, even in relative terms, as my father did at my age. But until recently I'd never lived in a house that didn't have city buses rumbling down the street at all hours. We brought my son home from the hospital to a house down the street from the city's only day-labor center. I regularly chased prostitutes off my front lawn.

In Los Angeles, our situation is somewhat better. The neighborhood is a little nicer than before. But we rent. Affording to buy an even remotely tolerable house is beyond our means. If we wanted a fixer-upper next to an auto-body shop-which we don't-we'd still have to find a way to finance $550,000. The beer trucks only drive down our street if there's construction on the main commercial road. Because of that, my son thinks this is a "quiet" neighborhood, and that breaks my heart.

Education is another source of continual anxiety. My parents may have worried that I wasn't being stimulated quite enough in school, or that I had some lazy teachers, but they didn't have much doubt, overall, that I'd get a decent public education that would prepare me for college. They certainly didn't have to worry about financing my education before college.

My wife and I, on the other hand, have had to make serious cutbacks in order to send our son to preschool. We rarely get babysitters, we don't go out to eat, and we don't buy new shoes. None of this is tragic, but let me emphasize this again: We're making sacrifices to send our son to preschool. When it comes to sending him to elementary school, we're faced with even more difficult choices. Our current neighborhood, which we don't like that much anyway, has one decent charter school and a bunch of unacceptable options. There are neighborhoods and suburbs nearby with better schools, but we can't afford to buy houses there. We don't even know if we can afford to rent in those neighborhoods.

All of this adds up to an increasingly empty feeling that I'm not going to be able to provide for my kid like my parents did for me. The conclusion I've reached, one that I never even considered before I had a kid, is that society has failed the family. No structures exist to help us, and no, the marriage deduction doesn't count.

The nuclear family, a mostly modern creation to begin with, seems like it's begun to fade into the realm of myth. Regina and I had Elijah in Austin, Texas, a perfectly fun, laid-back place to have a kid, but also 1,000 miles from any extended family. Any larger sense of community we felt was limited to an occasional babysitting swap night we did with another couple that we liked. This hardly formed the basis of a revolution.

But we had no idea that we were living at the front of a wave. A quiet reinvention of the whole idea of the American family was underway. Out of our struggles, and those of thousands of families like us, Family 2.0 was being born.

The current generation of parents is laid-back but not permissive, strict but not authoritarian, involved but not hyper-involved. We're reacting, in large part, to the dual excesses of the Baby Boomers. We have neither the means nor the desire to spoil our children, and we lack the energy to become full-on Soccer Moms and Dads. The parenting norms of the past don't seem to apply to our lives. Instead, we've begun to pull together a new parenting culture.

As it does with almost everything else in the contemporary world, the internet is leading the way. When we had Elijah, the online parenting community had just begun to flower. Regina spent a lot of time on the urbanbaby.com message boards, seeking friends, tips, and support. But what she found, while occasionally helpful, was mostly anonymous complaining and backstabbing. There was something impersonal, and even a little sinister, about the whole thing.

This manifested itself most fully when I published an article on Salon about how Elijah got expelled from his first preschool for biting. It was a nasty episode full of mistakes on our part, and on the school's. But it didn't warrant the explosion of vitriol against us. We were called "people who shouldn't have children," and Regina got an email that compared Elijah with a serial killer and threatened to call child welfare on us.

But that was two years ago, a lifetime on the internet. Online parenting culture has evolved. "Mommyblogs," with their confessional style and easy access to family photos, put faces to the previously anonymous posters, and made nasty side commenting much more difficult, and much less likely. The "daddyblogs" appeared later, but they, too, presented a different side of fatherhood, self-effacing and cynical, but also nurturing. Suddenly, thousands of mothers were publicly relating their doubts, fears, and joys, and fathers were publicly trying to figure out their own changing roles in a world where family is constantly in flux.

Blog coalitions evolved naturally. Mommyblogs evolved into group blogs, and then daddyblogs followed suit. Soon, families in Seattle and Boston, Utah and Los Angeles, and all points in between, were sharing experiences, stories, and resources. The culture continues to evolve. Websites openly calling themselves part of the "Family 2.0" movement have begun to spring up, online parenting communities that mimic MySpace in their intention, but are slowly starting to find their own way.

In the physical world, the social life of families is slowly but inexorably changing as well. An organization called Baby Loves Disco, started by a Philadelphia record producer and stay-at-home dad, has been, for the last year, staging massive parties in a half-dozen cities. Hundreds of families from San Francisco to Boulder to Brooklyn gather in nightclubs. A DJ spins dance hits from the '70s and '80s. The parents drink at an open bar, while the kids eat healthy snacks and drink from juice boxes. There's a "chill-out room" full of books and puzzles, bubble machines, balloons, and lots of other surprises. It's a simple concept that's perfect for its time. Parents and kids are having fun together, and meeting other families, under the innocent guise of a party.

At best, it's the basis for a new kind of community. At the very least, it's a hell of a lot better than having to watch your kid throw himself around a jumpy castle for an hour.

I don't know where all this is leading. Will it just be easier for families to meet other families that are "like" them? Will babysitting co-ops and community gardens emerge? Will there be a family-oriented nightclub party circuit? Any number of directions is possible.

An organization called Moms Rising presents one possibility. Through their website, momsrising.org, they're leading the political component of the Family 2.0 movement, campaigning for affordable health care and schooling, flex time and fair wages for work-at-home parents, and better after-school programs. Their comprehensive, thoughtful campaign was born out of the same sort of quiet desperation that my wife and I felt upon discovering that society would offer us no help in finding an affordable place to live, locating a school, or vacuuming stones out of our kid's nose.

I imagine, or dream of, a society where my kid can live in a safe, comfortable neighborhood, be assured of decent, affordable health care, and attend a good public school. The institutions of our society may be moving against those desires, but the people aren't. We're very early in the process, but a generation is rallying itself, slowly but steadily.

I'll be joining them as soon as I pay my $400 gasoline bill from last month. For that, I don't blame anyone but myself. It's my own damn fault for moving to L.A.]]> GOOD Wed, 22 Nov 2006 21:56:40 PST <![CDATA[Ten Reasons Why I Love America]]> http://www.good.is/post/ten-reasons-why-i-love-america/ http://www.good.is/post/ten-reasons-why-i-love-america/

10. I love how people treat me with respect in America. Sir this and sir that. I'm 33 but I look like I'm fifty so when I walk into a store, service people practically get down on their knees and beg me to share my old man's wealth. I can live with that.

9. I love how this is such a big country but when I travel around everyone speaks a fairly standardized kind of English. Sure there's the famous Southern drawl, but from what I understand the influx of Yankees into the sunbelt is slowly killing off Southern culture and diction. Sweet!

8. I love how young this country is. I don't have to study what happened two thousand years before Christ to fit in around here. Federalist Papers, the cotton gin, "Let's go Yan-kees! Let's go!" and I'm golden.

7. I love how I can dress all informal in America. I don't even own a freaking tie! And if someone gets married or dies, screw them. I'm an American. I'm wearing my duck cufflinks and my "sports blazer," whatever the hell that is.

6. I love how American women smell. Whether they're native or immigrant, small or elephantine, everyone smells like the height of freshness even in the summertime. I can respect that.

5. I love how cute and powerless the American intelligentsia is. Keeps it honest.

4. I love how Americans can be so innocent abroad. On the rare occasion the dollar rebounds they can still act pissy with the waiter, but when I see a middle-aged couple in some freaky country these days it's like, "H-h-h-h-help us, mister. We've just been r-r-r-r-robbed and s-s-s-s-stabbed." And I just wipe their blood off with my sports blazer and say, "Dere, dere, li'l chile, no cry you."

3. I love how every tiny thing I do in America they give me money. Little musings, overused anecdotes, mindless gum flapping. Anything I do-money. I don't know what I'm getting for this article but I'll bet ya it's gonna be a lot of money. And money means I can indulge in my passions and pursuits and contribute to this nation's idea of itself. Or as the youth like to say, "Whatever."

2. I love how most Americans believe some supernatural higher power is going to lift them up into paradise once they expire, but at the same time they work ninety hours a week to invent new technologies that make my earthly life long and comfortable, although, come to think of it, largely static and meaningless.

1. Four p.m. cheeseburgers with extra onions and tepid American sex on a day when the stock market's closed. I love it.]]>

10. I love how people treat me with respect in America. Sir this and sir that. I'm 33 but I look like I'm fifty so when I walk into a store, service people practically get down on their knees and beg me to share my old man's wealth. I can live with that.

9. I love how this is such a big country but when I travel around everyone speaks a fairly standardized kind of English. Sure there's the famous Southern drawl, but from what I understand the influx of Yankees into the sunbelt is slowly killing off Southern culture and diction. Sweet!

8. I love how young this country is. I don't have to study what happened two thousand years before Christ to fit in around here. Federalist Papers, the cotton gin, "Let's go Yan-kees! Let's go!" and I'm golden.

7. I love how I can dress all informal in America. I don't even own a freaking tie! And if someone gets married or dies, screw them. I'm an American. I'm wearing my duck cufflinks and my "sports blazer," whatever the hell that is.

6. I love how American women smell. Whether they're native or immigrant, small or elephantine, everyone smells like the height of freshness even in the summertime. I can respect that.

5. I love how cute and powerless the American intelligentsia is. Keeps it honest.

4. I love how Americans can be so innocent abroad. On the rare occasion the dollar rebounds they can still act pissy with the waiter, but when I see a middle-aged couple in some freaky country these days it's like, "H-h-h-h-help us, mister. We've just been r-r-r-r-robbed and s-s-s-s-stabbed." And I just wipe their blood off with my sports blazer and say, "Dere, dere, li'l chile, no cry you."

3. I love how every tiny thing I do in America they give me money. Little musings, overused anecdotes, mindless gum flapping. Anything I do-money. I don't know what I'm getting for this article but I'll bet ya it's gonna be a lot of money. And money means I can indulge in my passions and pursuits and contribute to this nation's idea of itself. Or as the youth like to say, "Whatever."

2. I love how most Americans believe some supernatural higher power is going to lift them up into paradise once they expire, but at the same time they work ninety hours a week to invent new technologies that make my earthly life long and comfortable, although, come to think of it, largely static and meaningless.

1. Four p.m. cheeseburgers with extra onions and tepid American sex on a day when the stock market's closed. I love it.]]> GOOD Wed, 22 Nov 2006 21:51:46 PST <![CDATA[America In The World]]> http://www.good.is/post/america-in-the-world/ http://www.good.is/post/america-in-the-world/

In the summer of 1867, Paris was flooded with visitors to the Exposition Universelle, one of the first of what would eventually come to be known as World's Fairs. Inside the Palais du Champ de Mars, the massive iron-and-glass main hall, people could wander among tens of thousands of exhibits from around the world featuring everything from exotic foods to new perfumes to fantastic new technologies. As the historian Arthur Chandler describes it, in a single day one could examine the canvases of Jean-Louis Ernest Meissonier and Jean-Léon Géron, check out jewelry settings and vases from around the world, and marvel at the giant cannon that Krupp, the German arms maker, had brought to Paris. And then, if you were of a certain mindset, you could worry about the Americans.

The U.S. government had committed itself to putting on a good show in Paris, in part as a way of winning more customers for American products, but also as a way of convincing skilled European workers that the United States was the best place to ply their trades. And put on a good show the Americans did. Their exhibits included Samuel Morse's remarkable new telegraph, demonstrations of the country's rich store of natural resources, and Cyrus McCormick's reaper. Although the Americans had less exhibition room than five other countries, they ended up winning four grand prizes at the Exposition. They also made some observers very nervous about what the future might hold. In the wake of the Exposition, Edmund and Jules Goncourt-two brothers whose co-written journals offer a brilliant impressionistic picture of Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century-wrote that the fair represented "the final blow in the Americanization of France, industry triumphing over art, the steam engine reigning in the place of the painting." For the Goncourts, the quintessentially American pursuit of technological progress guaranteed the eradication of quality and, ultimately, the destruction of culture. As the critic Rob Kroes has put it, America became the symbol of everything that was unsettling and dismaying about the advent of the modern world.

Accompanying the dismay, though, was also a deep respect for the fruits of American ambition and inventiveness. The French government had actively encouraged American participation in the fair; the French commissioner in charge of the Exposition said (perhaps with a touch of exaggeration) that Napoleon III, France's ruler, "had been very much astonished by the marvels of ingenuity and skill which he had observed in the United States." And the crowds that thronged the American exhibits-as well as the judges who awarded the prizes-must also have been impressed by what they saw. A world with telegraphs and mechanical reapers, it seemed, was surely better than one without them.

Almost a century and a half has passed since the Exposition Universelle, but the profound ambivalence America provoked there continues. Today Americanization-a word the Goncourts apparently coined-may be associated more with McDonald's, Hollywood, and the cult of the free market than with agricultural machinery, but fears remain of American culture and of American power running roughshod over local customs and creating a lowest-common-denominator world. These fears have been compounded by America's now overwhelming military power (which ensures no external check on its behavior) and by its tendency to act alone.

Since 2002, the Pew Research Center has been conducting an annual global attitudes survey, in which it polls thousands of people in countries around the world on a wide range of questions, including their attitudes toward their own countries, toward their neighbors, and toward the United States. The surveys show that dislike of America currently runs both wide and deep. This is not solely or even principally due to the policies of the Bush administration (although they have undoubtedly made things worse). Instead, it stems from a distrust of American power, both military and economic, and from concern for how American businesses are affecting the world. Perhaps the most troubling thing about these results is that, in the past, people drew a clear distinction between the American government and Americans; hostility toward America was typically pegged to bad policies. Today the hostility tends to reach beyond the government and attaches itslef to Americans as a whole. In other words, in a lot of the world, they don't like us. They really don't like us. (Thankfully, there are still a few places in the world-Great Britain, Canada, and Poland-where a majority of the people have a favorable view of the U.S. And Indians absolutely seem to love us.) The stereotype of the Ugly American has been commonplace since the end of World War II, but the world's view of Americans has never been quite this bleak.

If there is one trait that seems to characterize American behavior, and which contributes to global distrust, it's unilateralism, the American unwillingness to be bound by anything outside of one's own will. This has been accentuated in recent years-think of the decision to go to war in Iraq without a U.N. resolution, the refusal to ratify the Kyoto treaty, and the initial decision to ignore the Geneva Conventions in the war in Afghanistan. But it's hardly something the Bush administration invented. On the contrary, there is a deep strain of American thought that rejects the idea of being fettered, in any way, by non-Americans, and that sees going it alone as the only reasonable course of action.

There are two factors that make American unilateralism especially troubling in the eyes of many. The first is simply the breadth of American power. While no one is nostalgic for the Cold War, a majority of people in every country that Pew surveyed (U.S. excluded) believe that it would be better for the world if a country or group of countries emerged as a rival to U.S. hegemony. Whatever the dangers of superpower conflict, apparently they're preferable to having most of the world's military might in the hands of one nation.

The second factor is that the U.S. now regularly circumvents or ignores many of the international institutions that, paradoxically, it played a major role in creating. The United Nations, the various institutions designed to combat genocide and war crimes, the Geneva Conventions, the World Trade Organization-the U.S. was instrumental in the development of all of these. Yet in just the past decade, it's refused to ratify the International Criminal Court, refused to vote for a resolution banning land mines, refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, until recently declared the Geneva Conventions inapplicable to enemy combatants, and so on. From the perspective of American interests, each of those decisions may have been the correct one. But, to many, each also smacks of hypocrisy, making it seem as if the U.S. is happy to play by the rules only as long as it's guaranteed to win.

Take the question of free trade, the one cause that, more than any other, the U.S. has been unremittingly committed to over the past decade and a half. Without the U.S., much of the good work that has been done in lowering trade barriers and doing away with subsidies in the global economy would never have happened. Yet in 2004, in order to placate voters in steel-producing states, the Bush administration slapped tariffs on foreign steel. These were tariffs the administration knew to be in violation of World Trade Organization rules, yet it went ahead and imposed them nonetheless.

So Americans, it seems, are hypocritical, power-hungry, and self-serving. You can add "violent" and "greedy" to the list, two adjectives that, in the Pew surveys, majorities in many countries associate with the United States. And yet, when you look closer at the facts, you see flashes of the ambivalence that characterized the French reaction to the American exhibits in 1867. In almost all the developed countries and in India, most people see Americans, whatever their faults, as "hardworking" and "inventive." A study of global opinion leaders in 24 different countries found that America's economic dynamism and technological and scientific prowess were deeply appealing, and that the vision of America as a land of opportunity retains a powerful hold on people in most parts of the world. One of the reasons why Americanization is often seen as so threatening is precisely because so many people in other countries are drawn to American products, technology, and culture. At the heart of much of the world's relationship to the United States is a profound mix of attraction and repulsion.

Quote:

There is a deep strain of American thought that sees going it alone as the only reasonable course of action.

The stereotypical view of Americans, by contrast, is that they feel no attraction to the world at all. According to Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes, pollsters who have done much of the work for Pew and who have written a book based on that work called, tellingly enough, America Against the World, most Americans "downplay the importance of America's relationship to other nations" and are "indifferent to global issues," even in the midst of a war. They also tend to exhibit "an inattentive self-centeredness unmindful of their country's deepening linkages with other countries." It isn't really that we can't see ourselves the way others see us: most Americans know that their country's global reputation is not good (whereas in some countries people are more optimistic about their reputation than they should be-the French, for instance, believe that they are more loved by the world than they actually are). Most Americans also tend to agree with the rest of the world about their own flaws: almost half those surveyed in the U.S., too, describe Americans as "violent" and "greedy." The difference is that it doesn't seem to matter much. Most Americans are happy with their country, if not with their president, and most think that the good things about the place-including its economic opportunities, its technological inventiveness, and its level of freedom-outweigh the bad.

The same is true, as it happens, of most places in the world. While Americans are usually thought of as exceptional in their self-regard, people in many countries have a similarly positive view of their own societies. (For example, 88 percent of the Chinese think their country is great.) Nor does Americans' self-regard translate, as many assume it does, into a desire to remake the rest of the world. While American policymakers over the past few years have emphasized the need to spread American values-often thought of as "universal values"-most Americans describe themselves as uninterested in that kind of missionary work. This is hardly surprising. American exceptionalism has historically manifested itself in two different forms: on the one hand, the desire to evangelize the rest of the world, showing it the truth and converting it to the American way, and on the other, the desire to remain aloof from the rest of the world, free of entangling alliances and complications. If the Bush administration seems in thrall to the first vision, most Americans seem more comfortable with the second.

Quote:

It isn't that we can't see ourselves the way others see us: most Americans know that their country's global reputation is not good. The difference is that it doesn't matter much.

The rough picture we're getting is that the rest of the world is unhappy with and distrustful of the United States, while Americans-although they'd probably prefer to be liked-don't really care. But once you start to look beneath the surface-and, in particular, to look not just at what people say, but at what they do, and at the everyday reality of their lives-it becomes impossible to accept that there really is a fundamental alienation between the U.S. and the rest of the world. The paradox of American existence today is that for all the unilateral actions and rhetoric, and for all of the supposed indifference to the rest of the world, Americans have never been more reliant on other countries, in large part because of the integration of the global economy over the past three decades.

The connection between the U.S. and the rest of the world is, to begin with, a concrete financial reality: the U.S. now buys $600 billion more a year in foreign goods and services than it sells of its own goods and services. It also sells hundreds of billions of dollars a year in stocks, bonds, and property to foreign investors. Our quality of life, in other words, depends heavily on the work of people in other countries, and on the willingness of foreigners to invest here. That also means, of course, that much of the well-being of people elsewhere depends on us. They may dread the voraciousness of American consumerism and materialism but, without our seemingly bottomless appetite for stuff, plenty of economies would grind to a halt. We are not the breadbasket of the world. We are the consumer of last resort. As the historian Charles Maier puts it, if America is presiding over an empire, it's an empire of consumption.

Similarly, the remarkable renaissance of American business over the past two decades is impossible to imagine without the impact of management techniques imported from abroad (most notably from Japan), including an emphasis on quality, the focus on lean manufacturing, just-in-time production, and a greater emphasis on involving workers in the decision-making process. For all the talk and concern over outsourcing and offshoring, millions of Americans now work for foreign companies in the U.S., including workers at some of the most productive factories in the world (like Nissan's and Toyota's). Abroad, meanwhile, the hostility to the United States has had surprisingly little effect on American companies, even among firms whose appeal seems fundamentally tied to their status as American icons. McDonald's, for instance, is now more successful in France than anywhere else in the world, with the exception of the U.S., while three-quarters of Coke's sales come from abroad. And although American companies have not remade the world in their image, as the spectre of Americanization threatened, they have created tremendous value by sending their technological and managerial savvy abroad-just as foreign companies did in the U.S. More than enough has been written about the way American companies are changing places like Bangalore and Shanghai, but the benefits of American know-how are being felt even in Europe. European divisions of American companies, for instance, are significantly more productive than similarly-sized divisions at European firms.

Quote:

The paradox of American existence today is that for all the unilateral actions and rhetoric, Americans have never been more reliant on other countries.

Culturally, too, the connections between the U.S. and the rest of the world appear to be growing tighter, not weaker. Globalization in the field of culture is often thought of as a one-way process-Hollywood trampling over domestic industries. But the traffic runs very much in both directions. Some of the biggest American pop-culture successes of recent years, including Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, Big Brother, and American Idol, were all imported from abroad (which may sound like a good reason to keep the borders closed). And mainstream culture in general is increasingly influenced by foreign imports, from Japanese manga to reggaeton music. The internet has obviously played an important role in this process, by making it easier to discover new and interesting work and by making it economically feasible to distribute it in the U.S. And even travel, after falling sharply in the wake of September 11th, is on the rise. Last year, foreign tourists spent a record amount of money in the U.S., which is now the third most popular destination in the world (though still well behind both France and Spain), and the number of foreign visitors was close to the peak it hit in 2000. And as of 2004-the most recent year we have statistics for-Americans, despite the fact that they get almost no vacation time and have to deal with the declining value of the dollar, were spending more money on international tourism than anyone but the Germans.

The point is not to suggest that all is well between America and the rest of the world. Global distrust of the U.S. and fears of American imperialism have only been magnified by the United States' seeming disdain for multilateral solutions and its willingness to flex its muscles when necessary. But underneath the rhetoric, there are indelible connections between the U.S. and the world, and these are changing in ways both profound and beneficial. In the long run, these connections are likely to have more of an impact on the relationship between the U.S. and other countries than are the policies of the Bush administration. One potent sign of this may be that hostility toward the U.S. is actually much weaker among younger people. This may seem curious, given that we typically associate rebellion and protest with the young, but it reflects the simple fact that as the years pass, the world becomes more cosmopolitan, not less.

There is still a lot that can go wrong. If we think of the Exposition Universelle and that mix of horror and impressed fascination with which Europeans viewed Americans in 1867, we might recognize that either of those reactions can come to dominate. In thinking about how to keep the world more fascinated than horrified, one useful recommendation might be for the U.S. to play to the strengths that the world already seems to respect, including technological savvy and entrepreneurial vision, while trying to solve problems that have a genuine global reach. In this regard, it matters that important work in the field of public health and economic development is being done by Americans in the nonprofit sector, most prominently by the Gates Foundation, but also by scores of smaller groups that are taking the skills and techniques of American entrepreneurialism and applying them to the problems of the developing world. Coming up with a vaccine for malaria isn't going to solve the reputational challenges created by American hegemony, or the war in Iraq, or the Bush administration's penchant for going it alone. But it will make a difference. So, too, will an acknowledgement by the U.S. that solitude can be overrated. As Gertrude Stein once wrote, "Don't you forget, a country can't live without friends."]]>

In the summer of 1867, Paris was flooded with visitors to the Exposition Universelle, one of the first of what would eventually come to be known as World's Fairs. Inside the Palais du Champ de Mars, the massive iron-and-glass main hall, people could wander among tens of thousands of exhibits from around the world featuring everything from exotic foods to new perfumes to fantastic new technologies. As the historian Arthur Chandler describes it, in a single day one could examine the canvases of Jean-Louis Ernest Meissonier and Jean-Léon Géron, check out jewelry settings and vases from around the world, and marvel at the giant cannon that Krupp, the German arms maker, had brought to Paris. And then, if you were of a certain mindset, you could worry about the Americans.

The U.S. government had committed itself to putting on a good show in Paris, in part as a way of winning more customers for American products, but also as a way of convincing skilled European workers that the United States was the best place to ply their trades. And put on a good show the Americans did. Their exhibits included Samuel Morse's remarkable new telegraph, demonstrations of the country's rich store of natural resources, and Cyrus McCormick's reaper. Although the Americans had less exhibition room than five other countries, they ended up winning four grand prizes at the Exposition. They also made some observers very nervous about what the future might hold. In the wake of the Exposition, Edmund and Jules Goncourt-two brothers whose co-written journals offer a brilliant impressionistic picture of Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century-wrote that the fair represented "the final blow in the Americanization of France, industry triumphing over art, the steam engine reigning in the place of the painting." For the Goncourts, the quintessentially American pursuit of technological progress guaranteed the eradication of quality and, ultimately, the destruction of culture. As the critic Rob Kroes has put it, America became the symbol of everything that was unsettling and dismaying about the advent of the modern world.

Accompanying the dismay, though, was also a deep respect for the fruits of American ambition and inventiveness. The French government had actively encouraged American participation in the fair; the French commissioner in charge of the Exposition said (perhaps with a touch of exaggeration) that Napoleon III, France's ruler, "had been very much astonished by the marvels of ingenuity and skill which he had observed in the United States." And the crowds that thronged the American exhibits-as well as the judges who awarded the prizes-must also have been impressed by what they saw. A world with telegraphs and mechanical reapers, it seemed, was surely better than one without them.

Almost a century and a half has passed since the Exposition Universelle, but the profound ambivalence America provoked there continues. Today Americanization-a word the Goncourts apparently coined-may be associated more with McDonald's, Hollywood, and the cult of the free market than with agricultural machinery, but fears remain of American culture and of American power running roughshod over local customs and creating a lowest-common-denominator world. These fears have been compounded by America's now overwhelming military power (which ensures no external check on its behavior) and by its tendency to act alone.

Since 2002, the Pew Research Center has been conducting an annual global attitudes survey, in which it polls thousands of people in countries around the world on a wide range of questions, including their attitudes toward their own countries, toward their neighbors, and toward the United States. The surveys show that dislike of America currently runs both wide and deep. This is not solely or even principally due to the policies of the Bush administration (although they have undoubtedly made things worse). Instead, it stems from a distrust of American power, both military and economic, and from concern for how American businesses are affecting the world. Perhaps the most troubling thing about these results is that, in the past, people drew a clear distinction between the American government and Americans; hostility toward America was typically pegged to bad policies. Today the hostility tends to reach beyond the government and attaches itslef to Americans as a whole. In other words, in a lot of the world, they don't like us. They really don't like us. (Thankfully, there are still a few places in the world-Great Britain, Canada, and Poland-where a majority of the people have a favorable view of the U.S. And Indians absolutely seem to love us.) The stereotype of the Ugly American has been commonplace since the end of World War II, but the world's view of Americans has never been quite this bleak.

If there is one trait that seems to characterize American behavior, and which contributes to global distrust, it's unilateralism, the American unwillingness to be bound by anything outside of one's own will. This has been accentuated in recent years-think of the decision to go to war in Iraq without a U.N. resolution, the refusal to ratify the Kyoto treaty, and the initial decision to ignore the Geneva Conventions in the war in Afghanistan. But it's hardly something the Bush administration invented. On the contrary, there is a deep strain of American thought that rejects the idea of being fettered, in any way, by non-Americans, and that sees going it alone as the only reasonable course of action.

There are two factors that make American unilateralism especially troubling in the eyes of many. The first is simply the breadth of American power. While no one is nostalgic for the Cold War, a majority of people in every country that Pew surveyed (U.S. excluded) believe that it would be better for the world if a country or group of countries emerged as a rival to U.S. hegemony. Whatever the dangers of superpower conflict, apparently they're preferable to having most of the world's military might in the hands of one nation.

The second factor is that the U.S. now regularly circumvents or ignores many of the international institutions that, paradoxically, it played a major role in creating. The United Nations, the various institutions designed to combat genocide and war crimes, the Geneva Conventions, the World Trade Organization-the U.S. was instrumental in the development of all of these. Yet in just the past decade, it's refused to ratify the International Criminal Court, refused to vote for a resolution banning land mines, refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, until recently declared the Geneva Conventions inapplicable to enemy combatants, and so on. From the perspective of American interests, each of those decisions may have been the correct one. But, to many, each also smacks of hypocrisy, making it seem as if the U.S. is happy to play by the rules only as long as it's guaranteed to win.

Take the question of free trade, the one cause that, more than any other, the U.S. has been unremittingly committed to over the past decade and a half. Without the U.S., much of the good work that has been done in lowering trade barriers and doing away with subsidies in the global economy would never have happened. Yet in 2004, in order to placate voters in steel-producing states, the Bush administration slapped tariffs on foreign steel. These were tariffs the administration knew to be in violation of World Trade Organization rules, yet it went ahead and imposed them nonetheless.

So Americans, it seems, are hypocritical, power-hungry, and self-serving. You can add "violent" and "greedy" to the list, two adjectives that, in the Pew surveys, majorities in many countries associate with the United States. And yet, when you look closer at the facts, you see flashes of the ambivalence that characterized the French reaction to the American exhibits in 1867. In almost all the developed countries and in India, most people see Americans, whatever their faults, as "hardworking" and "inventive." A study of global opinion leaders in 24 different countries found that America's economic dynamism and technological and scientific prowess were deeply appealing, and that the vision of America as a land of opportunity retains a powerful hold on people in most parts of the world. One of the reasons why Americanization is often seen as so threatening is precisely because so many people in other countries are drawn to American products, technology, and culture. At the heart of much of the world's relationship to the United States is a profound mix of attraction and repulsion.

Quote:

There is a deep strain of American thought that sees going it alone as the only reasonable course of action.

Quote:

It isn't that we can't see ourselves the way others see us: most Americans know that their country's global reputation is not good. The difference is that it doesn't matter much.

Quote:

The paradox of American existence today is that for all the unilateral actions and rhetoric, Americans have never been more reliant on other countries.

Wayne Lee, 55. Camera no. 410. Observation site: Hachita, New Mexico. Hometown: Corry, Pennsylvania.

Anonymous migrant. Camera no. 375. Distributed in Naco, Mexico.

Anonymous Minuteman. Observation site: Hachita, New Mexico.

Anonymous migrants. Camera no. 007. Distributed in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

Anonymous Minuteman. Camera no. 435. Observation site: Arizona border.

Javier, traveling to Las Vegas. Camera no. 243. Distributed in Agua Prieta, Mexico.]]>

Last year, three friends gave hundreds of disposable cameras to two groups on opposite sides of the U.S.-Mexico border: the undocumented migrants crossing the desert and the American civilians trying to stop them. The result: A portrait of the border like no other.

Every day in small towns and desert stretches along the Arizona-Mexico border, a literal battle informs a political and social one. While the public, the president, Congress, and the courts debate the future of U.S. immigration law, thousands of migrants take the very real action of illegally crossing the border into this country. Waiting for them is a volunteer outfit of border patrollers who call themselves the Minutemen.

The Border Film Project-a three-person team made up of a Rhodes scholar, a filmmaker, and a Wall Street analyst-hatched a plan to simplify the complexities of immigration and show the realities on the ground. They handed out hundreds of cameras to both sides, cleverly encouraging their safe return with pre-addressed, stamped envelopes and zero-balance gift cards to be recharged upon successful completion of the project (Wal-Mart cards for the migrants, Shell Gas for the Minutemen).

The beauty of their approach is its refreshing evenhandedness. Give cameras to those affected and let the stories tell themselves. No agenda, no censorship. The goal is to raise awareness of that porous, spongy thing we call the border.

You can see more of the resulting photography at forthcoming exhibitions-at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and at DiverseWorks in Houston-and a book is slated for release early next year. In the meantime, GOOD offers you the first published portfolio of images from the Border Film Project.

Wayne Lee, 55. Camera no. 410. Observation site: Hachita, New Mexico. Hometown: Corry, Pennsylvania.

Anonymous migrant. Camera no. 375. Distributed in Naco, Mexico.

Anonymous Minuteman. Observation site: Hachita, New Mexico.

Anonymous migrants. Camera no. 007. Distributed in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

Anonymous Minuteman. Camera no. 435. Observation site: Arizona border.

Javier, traveling to Las Vegas. Camera no. 243. Distributed in Agua Prieta, Mexico.]]> GOOD Tue, 21 Nov 2006 12:03:17 PST