This Fucker Right Here

Martha and I had another long discussion last night about one’s obligations to one’s nation. The conversation resulted from the expected backlash I received after writing that I was considering leaving the US, and it got a little heated when she told me she thought the tone in my piece was “dickish.”

She was right, of course, and I have been working on toning down my dickishness, as I wrote about here. I said my tone came from a natural defensiveness I feel whenever discussing this topic. We’re not used to hearing our fellow Americans undermining the familiar national thesis that we live in the greatest country in the world.

One could make a strong argument that post WWII America, for a time, was the greatest nation in the world. First of all, apart from a famous naval base in Hawaii, we were intact. We were also incredibly wealthy, productive, and strong. Our middle class was surging as a result of wartime spending and pent-up consumer demand after war rationing. This created a virtuous cycle of consumer demand creating jobs which created further demand, which created more jobs. Our educational system was the envy of the world. Our historic system of racial injustice was slowly – slooooowly – moving towards greater equity. Women had successfully agitated for the vote and were beginning to stir into a potent civil rights movement. Etc. etc. etc.

This fucker right here.

Then came Vietnam, Watergate, the protest movement, youth rebellion and the attendant freak-out towards the new liberalism, as exemplified by the ascendancy of Barry Goldwater. Even though Goldwater lost to Johnson, his brand of harder-edged paranoid conservatism set the stage for the more telegenic Reagan to defeat incumbent Jimmy Carter, after the economic uncertainties of the 70’s combined with the dirty deal Reagan cut with the Iranians to keep the hostages in Tehran until after the election.

It was Reagan who ripped up the social contract of the post WWII boom: undermining unions, lowering taxes on the wealthy which he justified using the “voodoo economics” of supply-side capitalism, exploiting racism, turning his back on the AIDS crisis, antipathy towards the environment, and – just for funsies - I’ll throw in illegally selling weapons to the same country that kidnapped our citiziens to secretly fund a war in Nicaragua.

His most lasting and grotesque contribution to the American body politic was marrying the sizable, and growing, Christian evangelical community with the so-called “country club Republicanism” of the Eisenhower era. It has been this poisonous relationship that gave rise to George W. Bush, the Tea Party Republicans of Sarah Palin, and, finally, Donald Trump.

And now here we are, the richest, most technologically advanced nation in the history of the world, whose citizens cannot afford homes, medical care, or a college education. One of our two political parties has been captured by cabal of Christian theocrats. Our news media is broken. Every day our people are shooting each other in the streets. We are directionless, our only national aim, apparently, the accretion of evermore wealth placed in the hands of a rising oligarchic class. I’m sorry if that no longer sounds like the greatest nation on Earth.

The values of this nation do not currently align with my own. Will they ever again? That’t the question I keep asking myself. It’s the question that has me eyeing the exit. That does not mean I’m on my way out the door, only that I think it’s important and appropriate for people like me to start having the public conversation about America’s failures and the need for reform.

The problem is that it appears that most of my fellow Americans do not want reform of the kind that I mean, which would involve reorienting America’s traditional post WWII role from “world cop” into something… less violent. Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex went unheeded. That wartime machine metastasized until it captured the entirety of the nation’s body politic. We’re now in a situation where our economy is dependent on people killing each other all over the globe.

We are a nation of war mongers because war is the spoiled meat on which America feeds.

It would also mean a reorientation of our national interests from mindless money-grubbing to elevating the common good (healthcare, education, infrastructure, the arts, etc.), a notion which many Americans have turned their back on, preferring the anachronistic rugged individualism of our frontier history.

Further, it would mean opening our doors wider to immigration, with a special emphasis on welcoming people who most need our help. If I owe a debt to America for anything, it is that this nation welcomed my family when the czar made living in Russia impossible for Jews. That is a debt I wish more Americans would recognize, many of whose own immigrant forebears were welcomed here when they had nowhere else to go.

When others want to come here, we Americans take the snooty position that emigrating to the States is the default setting of humanity. But when of us talks about his disappointment with the nation, and starts casting his eyes towards other places that might provide a better environment, the reaction is anger.

Again, I’m not saying I’m leaving. Also, I recognize that nobody should give a shit whether I stay or go. The larger point is to spur a conversation about the social contract, and the terms and conditions by which we live.

To turn one’s back on the US – even if it doesn’t involve renouncing one’s citizenship, which I don’t think I would ever do - is to put a pinprick in our inflated national self-opinion. We are not the greatest nation in the metrics that I care most about: happiness, community, peacability.

There are those who say, “Stay and fight,” to which I respond, “Why?”

I’m not going to run for office. I don’t have enough money to influence anything. I have no authority and no desire to walk around the streets holding a placard. I’ve given over fifty years of my life to America; I’ve paid my taxes and voted and marched and done all the things I’m supposed to do as a responsible citizen. My debt to this nation – to the extent that such a debt even exists - is paid.

I don’t know how many years I have left. I’d like those years to be spent in peace.