The American Question

I’d like to take up the question of: what does it mean to be an American? First impressions to the contrary, that isn’t just a question to be confined within berets and bandied across the tables of Starbucks; it touches upon issues of citizenship and immigration, legal and political obligation, and the rights and duties of each of us.

President Obama opened this question in his State of the Union on Tuesday. There he reconfirmed his status as the President of Sighs. His address was mostly one of prose, and mostly that of the business memo dialect, but near thebeginning the President allowed himself one memorable excursion into the mystic chords of homily. One thing makes us “bound together as one people,” he said: “we share common hopes and a common creed; that the dreams of a little girl in Tucson are not so different from those of our own children, and that they deserve to be fulfilled.”
So what does it mean to be an American? To have hope. That is hopelessly vague, and vaguely pleasant, so you might be tempted to do as I did when I heard the speech the first time: to lop off the President’s sentence of rhetorical whipped cream. But I hope we can do better than that. If we can’t, we’re in trouble.
For America is not united by any more concrete identity. We obviously share no race, religion, or ethnicity. Some might say we all have a common faith in the liberal government that allows such plurality; but I doubt that: Communist and Nazi Americans are still Americans. Is it the imaginary lines within which we all happen to live? That, too, is problematic, for an American on vacation in France is still an American; and a French tourist in New York is not one yet.
For an answer to the American Question we need to draw from more diffuse matter. I think the President was on to something: our identity comes from a “common creed”: a commitment not just to an, but the American Dream. In its broadest sense, the creed is one of optimism and hope, a specific kind of hope. But the President was not exactly right: Americanness is affirmed not when “We do big things,” but when we do better things. The ideal American, more so than any other, is an improver, someone who leaves the world better than he found it. He is portrayed by our icons: inventors, pioneers, revolutionaries who built as much as they broke. It is this spirit who would be most likely to pronounce, and to draw inspiration from, the invocation of Federalist No. 1:
“It has been frequently remarked, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.”
The American hopes to improve things. This answer to the American Question is still vague, and perhaps it is little better than the President’s more pithy antiphon: “The American Hopes.” We need to keep asking the American Question and we need to return a better answer. Otherwise we are no more than a nation of soft and saffron esperance, presided over by sighs.
photo credit: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/171/441030585_84546b0a5c.jpg