01-Nov-2006
The American Way
I recall a minor pop/rock song some decades ago, a bouncy thing by John Mellencamp with a fetching beat that contained a line, which is about all I remember of the song, something like this:
Jack and Diane, makin’ it the American way
For as much as the song was forgettable, that line was not, and even then, when I was in my twenties or early thirties, there was a bemusing tick to it. What, exactly, was it for Jack and Diane to be making it the American way? Shoving aside the sexual entendre here (the American way, back then, was heterosexual in the missionary position, a condom permissible so long as it was “sold for the prevention of disease only”), I wondered long and hard about a young couple, of which I was a part, making it.
Ideas were pretty swirly then and existed in great multitudes and came at you through a blizzard of media. Above all, we didn’t want to be what our parents were, but we knew we were parents and had similar responsibilities.
Business suits were out; sexual experimentation was in. All government was inherently untrustworthy. Huge corporations, through their bought congressmen, opened up new markets by starting wars in strange places. Marx, Hegel, Lenin, Trotsky, Fanon, Guevara, Camus were in (as was, for the truly hip, truly progressive and testosterone-charged, Russell). Getting married to avoid the draft was in (I was 1-Y for medical reasons – nothing disabling). Cheap wine was in (Boone’s Farm, Thunderbird), as were LSD, pot, and mild amphetamines. Such theocratic icons as Presbyterianism, Methodism, Lutheranism, Catholicism, Episcopalianism, and the Baptists were out. Hugh Hefner was our great comedian, though we laughed like hell at John Mitchell, Martha Mitchell, Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, Spiro Agnew, and General William Westmoreland. Political parties were out. Kurt Vonnegut was our sage, though in his aging he has become so bitter we have recently had to withdraw his membership. Richard Brautigan we might have considered for secular sainthood, but then he killed himself. Tom Wolfe was good until he turned into Stephen King, and pop culture – well, all culture was pop. If earlier “culture” had to do with things like opera and symphonies and long novels and rhyming poetry and paintings in gilt frames, pop culture was primarily concerned with turning itself into a list, a very long list that ranged from Zen koans to pornography, Ravi Shankar to Maria Callas, Lenny Bruce to Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra to Jefferson Airplane, Martin Luther King to Abbie Hoffman, Billy Graham to Wavy Gravy, and “Gone With The Wind” (the movie) to “Easy Rider.”
Most succinctly, though, the “American way” seemed to have to do with choices. No longer was America a rural place where son followed father into the fields or daughter followed mother into the delivery room. Mom shaved her legs, daughter grew hair in her armpits. Dad thought oppression was bad, yet couldn’t understand why “they” would want to buy a house next to his. Son thought it was great to date a black girl, though few white boys did. Daughter, though, did date black guys, especially if she was tall and blond. She thought it great, too, to give birth to a black child, although if an abortion was deemed necessary it was wonderful that such a choice was available.
We thought we could be anything. Better still, we thought we could be anybody. Greatness was ours if we chose it, as was the feral anonymity of the rural commune. Art seemed a worthy calling; pursuing the dollar did not. As religions became comatose, Time Magazine declared God dead. That seemed cool, but it had (it seemed) nothing to do with spirituality, and spirituality, we soon discovered, gave birth to words, lots of words. Whole forests were doomed to perfidy by the publication of wretched books of prose and poetry and the proliferation of underground newspapers. Grammar was out; expression was in. If you couldn’t fuck, you could always talk, but fucking was thought to be every bit as good as conversation – and you didn’t have to have a point. The hallmark of logic back then was the non sequitor, expressed cryptically as:
If A, then why not?
Today we think the American way is something to be imposed on others. We think that certain fundamental human rights only apply to those who do no wrong. We believe that in the interests of our safety it is permissible to torture suspects, to lock them away in secret prisons, to deny them access to counsel, and to forbid them the chance to confront their accusers. We think church and state ought to be separate, yet we give millions of government dollars to faith-based organizations, and billions to all recognized creeds in the form of freedom from taxation. We view our medical establishment as the finest in the world yet prevent millions of our citizens from using that establishment due to inability to pay the outrageous sums required. We believe in free speech, but not for school citizens, corporate citizens or dissenting citizens. We believe in individual autonomy yet routinely refuse women the right to make decisions about their own bodies. We believe in individual autonomy yet increasingly allow our private selves to be publicly tracked through videocameras as well as devices in our cars, our cellphones, our personal computers, and even our library records, bookstore purchases, and financial transactions. We believe in representative government even though we have permitted our legislators to become the spokespeople for, on average, sixty-five lobbyists apiece. We give celebrity status and great wealth to a drug addict like Rush Limbaugh while thousands of our finest artists languish in obscurity and poverty. We fill large arenas in order to watch phony wrestlers, and we go by the thousands to watch race cars being driven around in circles while a bookstore feels fortunate if three people show up for the book signing of a new poet or novelist.
I’m still looking for the American way, and Jack and Diane are probably retired by now and living on Social Security, but I think it’s a fantastic time to be an American. We are rich in unfulfilled dreams.
G. K. Wuori © 2006
Photoillustration by the author
