Make It For the Right Reasons

The Musty Man weighs in on the fallacy of hating where you're from in an article titled "Hating America". Citing his experience as an American traveling to Guatemala on multiple occasions, he concludes that one's reaction to foreign places speaks more of lens than location. A recurring theme of his critique is the reiteration that he holds little esteem for that most visible and archetypal of travelers: the American-who-hates-America.

While such a topic could easily degenerate into a "if you don't like it then don't come back" cliche, The Musty Man takes great effort to remain solemn, articulate, and entertaining. He opens several cans of worms about why Americans who hate on America are preposterous and self-loathing. This is why I found "Hating America" to be a thoroughly inspiring piece, not because I agree with its key tenets, but because it's a well-advocated point of view (from a lawyer) who is particularly acerbic towards those who settle for a superficial understanding of the weighty reality of what it means to be an American abroad.

I'll tag in for Musty Man and note that if you are fond of espousing how much you hate your home country, you've forgotten some key things about yourself:

• The vast majority of traveling Americans speak American English. Language shapes culture. Culture shapes language. You think in ways you've learned how to speak, and you express your origin in the way that you speak. No matter what you may hate about America, some of its deepest most unchangeable things are also some of the deepest most unchangeable things in you, and it comes out whenever you open your trap and jabber about Mr. T or Oprah or NPR. If you've had the priviledge of not being able to speak English for weeks or months on end, didn't it feel incredible to speak at full-speed again? What is that anyway?


• Kindergarten through PhD, we are the product of one of the world's most exquisitely demanding education systems (OK, some Europeans would contest this, but I disagree) If you're sitting in a mudhole on some other continent and considering how you could be happy spending the rest of your life in said mudhole, it's only because you have a potent frame of reference that is anything but a mudhole. Regardless, you've probably learned a few do's and don't's from that third grade teacher you hated so much.


• And the most important point, the wealth of this nation, acquired through luck, hard-work, and superpower militancy, is the reason you could climb in a steel tube and throw yourself over the oceans. The wrong way to push this point would be to say, "people have died for your good fortune, be grateful". The better way, one more worth pondering, is that the power of centuries of nationalism has led to the stark differences between what you see abroad and what you see at home. You could have been born on either side of the looking glass. And on any given day, the whole system could evaporate. There's no reason to get militant or depressed about it, just make yourself and others happy. And you can't do that by hating.
  

Truly I think all of the aforementioned points are self-evident and we all feel them, even if they aren't always at the tip of our consciousness. But all of that said, I think I've led us along a false axiom right at the start of this essay. All of those points are directly aimed at those Americans who genuinely hate America. All thirty-two of them.

The author of "Hating America" had a mutually drunken conversation with someone who mercilessly attacked the problems of America. And as those barstool conversations usually progress, one side makes a demon out of the other. One side gets polemical, the other side takes the bait, and woooo-eee, down goes the bottle and "I'd rather be in Mozambique, god damn it".

Let's face it, when we're not so drunk, we'd vouch for the good things: that America being from America means you have the freedom to disagree (although that's not something unique). You'll carry your currency farther (although that's not something unique). You'll travel using what has become the global language (although that's not something unique).

Perhaps it's already obvious: these are merely variants of my three subjects above. The difference - instead of nuanced cultural histories, these jingoist hijackings measure happiness by how powerful we are. And we shouldn't travel for these reasons nor should we remain in a country for those reasons. America shouldn't be loved for economic superiority, for once we're eclipsed by some other nation, what will have left for a history? There's Ralph Waldo Emerson, Buckminster Fuller, and Martin Luther King. If the jingoists win, I might need to salute all of the good ones and find another land. Carry the spirit of where I'm from to another place.

Are you surprised? Is it really that radical? That's what most of this nation's ancestors did.