I figured I should rectify that knowledge deficit and saw in my classmates a golden opportunity to get smart about the country quickly. Meeting people for the first time, they would often lead with where they were from. Of course, some places were over represented - you'd meet New Yorkers by the bushel, New Englanders (which usually meant Boston + college towns) by the score, Bay Area Californians by the gigabyte. But Texans weren't uncommon, and the more exotic states (meaning Nebraska and Kentucky, not Alaska and Hawaii) popped up in ones and twos. I'd tell them I was from Canada and didn't know much about the States, and they'd be more than happy to tell me all about their country. Here are some of the answers I got (recovered from long passed memory, so apologies if you were one of my informants and I'm remembering it wrong):
America is all about the hustle. You can come from anywhere, be whoever you want to be, do whatever you want to do, and nobody cares as long as you keep up, work hard, find your opportunities and break through to become successful and really be somebody. (New Yorker, but I also heard this from Chicagoans)
America is a place where you know your neighbors, you look out for one another, you build up your community and you always have time to help. It's small-town sports teams and going to church just to say hello. (Small-town Minnesotan)
America is a place where no one can tell you what to do. You can stand your ground and do things your way and you don't have to bow and scrape to anyone if you have a place of your own - and there's room for everyone, because the space is boundless and the sky is high and big. Also football. (Texas, obviously)
America is about diversity, about multi-culturalism, about eating sushi for lunch and pho for dinner. You can put together your own values and have whatever lifestyle you want and everyone can do their own thing as long as they respect the others around them. It's about getting out in nature, whether you're hiking or surfing or just lying down in a park. You don't have to follow traditional rules because America is about the future and not the past. (California)
America is barbecues with your family, fireworks on the 4th of July, being an Eagle Scout, believing in something larger than yourself and being willing to sacrifice for it, like your grandfather's did back in World War 2. It's about being able to have a good life - two cars, a nice house, money enough not to worry about it - and being willing to work for it and protect it. (Oklahoma or basically any non-coastal suburb)
America is about getting up if you've been kicked in the teeth. It's about not taking no for an answer and being willing to fight for everything you have. It's about doing it yourself, because no one will help you. (Native American)
You might expect people from different parts to give different answers - different experiences breed different perspectives - so then I'd ask them about the other answers I got. I'd ask the New Yorker about what I heard from the Texan, the Texan about what the Californian told me. Almost universally, the response was a dismissal, sometimes polite (Midwesterners would say, "oh, well you know, those guys are different") sometimes less so ("rednecks don't count," "Californians aren't really Americans") followed by a double-down that their particular definition was what it REALLY meant to be American.
This felt like narrow-mindedness at the time. It started making more sense as I spent more time in the US and seeing different parts of the country. The same flag flies everywhere, but life is very different from place to place, each region with its own accent, its own food, its own skyline, its own pace. A country is a very abstract thing - some symbols, some laws, some shared stories and a distant government that you ignore until it does something to get you mad. Looking back, I realize that when I asked about America, my classmates weren't describing a country, they were describing their home, which was the thing about America that they really felt connected, really treasured and really loved. And all of their homes were different.
With this realization came the awareness of a bigger question - if America means all these different things to all these different Americans, than what keeps them together? What keeps all these people, with all of their different ideas about what their country is or should be, together?
Enter Waylon Jennings:
"America" is his patriotic national ballad (if not obvious from the name), and both the song and video are remarkable. This is an old song, from 1984, inspired by the Los Angeles Olympics among other things, and Jennings claimed it was one that he was particularly proud and fond of.
For the millenials reading this over their avocado toast, Waylon Jennings is old-timey country. He was born on a farm outside Littlefield, a nowhere town in West Texas.
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| This is the google image - a tiny church (Baptist, of course) and a lot of nothing |
His father started as a farm worker before opening a grocery. His mother changed his name to spite a Baptist preacher. He dropped out of high school. He wasn't an early Billy Ray Cyrus - he didn't move out to LA, he didn't Hannah Montana his children, he didn't do reality TV, but he did do the voiceover for the Dukes of Hazzard. What I'm getting at is that he's about as perfect a red state cultural figure as you can get, but just think about the song, just look at the video.
"Well I come from down around Tennessee, but the people in California are nice to me," he sings. "My brothers are all black and white, yellow too, and the red man is right to expect a little from you, make a promise and then follow through, America."
The video features all of the usual country imagery - cowboys and tractors, vistas and crop fields - but to illustrate who he means by his brothers it shows an urban basketball game, bringing in young men that, in a different red state production, might just be extras mowed down by a righteous Charles Bronson. And this right before he acknowledges that America still owes a debt to the Native Americans.
Unlike other patriotic ballads, there's no glorification of the military - instead, you have a line recognizing the grace and decency of the United States in granting amnesty to those who left the US to avoid the draft during the Vietnam war.
The countless different places - the countless different homes - that make up America belong together only when they believe they do, and "America" shows how you build up that belief. Don't deny your own identity or your own culture, but reach out to bring in everyone else and that means showing the patience, understanding and generosity to take them as they are before asking that they do the same for you. This song isn't woke or politically correct, it's not an exercise in virtue signaling. In 1984, political correctness wasn't yet even a sparkle in a liberal professor's eye, and some people will be quick to pounce on his terminology (to borrow from a great movie, Red Man is not the preferred nomenclature - Native American, please), and every note drips with American pride and sincerity.
This sentiment feels absent from contemporary America, where it feels as though different national subcultures are at each other's throats all the time, eager to dominate or purge those who disagree with them. But things may not be as bad as all that. A few years after I graduated college, I found myself in grad school at Berkeley (I know, even worse) at a 4th of July barbecue. We were all critical of American policy, and there was a lot to be critical about - the Iraq war was raging, the Patriot Act had just been passed, and George W. Bush had won reelection, with all of us feeling acute frustration and disappointment. As we waited for the hamburgers to grill, someone suggested something to mark the holiday - given that we spent the rest of the year complaining about the US, maybe each of us should name one thing we admire or appreciate about America. We stood awkwardly in a circle waiting for someone to start, inhibited more by social anxiety than by lacking anything to offer. As soon as some one made the first move, things went quickly. The question went around the circle once, then twice, then three times, a mounting inventory of America's virtues that was only interrupted when someone started an argument about football teams.
On this 4th of July, wherever you are, I hope you can feel some of that Waylon Jennings spirit.
Happy Independence Day!
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