From “The Scratching Post”: American pride

By Ken Marks

[Originally posted on The Scratching Post, March 25, 2018. Republished here by permission of the author.]

Have you ever watched “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” You can get an education, and not just from the questions and answers. For example, it recently aired a week of shows with the theme “American Pride.” All the contestants did a service for their communities: charity work, nursing, firefighting, teaching, and the like. Certainly, we should be grateful for the good they do, sometimes at the sacrifice of a livable income. But it’s hard for me to see gratitude as pride, and I certainly see nothing “American” about what I feel or what they do.
    In fact, I’m pretty much down on the whole idea of connecting nations with pride. The connection has nasty consequences if people don’t take care. I don’t even like connecting national pride with Olympics medals. Didn’t the Olympics originally salute the glory of individual achievement?

But I digress. My aim here is to focus on America’s preposterous self-regard. On the Inflate-O-Meter, we surely must have a score that rivals those of ancient Rome and Nazi Germany. When you’re certain that you go to war with God on your side or that your founding documents were blessed by God, you’re off the meter. When you create a national symbol that you pledge allegiance to and regard as reverently as a juju object (kneeling bad, standing good), you’re off the meter.
    Considering our history, you’d think that humility was in order. Yes, our Constitution is an admirable document, but even as it was ratified, we were hip-deep in racism. Native Americans and Africans got the brunt of it, then and even now. As waves of immigrants came to our shores, the Irish, Italians, Jews, and Asians joined the ranks of the mistreated. Theses days, the haters focus on Muslims and Hispanics. Assimilation has been prolonged, tentative, and often ingenuous. Are we proud?
    Blue collar workers were overworked and underpaid as America industrialized. New hazards in the workplace were ignored, and the bosses fought efforts to unionize. It took the Great Depression and the decimation of the labor force to make the labor movement irresistible. It grew for decades, with workers from the services sector joining in. But in the 80’s, millions of industrial jobs began to move abroad, and the political mood of the country changed. Belligerence swelled toward the foreign producers of oil, cars, and hi-tech products. The political influence of unions waned as the ranks of unionized workers dwindled. The minimum wage stagnated, losing any correspondence to the rate of inflation. Today, it’s considerably harder to earn a living wage than in the middle of the last century. Are we proud?
    Though many Western nations offer universal health coverage, we do not. We became politically aware of our failure long ago, but it was only 8 years ago that a partial remedy was enacted. And now our current president and congress have moved to make that remedy unworkable. Insurance is once again unaffordable to people who managed to scrape by for a few years. Are we proud?
    We lead the world in annual shooting homicides per 100,000 people, with the exception of the Central and South American countries (minus Argentina) and Swaziland. We are far ahead of everyone in gun ownership. The number of guns owned by Americans and the population of America are virtually the same number. Serbia holds second place, with three-eighths of our ownership rate. We also hold sway in mass shootings. In recent decades worldwide, there have been 18 mass shootings in which 20 or more people were killed. We are the only nation with more than 1 of those mass shootings to its name; we have 7. Our politicians are cowed by the gun lobby, whose solutions to out-of-control gun violence are as shameful as they are stupid. Are we proud?
    True, we have won wars, most significantly World War II. We’ve done well in conventional land, sea, and air confrontations. However, nations haven’t fought that way since the 50’s. Our enemies use guerilla tactics, land mines, car bombs, and martyrdom. We can no longer rely on the power of our industrialized economy to overwhelm them with mass-produced materiel.
    The men and women in our armed forces have fought bravely to achieve our government’s objectives, even when they were ill considered. But the militaries of our adversaries have done the same. Our military, to the extent it keeps us safe and sound, has my deep gratitude, but I also recognize that its human strengths and weaknesses are no different from those of its opposites. We’re all human beings, and it’s in our common humanity that I find pride.
    Can our national ego be deflated? Can we come to realize that we are exceptional only in being exceptionally fortunate – tucked safely between two oceans, free to expand into a continent with enormous natural resources, far from the oppression of Europe’s wars, monarchies, and class system? To make a radical change in our self-regard, we’ll have to focus, day after day and for years to come, on becoming more modest. Then one day – a day I’ll regretfully never see – people may begin to talk about American humility.

Copyright © 2021 by Ken Marks Ken Marks was a contributing editor with Paul Clark & Tom Lowe when “Moristotle” became “Moristotle & Co.” A brilliant photographer, witty conversationalist, and elegant writer, Ken contributed photographs, essays, and commentaries from mid-2008 through 2012. Late in 2013, Ken birthed the blog The Scratching Post. He also posts albums of his photos on Flickr.