Quit Apologizing for Being American

By Luther Ray Abel

Sunday, July 16, 2023

 

Of all the obscene pleasures Americans share an interest in, our penchant for apologizing for our Americanness while denigrating our birthplace is the most insufferable. Whether right-wingers moaning about the loss of an America that never existed or left-wingers explaining to a Bosnian farmer on Discord how the U.S. is literally a fascist hellscape, it’s shamefully egotistical to announce to the world our foibles as if they’re novel or the least bit interesting. There is very little reason to believe that life could be any better anywhere at any time than in this country today, and those saying otherwise are Francophile dorks or selling something.

 

Maybe the most frustrating example of this behavior is online in comment sections, where Europeans and Canadians grouse in error about us while fellow Americans celebrate the abuse or even facilitate it. American travelers, typically the wealthier ones, who pretend to be Canadians are just one more example.

 

But why do we do this? J.J. McCullough, a Canadian columnist for the Washington Post and a culture analyst on YouTube, recently posted a considered investigation of our national neurosis.

 

McCullough breaks the reason for our disdain into four parts:

 

1.       Noxious political rhetoric

2.       Mainstreaming conspiracy theories

3.       Foreign criticism (“malevolently well-informed”)

4.       Capitalism (availability of anti-American products and advertising)

 

What McCullough gets precisely right is how our mania expresses itself — we reward vendors, politicians, and foreigners for saying what we feel to be true. But fool’s gold and the critiques of a random Greek guy on Facebook aren’t causing us to act this way. Rather our self-obsession and feelings of wrongness are the cause — the same way that it’s impossible to convince a mom that her kid is ugly unless she suggests it herself, at which point you pity the child while reviling the mother. Her vanity and loss of perspective make it a hideous, anti-maternal display. Such is our case.

 

Tim Carney appeared recently on Charlie’s podcast, and they spoke at length about how disparate parts of America maintain hope in the American experiment because they’ve kept the civic institutions that have withered elsewhere. To oversimplify Carney’s book, those who attend church and the local high school’s football games are much more likely to think highly of the U.S. and her future. The wealth gap in his examples reinforces the idea that once modest wealth is achieved (home, car, and stable employment), people need to know that where they are matters. The dynmics of group ownership with the structure of private enterprise allow for material prosperity while maintaining the reason for growth: to effect good for those around us.

 

The answer to what ails us is simple: stop giving in to the pornography of rage and run for the school board or volunteer for a mission trip to rebuild an orphanage in Burkina Faso. We’re so wealthy and consumption-oriented that we can afford to fly to the wealthiest city of every developed nation and pick at the sweetmeats they offer our gullets and eyes. We then fly ourselves home and wonder why the U.S. doesn’t look like the tourist wonderland we just left.

 

We pay to be lied to. We like to be lied to . . . that’s a consumer choice too many of us have been making for far too long. Don’t apologize for Americans being stupid; apologize for being an American who’s so stupid he can’t see just how good his life is and how much better he can make it yet.