“What is Russia?” Churchill said it’s “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma” and I’d add locked in a jail cell and dumped in a shithole.
And let’s not ask “What is Germany?” for fear that they’ll show us again.
Other nations are based on battle, blood, ethnicity, culture, language, and (unlike Jamestown) terra firma. Not America. We’re strangers turned loose in an opportunity. An opportunity to treat other strangers like shit very much included.
Witness, in the Declaration of Independence, our unalienable right to Pursuit of Happiness. Whatever the hell happiness is supposed to mean. Pace Webster’s, “dominantly agreeable emotion ranging in value from mere contentment to deep and intense joy in living,” happiness has no definition. Whatever makes you happy. We are a pursuit without a purpose. Always on the go with no idea where.
America is not a place. It was the middle of no place when people first got here and somebody else’s place we’re taking ever since. America is not an ideal, or lightning would have struck us dead long ago. America is not an idea either. Or if it is an idea, it’s a fuzzy one. And we’ve always been of two (or 327.2 million) minds about it.
A friend of mine recently told me that America’s angry perplexity made him feel confused. (Admittedly he’s a cisgender hetronormative middle-aged white male from the Midwest and can’t be expected to truly have feelings.) “I don’t get it,” he said. “America emerged from the Cold War with a military that dominates the world and an economy that does the same and now business is booming. Why aren’t we taking a victory lap? Why aren’t we fat and happy?”
Well, we’ve got the fat part . . .
* * *
Maybe we should just stick with the “Ain’t it awful” explanation of America. When things don’t turn out exactly the way we want, it’s sort of comforting to think that they never did. Or maybe we should go with the “foreigner” explanation of America—a capitalistic, imperialistic, hegemonistic, grossly materialistic place rife with social and economic injustice where they all want to live.
Both true enough. Yet there’s an “exceptional” explanation of America that’s just as true and much more puzzling. Our country was founded by the delusional and the crazy, populated by the desperate and the unwilling, motivated by most of the Seven Deadly Sins, and is somehow . . . the richest and most powerful nation on earth, ever.
Which leads us to the “drunk” explanation of America. We’ll let some drunk shout it from the back of the bar.
“We had to fuck a lot of people to make this baby!”
One Nation—Divided As Hell
Coastals vs. Heartlanders
They know all about organic, sustainable, non-GMO, pesticide-free, fair-traded, locavore, artisanal, gluten-free, hypoallergenic, and vegan. But they don’t know hay from straw.
They are the Coastals—the enlightened, the progressive, the sensitive, the inclusive, the hip, the aware, the woke. They inhabit the metropolises of the Left Coast and the Eastern Seaboard from the Chesapeake Bay to Bar Harbor and they dwell in the trending atolls in between. You find them in Ann Arbor, Michigan; Austin, Texas; Boulder, Colorado; Taos, New Mexico, and all the other places where the smell of pot and $5 cups of coffee is stronger than the smell of factory smoke, crop fertilizer, heavy equipment diesel fumes, or the sweat of physical labor.
The opposite of Coastal is Heartland. As far as the people of the Heartland are concerned, you can tell Coastals from Heartlanders the way you can tell
Theories from practices
Ideas from actions
Words from deeds
The Harvard football team from the Ohio State Buckeyes
The defining feature of Coastals is that they know so much more than Heartlanders do. (Ignoring, of course, Coastals feeding straw to the horse and trying to sip a Starbucks Cascara Cold Foam through a blade of hay.)
The Coastals know what’s good for the Heartlanders better than the Heartlanders do. They know what’s good for the whole world better than the whole world does. And the Coastals can prove it. It’s a bad old world. So the world must not know what the Coastals know or the world would be good. It’s not. Case closed.
Another defining feature of Coastals is that they care so much more than Heartlanders do. They say to Oklahomans, “Oh, sure, you care about climate change. But you care only because of lawn-watering restrictions. We really care. We care so much we quit using the toilet. And because we care so much more than you do we’re better people than you are. The world should be run by better people. Therefore we’ll run Oklahoma from Washington.”
Besides knowing and caring, a third defining feature of Coastals is that they are so much more successful than Heartlanders are. Materially, of course, but successful in their attainment of righteousness as well. Hearlanders try to be righteous, and almost always fail at it (just go to one of their cement-block churches and listen to one of their fire-and-brimstone preachers tell them so). Coastals try to be self-righteous and they succeed every time.
As noted, being a Coastal or a Heartlander isn’t purely a matter of geography. Although it’s interesting to consider why Coastals dominate the coasts. Or some of the coasts. Coastals are scarce on the Gulf Coast, uncommon on the shores of the Great Lakes, and dominate the Atlantic Coast only as far south as Washington’s Virginia suburbs. Hawaii is both lower case c and capital C Coastal, while Alaska has lots of coast but is almost entirely Heartland.
The Pacific Coast can be explained by a Midwestern saying: “Every now and then the country gets tilted and everything that’s loose rolls out to California.” As for New Yorkers, Bostonians, and their ilk, maybe while the rest of the nation was engaged in Manifest Destiny and the Great Western Migration the Northeast simply missed the bus.
But there are lonely Heartlanders in Berkeley and isolated Coastals frantically seeking
