“Over the mountain, down in the valley, lives a former talk-show host. Everybody knows his name. He says there’s no doubt about it. It was the myth of fingerprints. I’ve seen them all, and man, they’re all the same.”
Paul Simon
In which I explore the wisdom and efficacy of investing emotionally in the long-term outcome of America
We all like to think of ourselves as so terribly unique, so singular in our identity, only to discover again and again that we are little more than a slightly blurry carbon copy of the millions who have come before. Some might find this comforting, I suppose. The idea that we’re all in it together and our problems are everyone’s problems. That we’re not that special. We’re not that unique. Just another rat in an endless race.
I find this incredibly dispiriting.
I grew up in an America that was full of promise, where the sky was the limit and dreams were part of the promise. We could do anything, and we probably would. Our parents themselves were the children of those who had lived through the Great Depression. They were the product of a great sacrifice that made America an economic powerhouse and a military giant. The world was their oyster, and they would remake it in their image of what could be. They went off to change the world, or at least to earn a living, and we were left at home to enjoy the fruits of their labor: Atari, Pop-Tarts, and Home Box Office.
While it shouldn’t be a surprise that Kellogg’s, Huffy, and Mattel did not, in fact, have a grand plan for our lives, we might not be blamed for assuming that more was to be expected. It’s not just the lack of personal robots or flying cars. It’s the lack of any meaningful gains in equality, opportunity, safety, and security. We’ve become a nation of downwardly mobile lemmings, hoping for a bit of charity.
In the 2015 film The Big Short, Mark Baum tells an audience, “We live in an era of fraud in America. Not just in banking, but in government, education, religion, food, and even baseball. What bothers me isn’t that fraud is not nice. Or that fraud is mean. For fifteen thousand years, fraud and shortsighted thinking have never, ever worked. Not once. Eventually, you get caught, and things go south. When the hell did we forget all that? I thought we were better than this. I really did.”
We’re all so cocksure of the unique nature of the place and time in which we exist, and our part in it, that we fail to see the cycle of insanity that surrounds most human endeavor. Everyone is so confident that what we are experiencing is unprecedented, with no recognition that we are merely repeating our own history, over and over again.
There are moments in time that can feel like a confluence of disparate forces coming together to form a perfect storm of epic bullshit from which we may not walk away. Existential windows into the dark corners of the soul.
When you’re in the eye of the storm, the storm itself can feel inevitable, defining, and inescapable. But often, in hindsight, we see the path forward clearly and easily. Like being able to pick out a baby picture of someone you know, but never knowing what the baby will grow up to look like. Everything seems so clear when we’re looking back in time. But even that is a mirage of unreliable memory and rose-colored mythology.
The myth of American exceptionalism has been propagated since the earliest days of our colonial existence, beginning with Thomas Paine’s 47-page pamphlet, “Common Sense.” This highly influential document became the most widely read piece of literature in the Western world, second only to the Bible, and helped to garner support for American independence from Britain.
In what is possibly America’s most overlooked contribution to human society, our ability to brand ourselves in a manner of our own making is truly remarkable. Critics claim we have no culture, that we are little more than a manufactured society based on conspicuous consumption and enormous waste. Like Las Vegas personified as a culture. But every day, millions of people around the world make plans to move here, whether legally or illegally.
Despite all its faults, and yes, there are many, America is still seen as the land of dreams. This is where people come to make their mark. Actors. Athletes. Scientists. Doctors. Writers. Filmmakers. Musicians. Academics. If you want to be the best, this is where you come to see how you measure up against the world. It’s the heart of unbridled capitalism and the epicenter of narrative brand-building. You may believe it’s just Iowa, but for many, it’s still the field of dreams.
Empires come and go. Greece used to rule the world. Now they can’t go a few years without needing a financial bailout from their neighbors. Italy, Britain, Spain, France, and even the Dutch all had their moments in the sun where they were the lords of all creation. Now they’re like a quaint village you visit to feel nostalgic about history. A faint reminder of past greatness.
Historically, your average empire has lasted about 250 years. After a quarter of a millennium, corruption and decay caused them to either collapse under their own weight or be conquered by outside forces. The only reason to believe that America might exceed those same expectations would be our belief that we are somehow unique—exceptional, in fact.
We do have some unique features that are unprecedented in human history. The fact that we are as geographically isolated as we are. The sheer volume of underdeveloped land we still control. The natural resources we have, the technological know-how we have built, and the overwhelming military might we maintain are unrivaled.
If you just looked at the historical record, it might be reasonable to consider that our time in the sun is over. But like a dying star, it’s unlikely that we just peter out. We are, in fact, far more likely to consume everything else in a giant supernova.
This leads me to a question that has nagged me these past few years. Is any of this worth fighting for, and if so, is there any reality to the idea that I can do anything about it? I don’t know if it’s the fatigue or wisdom that comes with age, but the older I get, the less confident I am in my ability to change a single thing about the future, my own or others’.
How exceptional is America really? What makes me so unique within the pantheon of characters who have come before me? These are largely unanswerable questions, but they lead me back to what, if anything, I can do to change the course of history, and my answer to that is: nothing.
It’s not that singular individuals have failed to change the course of history. It’s that we don’t get to choose who or what becomes the catalyst to enact lasting change. The best you can do is to try to do the right thing and hope that the right thing works, but realistically, you’re just one of a multitude that occasionally tip the scales.
It’s not that I believe in fate or destiny or that there is some grand unifying plan for creation. It’s just that so much of life is random that, at this level, it presents as chaos. We are often unable to pull back far enough to recognize the patterns in nature. A colony of ants might appear intentional in the macro sense, but were you to follow a single ant, you would hardly believe their life had a profound impact on the colony.
At its height, I imagine it was difficult for the leaders of Rome to foresee a time when their empire would cease to exist. That Italy itself would be reduced to a small European country known for comfort food and fashion. How could something so massive, so powerful, and so wealthy possibly fail? It was inconceivable, I’m sure.
The writer David Sedaris, who has long had a fascination with taxidermy, tells the story about visiting a shop in New York:
“I went to a store on the Upper West Side. This store is like a Museum of Natural History where everything is for sale: every taxidermic or skeletal animal that roams the earth is represented in this shop, and because of that, it is popular. I went with my brother last weekend. Near the cash register was a bowl of glass eyes and a sign reading “DO NOT HOLD THESE GLASS EYES UP AGAINST YOUR OWN EYES: THE ROUGH STEM CAN CAUSE INJURY.” I talked to the fellow behind the counter, and he said, “It’s the same thing every time. First, they hold up the eyes, and then they go for the horns. I’m sick of it.” It frightened me that, until I saw the sign, my first impulse was to hold those eyes up to my own. I thought it might be a laugh riot. All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I’m afraid that when all is said and done, the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints.”
If none of us are really all that special, and America is no more exceptional than another empire that has come and gone, then maybe it shouldn’t really matter what happens to any of us. Do the best we can with what we have in the moment. Be tolerant, empathetic, and patient. Be kind, not only to others, but to ourselves. Try not to make too much noise. Accept that we are imperfect people, doing our best to get through the day.
Breathe.
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