Reply #82: Up thread, someone mentioned goldfish and microbrews.

[tomg]

I am living in Florence for a semester(teaching). I really miss the Goldfish; in fact one of my friends is bringing some over for me. Obviously, I miss family and friends - but if they were here too, I wouldn't miss them.

More seriously, the question is "is there something that makes Americans uniquely Americans." I honestly don't think so, at least anymore. Admittedly, I do not believe in American Exceptionalism. There might have been at one point: an idea, a belief, an opportunity.Granted as others have aptly pointed out, it was always,to an extent, an illusion and a dream, but still it was an ideal and therefore a thing desired and worked for, no matter how fumblingly. I think at this point, though, with increased economic globalization and the systematic destruction of the middle class, with a lack of compassion for others who have not ( and now probably won't ever ) made it to the middle-class and a failure to make a real commitment to economic justice based on real opportunity, I think that what once made the idea of the United States unique is no longer the case.

My students (in casual and out of class conversations )- middle class kids from the burbs for the most part - continually point to our "freedom of speech." And then I point out that, minor cultural variants aside, we have no greater freedom of speech in any meaningful way than other western industrialized countries. They point out to our "economic opportunities to be whatever you want," and then I point out the disparity between the rich and poor. And so on and so forth. They say freedom of choice as regards health care and I say ( I don't want to go there. . . ). the point being that there was, I think, one thing that made us at one time unique: we were not bound by the past, we were not bound by a tribal sense of "place" and we were not encoded into a fixed social position ( at least, we were working in that direction however slowly and I think that the great movements of our "progress" - Civil Rights in all its facets - come out of that quest). We were open to others ( again, no matter how clumbsly). What my students are really saying is that "this is my home and I love it." Obviously, this attempted cultural openess is now gone at the same time that economic globalization ( in the pejorative sense) and the ensuing destruction of the middle class and economic oppression of the working and marginallly working has accellerated. the two are absolutely connected.

Right wingers ask "why, then, do people continually try to emigrate to the United States." Good question, but I see that everywhere in Florence, as I've seen it in Paris and London and Rome and other European cities I've spent time in. Everyday on my way to class, I see the streets filled with North African emigrants who are simply trying to make a euro to send back home, as my great grandparents tried to make a dollar to send back home. If that is the rw argument - people still come here - then it is poor one. For one thing, they oppose opening our borders, so they contradict themselves. Really though, it is the argument that explains why rural people emigrate to cities because of economic opportunity, that the poor will always try to get ahead. I think that once we represented a real possibility to break away from an enforced past. If we were never - and I know we never were - the shining city on the hill - at least we believed we could be. I think that that is now gone. Were I to pinpoint it, i would say that it started with Reagan. He started the destruction of the middle class, however inadvertently.

Sorry to go on, but being away has sort of got me thinking about things a bit more.