America's Sense of Self

While many would like to attribute Bush's perspective on being right on all things to him only, this tendency is one that we should examine in America in general. As we end the Bush administration and enter in to the Obama administration, it is interesting to listen to the way in which the outgoing president portrays his decisions. Hearing Bush deny that the U.S. has an image problem or is seen in negative ways, that he has worked with strong allies beside the U.S., and that we have helped lead the world as a beacon of liberty, is truly an amazing thing. What is interesting to me about it, however, is how much of a sense of self we have as a nation, and how hard it seems to view things from the point of view of the other.

There are several reasons, I believe, for this orientation. Among them is the idea of rugged individualism that seems to have caught on as a founding principle of our nation. While this may be true, when one reads documents by those founding members of our country, they are also living, wrestling with, and most importantly, dedicated to the notion of what we do for one another. The idea of service and duty are laid out frequently as part and parcel of citizenship, whereas it is now the case (as the Bush administration once suggested) that we best demonstrate our citizenship by buying and consuming goods to fight terrorism. Perversely, we consciously are encouraged to work and spend as individuals, while the notion of community has taken a holiday.

When I travel abroad, I see another aspect of how we see ourselves as central to the world, through the media. It is fascinating to my students to travel in Latin America, for example, and notice that the news is not Gringo-centric, i.e. stories that involve two actors may actually be written which do not include the U.S.A. as one of them. It is natural for citizens in most societies to have an element of ethnocentrism, it is why virtually all cultures have a creation stories of which they are the focus. However, I would argue that with few possible exceptions, no country has become so practiced at its self importance as we have. This is exemplified in our outgoing president, who literally cannot conceive of the idea of acting in concert with others, at least not in the sense of actually taking their views into active consideration.

As I listen to Bush defend his eight years in office, I must admit that while I am angry about the loss of life (which he still believes was justified in our ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) I am also deeply saddened. It is tragic to me that we had a president who consciously or unconsciously, believed that being a leader was merely "making tough decisions." Even as he justifies policies, decisions, and entire wars, the framework is one which centers around himself, his life, his views, and his personal narrative. He is literally incapable of even understanding that there ARE alternative narratives, much less that he could be wrong.

And so we need to accept to, that he is not so different from many of us in this country. We are a people who need to get out more, listen more, acknowledge other viewpoints as legitimate far more often, and accept that others can come up with good ideas that don't have to be ours, necessarily. We have become a divided nation, not necessarily through arrogance, but certainly through a lack of practice at being humble.

The American Dream, and Stuff...

The New York Times story on the Bush Administration's stoking of the mortgage bonfire demonstrates a couple of interesting points about home ownership in the United States. The first is the fact that there is no "market" when it comes to housing, if you are deregulating and advocating policies that convince more people to borrow beyond their means when it comes to a mortgage. While it is a complete hypocrisy within conservative thought, to believe in a market but toy with the conditions that regulate it, it is not limited to them. The lack of a broad range of ideas regarding property ownership, which excludes everything from Libertarian to Marxist thought, suggests that the only viable parties buy in on this notion of encouraging home ownership at the expense of reasonable consideration of debt.

The other major flaw in this thinking is that it is also a policy that leads us in pursuit of more "stuff." Jerry Seinfeld, when he was first a stand-up comedian used to do a bit on how we got our "stuff," and how often we did not know what our "stuff" was, or how we got our "stuff." The mortgage bonfire, as the NYT calls it is the ultimate example of a focus on consumerism and materialism. The Bush administrations policy, in complicity with both political parties, focused on living out the American Dream through the things we have rather than the relationships we cultivate with friends and family. Instead of making home ownership a possible outcome of the American Dream, it was made a goal of it, and like Seinfeld, we wake up with a stuff hangover that then leads us to ask, as the president is quoted as saying, "How did we get here?"

It is refreshing to see many families focusing on spending time together, doing things with one another, rather than accumulating more stuff. It would be great to see more people considering their spending more consciously, all the way up to and including home ownership. The American Dream should be about the quality of our relationships in our communities and the world, not merely focused on the material world.