America the Beautiful

My first memory of America is driving through the Black Hills of South Dakota on a hot August day in a black Chevrolet Corvair without air conditioning. It was 1963 and the Corvair still had two carefree years before Ralph Nader would declare it the unsafest car on the road. We were three months away from Zapruder and jfk’s ghastly caravan. It was a safe time, perhaps the safest. My parents and brother and I stayed in motels with swimming pools and splashed in the 90°F heat and ate at Rib Shacks or bbq Barns. During those blanched days, we drove to roadside attractions: a Flintstones theme park where you could play miniature golf using a plastic club in the shape of a pterodactyl. At another stop, a man milked a rattlesnake, holding its fangs over a glass as the venom leaked out. He then wrestled an alligator in a dusty ring, flipping it onto its back, which produced a reptilian cartoon smile.

We stood in front of Mount Rushmore, the “shrine of democracy,” and drank Hires root beer and wondered at the monumentality of those faces, which had taken sculptor Gutzon Borglum fourteen years to carve. The four presidents represented all Americans, we were told by a guide. George Washington presided over the nation’s birth, Jefferson honed its ideals, Lincoln preserved the Union, and Teddy Roosevelt moved the country from rural republic to world power.

The back seat of our Corvair folded down (making it even less safe), and as we drove back to the border through the night I lay on a blanket, staring at the fearless republic retreating through the rear window, moments of neon eclipsed by blackness.

On January 16, 1965, Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson was at the ranch of American President Lyndon B. Johnson. The rangy, crude Texan introduced the Canadian leader to the media as “my good friend Drew Pearson.” The physical contrast was acute. Pearson lisped politely and wore bow ties and looked like a class valedictorian, while Johnson carried a sense of physical menace in that long body. Pearson was photographed wearing hunting gear, an image that looked like an unfortunate play date arranged by a negligent mother.

In February, lbj ordered the bombing of North Vietnam. Two months later, Pearson was at Temple University in Philadelphia, and in his speech he suggested that a temporary cessation of the bombing might bring the North Vietnamese back to the bargaining table. When the two met at Camp David, the presidential retreat, lbj took Pearson by the lapels and shoved him against the rustic cabin. “Lester, you pissed on my rug!” he yelled. So much for diplomacy.

Pearson has emerged the greater man: winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, the inventor of the peacekeeping force, ahead of his time. He was a genuine statesman, before we understood them to be an endangered species. He helped define Canada’s role internationally, a desperate priority at the time, and one that still nags. And yet, as an eleven-year-old I yearned for lbj’s Daniel Boone persona. He exuded power and confidence. Pearson looked like one of those fathers who threw a baseball like a girl, an embarrassment.

It was difficult not to envy the United States—that breezy confidence and oppressive sexuality, its skirt billowing, breasts barely contained. Comedian Bill Maher, commenting on the world’s perception of America during Kennedy’s time, noted that the country had been loved and envied. “Now we’re the asshole,” he said. How did it become the asshole? This past summer, in a Pew Research Center poll of sixteen countries, only three had a more favourable view of the United States than they did of China—India, Poland, and the United States itself. George Bush has enlisted Karen Hughes, one of his chief image-makers and the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, to “rebrand” the United States in the Arab world. The language implies that America is a product, a fair-enough assessment, and Hughes’ approach has been to teach Arab children that America is a force for good, to fight “propaganda with truth,” almost always a losing battle.

An image consultant might have been a good hire here too, after the United States ignored a nafta ruling in Canada’s favour on softwood lumber exports. Even the Canadian architects of the Free Trade Agreement, among them Pat Carney, Derek Burney, and Gordon Ritchie, denounced the Americans as “jackboot negotiators” and a “schoolyard bully” and stated that it was time to take a stand. The flagrant rejection of the rule of law elicited editorial and political outrage and revived familiar critiques of American exceptionalism, the country’s skittish relationship with international initiatives (the salt talks, Kyoto, the United Nations, the World Court). Is Noam Chomsky right; has America become a rogue state?

Foreign unease is matched by domestic grief and uncertainty. The despairing crescendo of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina produced both an outpouring of sympathy from the international community and muted censure. With US Army regulars and reservists in Iraq, the federal response was compromised, and on cnn came the daily cry that America could no longer protect its own. The anarchy witnessed in those first few days produced real fear both at home and abroad, a visceral glimpse of the world’s superpower as vulnerable and confused. Instead of the can-do spirit of American enterprise, everyone pulling together, there was the voodoo apparition of environmental neglect, tortured racial history, social inequities, and the rule of the gun all rising from the grave and wading through the muddy waters of Louisiana.

“The Lord Jesus is going to come on time. If we just wait,” said Condoleezza Rice from nearby Alabama. Neither Jesus nor President Bush arrived on time as it turned out, and the devil rejoiced. That the government appealed to a higher power, that it publicly pined for a pre-lapsarian innocence that would erase every sin, was unsettling. Equally unsettling was Bush’s announcement soon after that not just evolution but creationism should appear in school curricula. “Both sides ought to be properly taught,” he said. This was presented under the banner of freedom, the idea that debate is enriching. And it was, at the Scopes trial eighty years ago. It is less so now.