America Should Never Have Been a Superpower

I've told this joke before.  There are only two reasons the United States became the leader of the free world after the Second World War.  The first is that the United States was one of only two major countries that were not partially or completely destroyed by the war.  The second is that Canada didn't want the job.

Quite frankly, ascendancy by default is the only way that the U.S. could have become a superpower.  The United States in 1945 was no different the the United States before 1945 - that is, it was still a country where literature was defined by dime-store novels, where not one college or university had have produced a great mind equal to that of Darwin of Freud,  where prayer was still practiced in schools, where banning alcohol to strengthen morality had been tried only to lead to a violent crime wave,  and where the teaching of science outside the urban Northeast and Great Lakes was still virtually nonexistent.

America simply doesn't have the wisdom and the maturity to be a world leader, let alone the world leader.  As Paul Fussell once noted, America, having not had an age of antiquity, a medieval period, or a Renaissance, was missing many if not most of the historical and cultural experience to sustain a civilized society.  I would add that one could argue the same about Canada and Australia, but those countries at least retained a connection with the British Crown.  Not even our connections to the Old World via immigration have given us a sense of history, philosophy or culture.  The average American of Italian origin knows no more about Dante than the average American of Chinese origin knows about Confucius, while the average American of German origin is . . . Donald Trump.   The biggest European or East Asian influences in American civilization tend to be culinary, as the preponderance of pizzerias and Chinese take-out joints suggest.  (Sometimes I think that the only ethnic groups in America that have a genuine appreciation for their deep cultural heritages are us Irish and the Jews, but only because our food is so terrible. 😉)  Also, the romanticization of immigration flies in the face of one inconvenient truth.  The immigrants who came to this country, all the way back to the Englishmen who settled it in the seventeenth century, were not the best and brightest from their lands but the dumbest and the dimmest; they were folks who couldn't make it back in the Old Country, so they came here were all things were equal and no one was better than anyone else.

It is all good and fine to say that, for all of of the differences between Americans based on race, ethnicity, gender or religion, our experiment in representative government is what unites us, but the real entity that brings is together is money.  We all believe in the American Dream, the belief that we can get as far as out talents will take us, which usually means making lots of money.  We always applaud the plucky immigrant who comes here with nothing and makes something of himself by making lots of money - even Elon Musk, who came here with lots of money already and ended up making lots more money.  We celebrate pop stars and movie stars who come from nowhere with nothing and make lots of money - so what if their music or movies suck?  So what if we've had few authors, composers, artists, or filmmakers who compare to those of more intellectually endowed nations?  Especially when those few have never made a lot of money?  As the Israeli-born American philosopher Chaim Witz  - his childhood pals from Queens knew him as Eugene Klein - once said, no aesthetics exist aside from what people buy.  You know him as heavy-metal star Gene Simmons.    

A country that celebrates people known for making money - like Donald Trump - is not worthy of being a world leader.  A country with creationist theories based on the idea that humans and dinosaurs co-existed like on "The Flintstones" is not worthy of being a world leader.  A country that ranks 36th in literacy is not worthy of being a world leader.  A country where speaking aggressively into a microphone to a computerized beat is considered music is not worthy of being a world leader.  A country that celebrates James Patterson while real authors starve is not worthy of being a world leader.  A country known for producing moves based on comic-book characters is not worthy of being a world leader.  A country that lets its cities rot and fall apart and builds soulless, ugly, autocentric suburban sprawl in their place is not worthy of being a world leader.  A country that values style over substance is not worthy of being a world leader. And a country that declares its values and worth by electing and then, after a four-year hiatus, re-electing Donald J. Trump as its President is definitely not worthy of being a world leader.  

Like so many aspects of American history, World War II is badly taught in our schools, with many Americans coming away with the idea that this country saved Europe from itself and then assumed its rightful place as the world's most powerful nation because Europeans had fought each other into oblivion.  World War II - at least the European theater, the Pacific theater being another issue entirely - was the result of a thousand years of bitter rivalries between the various nationalities and alliances based on religious affiliations and familial disagreements over scarce land and scarcer resources.  Incidentally, all of this is what produced artists like Michelangelo, architecture like the Notre Dame Cathedral, philosophers like Descartes, and also the fairy-tale-reminiscent castles American tourists fall in love with and tightly knit villages and towns with streets as narrow as an office-building corridor that Americans find so charming.  Americans didn't just parachute into Europe and take over everything; D-Day was a collaboration with the British, and the liberation of France - which was accomplished in part by the French themselves, through the Resistance and the Free French forces - was augmented by the Soviet Red Army advancing to and entering Berlin from the east. And even as the United States was able to fight a war without any attack on the homeland, the British had to deal with air raids and V-2 rockets against their home ground, while the Soviet Union suffered a greater loss of civilian lives and property than any other nation in the war.

It would have been for the benefit of the United States and the entire world if American GIs in Europe had returned home with some knowledge and understanding of the Old World they fought to help (help) save and had wiped the American slate clean and started over with European cultural assumptions, just as Western Europe started over with American democratic assumptions, but American cultural assumptions persisted in the decades following the war in the form of Joe McCarthy, the John Birch Society, Levittowns, a racial caste system, a suppression of socialistic ideas, and the hypocritical addition of the words "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance.  The rise of evangelical politics and supply-side economics led to Ronald Reagan, Wall Street, neoliberalism, and materialism.  The late 1960s and early 1970s were an exception - America under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon endured violence, anarchy, and anger toward the scandal that was the war in Vietnam.  But that period also produced Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Jimi Hendrix, Neil Simon, and Martin Scorsese.  Bill Clinton presided over a period of peace and prosperity in the 1990s, and what did that produce? Hootie and the Blowfish.

Allusions to The Third Man aside, it's worth noting that America is no more immune to the tragedies of humanity than other countries, but our shallowness, our venality, and our complete disdain for intellectualism and wisdom allow us collectively deny how tragic life is, and that is how a nation as intellectually impoverished and as morally bankrupt as ours is stumbling to the end of its first quarter millennium with no guarantee that we can make it through another 250 years.  A nation with a major political party that denies climate change, after all, is not worthy of being a world leader.  So, alas, it seems appropriate that Donald Trump should return to lead this nation once again, and likely lead it to its downfall.  And yet we will still believe that America is great, if only because we're a topographically diverse, 3.8-million-square-mile land mass, a continent-sized nation of nation-sized states.  A continental nation, but not a Continental nation.

As I said before, I can't leave America, but I don't have to.  America left me.