America the helpless giant: how pitiful can we get?

Watching our government screw up the challenge of Katrina engendered anger, but now I feel a new emotion creeping in.

Sadness. Pathos. Pity. Our wounded country squirms like a helpless giant, unable to deliver prompt aid to its drowning, starving, bedraggled citizens. The snarl of partisan bickering grates from every quarter as our vulnerabilities lie exposed like maggots engorged on near-death flesh.

The Gulliver of the world has been cut down to the size of the Lilliputian nations that surround it.

Something is dying. Some “infinitely gentle infinitely suffering thing” struggles to survive.

Back in the 90s, our nation was happy, carefree, and somewhat wild and crazy. Those were the go-go years under our lovable rogue President Clinton, who gave us our own national soap opera to follow. A man whose flaws were as great as his strengths, but he did one excellent thing: he made us solvent.

And now?

Are we the once-glorious country that the world used to look up to? Are we that shining city on a hill … still?

No. We seem wounded somewhere deep, and it occasions a lingering sadness. I want to reach out to my fellow citizens and ask for tears of sympathy -- cry, our beloved country, for the dead and poor in New Orleans … for the families whose children have died in our Iraq war … for the wounded soldiers returning home from that foreign land, their limbs severed and their faces blown off, as modern medicine restores them to walking simulacra of the living dead.

What happened?

Three events: 9/11. The Iraq War. Katrina.

Three challenges. How did we rise to them?

Challenges had never scared us before, nor ever brought us down. In 1929 our economy lay in tatters, shred by the greed of robber barons and speculation. Then came FDR to birth the New Deal, and we rose again.

In 1939 the fascist imperialism of Germany and Japan threatened the world. We tackled this challenge with our greatest generation, beating back the forces of evil. And in our finest hour, we reached out to our vanquished foes with the helping hand of the Marshall Plan. No other nation in the history of the world has ever done anything more noble – to lift up our enemies to join us in a new freedom.

Then another foe arose, the Russian empire. Reagan was right: it was evil. Yet we faced it down, again, until a wall crumbled and those who’d been oppressed suddenly breathed the fresh air of freedom inspired by our example.

America, the bastion of freedom: we reaped the rewards of having risen to these great challenges. In the 60s our wildest generation loosened the shackles of sexual repression. Men and women were free to enjoy the gift of their bodies. And those Americans who weren’t yet sharing in our freedoms – African-Americans, women, gays – stood up for themselves and gained their place in the sun, to sit at the table of our bounty, and share the fruits of freedom.

Then, like a bolt from the blue, 9/11 happened: a symbol of our might, the World Trade Center, crumbled under the attack of a new foe.

It took our breath away, and we haven’t gotten it back yet.

A new president led us into a foreign adventure – some say with the ignominy of lies, some say with the noble ideal of spreading freedom – and we got bogged down in a foreign land.

Then, in another bolt from the blue, nature attacked us, and swallowed one of our cities.

We are reeling. We are still strong, but we are stumbling in the dark. The world sees a helpless giant, its nose bloodied by Iraq, its reputation horribly scarred by Abu Ghraib, its competence laughably compromised by a belated response to a great tragedy, its Homeland Security unmasked as totally useless to deal with the threat of any future terrorist attack.

We are a nation rich in myths, and now those myths are in question. The rest of the world may still want to believe in them, but we’re giving them less and less reason to do so.

Our country’s soul has always been nourished by great American myths. And being the consummate bullshitters that we are – masters of hype, sultans of spin – we’ve sold these myths not only to ourselves, but to the whole wide world. Here they are:

1. The myth of the pursuit of happiness: we say it’s good to feel good, to want it now, to enjoy comfort and convenience all our days. Heck, we even got round to conditioning the very air.

2. The myth of our can-do spirit: our Yankee ingenuity, our penchant for thinking big, our screw-tradition, what’s-new vigor. We invent new things –- the light bulb, the phonograph, underarm deodorant, TV, rock ‘n roll, the laptop, the Internet, the iPod. With new things we make the world new, fueled by an irrepressible optimism that we can always find a way to make the world work for us.

3. The myth of social mobility: we are a nation of immigrants pulling ourselves up from nothing by dint of ambition and diligence. Our land is the one place where hard work begets fabulous riches, where all of us can attain the American dream.

4. The myth of the individual: here you can be all you want to be, express yourself fully, re-invent yourself, make yourself over, start anew as a new person.

5. And our grandest myth of all, the myth that girds all others: freedom.

But where are our myths now? They’re still hanging over us, but are we living up to them?

Where, for example, is our can-do spirit? Our fellow citizens sit stranded for days in New Orleans, mired in the stink of their own excrement, and we can’t get water and food to them. Last week Japan evacuated more than 300,000 people from coastal areas to evade a typhoon. No incompetence, panic, or disorder there.

Where is our myth of social mobility? Most of us stay stuck in the class we were born in. We’re working harder than ever before for less money. Those born in the ghetto have little chance of escape: they’re fated to die there.

Where is our myth of the individual? We have herded ourselves into special interests – minorities, Christians, homosexuals, teenagers, the right, the left, the rich, the poor – and snipe at each other from the comfort of our herds. We’d rather be labels than individuals. We’ve become the talking points of our group agendas instead of straight-talkers from our hearts.

Where is our happiness? As a nation we bicker, we call each other names, we seem unable to solve our problems.

Where is our myth of freedom? That, thank God, despite the Patriot Act, despite the strictures of the Christian Radicals against gay marriage, abortion and evolution, is still alive. Without it we would not be Americans. It’s the one reason I still smile in my sadness.

But overall, where are we now? We bestride the world stage like a blind elephant. We, who’ve always helped the world, today we cannot help ourselves. Mexico sends us food.

Instead of being solvent, we are in massive debt to the world. We are in massive debt to ourselves, too. Most of us live only a paycheck away from penury. Medical costs can wipe any of us out. And while the vast majority of us hang on by our fingernails, our rich are getting super-rich. CEO pay has sky-rocketed from 50 times the average hourly worker a generation ago to 500 times today, with no recognizable link between pay and performance (other countries don’t suffer from CEO greed; it appears to be a peculiar American problem). Katrina ripped the façade off our competence and exposed the underbelly of the American dream: it thrust in our faces the hard fact that 37 million Americans live in poverty in the richest nation on earth. One in five U.S. children is poor during the first three years of life, the time when brain development is the most crucial. In its 2005 Report Card for America's Infrastructure, the American Society of Civil Engineers surveyed 15 infrastructure categories -- roads, bridges, drinking water, public schools, etc. -- and issued an overall grade of “D."

Cry indeed, our beloved country.

Who will lead us out of this? Whatever you may think of our president, and even if you love him with all your heart, which many Americans do, you have to face one truth about him: he’s the evidence that the rich guys got their guy in for eight years. It takes a great politician to do that. Yet he’s no great statesman. We haven’t had one of those since FDR. Take your pick: George W. Bush is a good man in a tough time – or a small man in a big world -- or a hapless rich dude in a bubble of privilege doing the best he can. But his best will never be enough to transform us from a helpless giant into the shining city on the hill that we used to be. He’s not the one to give us back our faith in our myths, because his is the raw face of capitalism gone wild, where the rich get tax cuts, and the poor sit foodless in a football stadium.

How can we make the world proud of us again? How can we make ourselves proud of us again?

The time calls for an FDR or a Martin Luther King, yet there is no such individual in sight. We will have to do the job ourselves, one day and one American at a time.

We will need to originate a new myth, because our old myths don’t serve us anymore. Besides, these days the rest of the world isn’t much inclined to buy into them.

One of our fine myths, the myth of the individual, has a dark underside: if you’re an individual, you’re out on your own: the lone ranger, Gary Cooper standing alone at High Noon. Nobody’s got your back. It’s all up to you, buddy. Expect no help from anyone else, pardner.

In our glorification of the rugged individual lies the counter-myth of the darkness of the self, the lure of individual greed. Individual responsibility undercuts the idea of shared responsibility. This is the one myth we sorely lack: a myth of a generous and inclusive community.

The closest we come to it, is when we welcome a new neighbor by knocking on their door with a cake we baked ourselves. A sweet old-time myth of small-town America. A myth that died in the cut and thrust of our big-city anonymity.

We need to take that myth, the myth of small-town America, and apply it afresh to our entire nation again. We need to say to ourselves that we are the American family, small-town at heart -- and like a family, we stand together, and will not allow members of our family to suffer.

We need to look our economic system of capitalism in the face, that great engine of prosperity, and say it to it: we need you to have a human face.

Capitalism with a human face: the face of community, of shared responsibility, of taking care of our own, of family bonds embracing the whole nation. For too long each of us has been looking out for Number One, an attitude that’s made all the Number Twos suffer.

Will we ever be able to add the myth of community to all our other great myths? We may have prospered long without it, but it’s the myth we need most now. After all, if we can invent the myth of Santa, which we did in 1880 -- a myth our children still believe in -- we can invent the idea of an American community, of an American family, right now. All we have to do, is demand from our government that it stop running a welfare state for big business -- our business-as-usual government of fat cats, by fat cats and for fat cats -- and run a people government instead. A government that represents the better angels of our nature, and elevates the poor, the sick, and the uneducated among us in a domestic Marshall Plan, which will give us back an America in which all Americans prosper. (A more provocative way to say the same thing is that we should bite back our masculine impulses, which have made us the military top dog, as well as the biggest exporter of arms that feed the world’s wars, and instead feminize our society, i.e. unleash our nurturing impulses.)

Who knows, if we start now, we will have a new America to believe in soon. If we don’t, we’ll just have to get used to a great sadness tugging at the heart of the helpless giant we’ve become.