Perspectives

I watched New York City’s annual gay parade this past Sunday. Standing at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 14th Street, I was struck by the incredible diversity of America. Every imaginable ethnic group, race, religion and political affiliation was represented in the pageantry and along a parade route made all the more festive and celebratory because of New York’s recent passage of a gay marriage law. Many corporations, too, had floats and people participating. I tip my hat to Macy’s department store for its prominent support of gay rights.

For years, I’ve thought about American exceptionalism, what it is and whether or not it is mere national jingoism that America is “special” among the world’s nations. To suggest otherwise is to open one’s self to criticism for not being sufficiently patriotic or pro-American.

We, as a people, are smitten with the myth of our national creation. I’ve been consuming history for over 45 years and have a graduate degree in the field. I’ve read a lot of history and have a sense for the marvelous, ever-entertaining story of our species. The founding of America and our subsequent ascent to being a world power is a mixed bag of promise and vision leavened by reality and human nature.

The Republican wingnuts (Bachman, Beck, et al.) who are rewriting American history to conform to their ridiculous quasi-religious “city on the hill” illusions are doing the nation a grave disservice. They are ignorant fools. Our Founding Fathers were an exceptional assortment of men who took humanist Enlightenment values and created a form of representative democracy that, over time, came to include most us. That many were slaveholders and that they sanctioned the dislocation and extermination of whole native populations should give us all pause when evaluating and understanding our national history.

From 1848, from our war with Mexico, America has been an unrepentant imperialist power. America, our country, has been responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide. We occupy nations and influence events to secure our power and authority. That is what imperialistic powers have historically done since time immemorial. What is different about our story is we wrap our aggression in sanctimonious B.S. that we are “bringing” democracy to the downtrodden of the world. Tell that to the Moros we slaughtered in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War or the governments we overthrew in Central America for corporate interests such as United Fruit Company.

Yet, is there American exceptionalism? Yes. It was Alexis de Tocqueville who first described America as “exceptional.” But it is, to me, Walt Whitman who best captures American exceptionalism by depicting our diversity, our pioneering spirit, our unequivocal commitment to variety, to reveling in the infinite variousness of human expression. Read or reread Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.” It is a seminal work of American literature. It will put joy in your heart. It will. So too will Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Standing on Fifth Avenue watching the gay parade and absorbing the astonishing, wonderful diversity that is America, I inwardly acknowledged that we (Americans) are capable of change, no matter how inexorably slow it may seem to those historically outside the tent (so to speak).

American exceptionalism isn’t the projection of our power (economics) through our military; it is America’s clarion call that all humans are unique and worthy of respect and our historical struggle to actually achieve that value.