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January 2008 Unbound Atlantic Monthly
Essays by Atlantic readers
The American IdeaFor The Atlantic's 150th-anniversary issue in November, we asked a variety of writers, artists, and public figures to define their concept of the American idea. We invited our readers to do the same. From the more than 400 reader submissions we received (from 40 states and eight countries), we've selected the following 25. The authors of these essays will each receive a copy of The American Idea: The Best of the Atlantic Monthly; 150 Years of Writers and Thinkers Who Shaped Our History, a new anthology compiled by Atlantic editor-at-large Robert Vare. Every so often, the elements sandpapered our town of Shiprock, New Mexico. Shaking in the howl, I counted to fifty, willing evil spirits away. If anyone shouts “sandstorm!” to me now, I lurch to my feet, tensed for action. Old habits never die. When the wind woke from his lethargy and whipped sand from the earth, the fool caught outside was helpless. With cunning and old dishrags placed under window cracks, we repelled the invading sand. As a blond, Caucasian girl growing up on the Indian Reservation, I was the only kid in Nizhoni Elementary who wasn’t Navajo. On Self Portrait Day in kindergarten, I waved my melted-crayon masterpiece aloft. Through the window, the darkening sky geared up for another sandstorm. Inside, my teacher snatched up my drawing and stared at me for a moment. I still have the picture, somewhere. In the first self portrait by my five-year-old and wisest self, I am not white. I’m Navajo. The American Idea is a moment of stillness, really. It is the eye of the storm. When sand swirls outside and grinds the world down to its foundations, that idea is a micro-shock of clarity, the echoes of which endure beyond manipulation. Marguerite Atterbury
Living abroad – in my case as a writer in Shanghai – clarifies one’s notion of the American idea. My Chinese friends often ask about America and our system of government. A sense of pride swells when someone from China learns for the first time that, yes, you can protest the American President directly in front of his house and you won’t be jailed. A deep sense of shame emerges when you’re asked about urban poverty or if you can help explain what waterboarding is. But the particulars often miss what to me is the Organizing Principle or Idea of America: there is none. The American Idea, really, is the individual idea. When governments fail to offer master plans or grand visions for collective action, as ours has done, a spontaneous and organic order arises. Think of the local church support network, a pick-up basketball league, or the small bakery that opened down the road. These are Edmund Burke’s “little platoons,” and they can be bigoted and exclusionary or welcoming and expressive. For China, who in rhetoric and action aims to move as a cohesive whole, this is an idea that deserves to be heard. Jude Blanchette
We as keepers of The American Idea have become popular kids during their senior year of high school (engorged with confidence but in constant fear of what’s next) who then immediately enter mid-life crisis (so fortunate that we can’t stop fretting about our good fortune). We are choking on abstraction, and need to go to boot camp, fat camp…any place that takes a hammer to our ego: a place where we repeat to ourselves daily that we are not the greatest country in the world, so that we may truly enliven the spirit of competition; a place where competition is not beating one’s opponent into submission; a place where we would never invoke the word “freedom” without putting it in context, as we are in danger of abusing that word of all its power, until it joins the ranks of “amazing”, “surreal”, and any great cuss word that now simply serves as conversational yeast; and ultimately, a place where we would never treat braggadocio, privilege, or violence as ironic or cute, be it via t-shirt, hat, body language, or decal. We need to peel The American Idea off the back windows of our automobiles and put it back to work. Sean Boling
Number 35: Buy Lawn Chair It’s 11:39 pm but it is urgent, critical even, that I buy a lawn chair this instant! Thankfully, the American interpretation of time, the child of Puritan punctuality and Fordism efficiency, has now twisted itself into an obsession with twenty-four-hour shopping. Within a ten-mile radius of my home, I can find three Wal-marts, a Wegmans grocers, and two CVS drugstores with doors still open, lights still burning, and cheery cashiers with open registers. I need to be awake by 6:00 am, and yet here I stand, brain-fried at 11:51 pm staring at my local Wal-mart’s selection of lawn chairs. Watching the customers to my left and right, I conclude that midnight must also be the appropriate hour for buying prom dresses, new chainsaws, and bakery items. What has happened in America to make this acceptable? Why am I not in bed? Why is this store full? Because at the core of the American Idea is time, and a rather sick interpretation thereof. The same idea that keeps me reading my e-mails at 1:00 am keeps America’s parking lots packed after midnight; our obsession to beat the clock – to cross items off our never-ending “to-do” lists. Heather Carmody
As the home of immigrants and the progeny of those immigrants, America is a nation that is universal in her origins. This fact separates America from other countries in that it prohibits her from constructing a culture rooted in the principles of uniformity and regularity, and instead begs her to understand that our differences do not bind us to a future of enmity, but to a future of equality. As Walt Whitman once wrote, "do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes." Indeed, just as the differences between individuals are varied and vast, so the Idea of America must also be varied and vast. Within this Idea the lines that separate us as individuals, though contradictory, are not boundaries that divide; they are interstices that connect. Differences between heritages, religions and beliefs no longer represent irreconcilable forces that must be melted and molded into a single image. They represent necessary diversity. It is a misconception to think that the American Idea promotes the individual at the expense of the collective. The American Idea promotes the individual for the sake of the collective. By valuing the differences between people we acknowledge that the potential of each individual is different and that the potential for our collective nation is infinite. Anna Crawley
Not long ago, when the curators at Ford’s Theatre in Washington looked anew at the plain black coat President Lincoln had worn the night he was assassinated, they found embroidered in the lining the words “One Country, One Destiny.” That is the American idea – a noble ideal, unfinished, incomplete, never to be achieved once and for all, tested again and again by great tragedy. Oneness, the unum derived from our pluribus, remains our elusive national theme. We are many still trying to be one, trying to be “we.” Four-score years ago, our now mostly forgotten historian-poet, Stephen Vincent Benet, chanted the American idea in his epic, “John Brown’s Body.” Many had tried to understand America, he wrote, but “only made it smaller with their art.” We may be one country, with one destiny, but we will also be forever not as one, a nation as various as the land in which we live: “All these you are,” wrote Benet, “and each is partly you, / And none is false, and none is wholly true.” Missy Daniel
When I was growing up, in the 1960s, The American Idea was light. A great American had invented the light bulb. American ingenuity was raising dams, wildcatting oil wells, splitting atoms and electrifying the world. Our way of life was a shining beacon, illuminating the dark corners of despotism in far away places. As they often do, my sons, born at century’s end, trained a klieg light on my glaring ignorance. “Hawaii,” my fifth grader explained, “was hijacked into statehood by American pineapple plantation owners, with help from a shipload of Marines. Queen Lili’uokalani was under house arrest when she wrote Aloha ‘Oe. Didn’t you learn this in school?” No, I did not. When I was a schoolboy, we were taught that the Queen and her subjects loved democracy and freedom and admired the United States so much that they requested admittance to the union, a wish graciously granted by President Grover Cleveland and the Congress. Seriously, that was in our textbooks. Unlearning early lessons has been painful, but I’ve discovered that the true American Idea is The Question. Doubting, digging, challenging. Refusing to settle for pat answers and platitudes will make my sons’ America the light on the hill. Andrew Dolson
The true essence of the American Idea is hope for the future. When the founding fathers were fighting and writing for the freedom of our country they were concerned with not only the present but with the future. Their hope was not only to bring freedom to themselves but to future generations. Their hope was that each generation would add to the country in a positive way and leave the country in a good place for future generations; that the country would always be free, with each person knowing that freedom; that each person would have equality; that justice would be fair and equal for all. The greatest challenge hope faces is the day to day. Each person has to have hope that we are changing for the better; that we are doing the right thing; that the country will be a better place for our future generations. If each person has hope, the future will be better than the present or past. Without hope for the future America will fail because people would only be concerned with the present and will end up destroying the country. Hope is the thread that keeps the fabric of our country together.
Katie Gilley
Most nations are homogeneous—their citizens bound together by similarities in appearance and philosophy, like colonies of termites or synchronized shoals of sardines. America is different. Her citizens do not all look alike, do not all think alike, do not all worship the same, and do not share identical hopes, goals, and dreams. They clump together, though, here—to form the United States of America—because of a powerful commonality, one pinprick point of convergence, tiny but profound. Even the strongest individuals can not resist this national gravity. Its pull on the strong and talented, in fact, is most powerful. They have the greatest mass. This American idea, this national glue, is the same great truth understood by our founding fathers—individuals form nations, not the reverse. Since this nation's inception, individuality has been nurtured, celebrated, and elevated above conformity. The American idea continues to attract the strong and talented, continues to ensure a citizen's freedom to choose happiness, and continues to help the United States shine brightest in the firmament of nations. Without it, we might as well live in a bee hive. Thomas M. Hill
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