Bored last night at midnight i wrote:
Constellations
People see all sorts of things among the stars. Children camping out in their backyards for the first time, couples lounging in the park on a cool night, writers searching the skies for inspiration - all these and more find infinite numbers of unique connect-the-dot pictures. They see the faces of old lovers winking at them in the night sky, celestial ice cream cones floating gently overhead, and a number of members of the animal kingdom winking at them, and only them, in the blackness. And on this fourth of July, sinking into a thick blanket on a packed high school football field, I’m watching constellations of man-made stars piercing the natural serenity of the nighttime, fleeting bulbs of color screeching speedily towards no where in particular.
“I wonder how much the city spent on these. This all comes from your taxes. René,” I joke, turning to a member of the group of family friends who had dragged me here to see the fireworks.
René lives in the town that hosts the fireworks and schleps his family to the field each year, where he becomes a member of the mass of humanity known as the “patriotic Americans,” clad in stars and stripes, waving flags, sharing garbled American history lessons with their kids, babbling about redcoats, Andrew Jackson, the New Deal, and Condi Rice. These are the people who hang American flags outside their door-steps for a week - maybe two - every July, who hold barbeques for other patriotic Americans where on their stereos they play grossly and almost absurdly “American” tunes.
Forgive me if I strike you as cynical, even un-American. I’ve just never caught on to the whole fourth of July thing. It seems to me to be a chance for ordinary people to act more enthusiastic about their nation than they really are. As a burgeoning historian, newspaper enthusiast, and fairly strange teenage girl willing to pull over at highway rest stops named after favorite American historical figures, I’m sort of ashamed of the one overwhelming display of love of country Americans show on the fourth. Their actions strike me as distinctly gaudy as only Americans can be - as gaudy as giant strip malls the size of small island nations, as gaudy as the outfits and shimmering “bling” worn by America’s favorite celebrities, as gaudy as suburban-mother driven Hummers decked out with fifteen different multicolored patriotic magnets.
“Support Our Troops!” “Proud to Be an American!” “Land of the Free!” Patriotism has come to be summed up in trite little statements such as these, so that those who haven’t learned to express their national pride in cute slogans are cast to the outside, so that those who find reading history books and the New York Times more enlightening than searching for the best car magnets screaming politician’s names are pointed out and labeled as unpatriotic.
My relationship with America, at times, is as precarious as my relationship with pretty much anyone and everyone else. Such is the plight of the average eighteen year old American. Since I was very young I have always flirted with the wonder of the ex-patriot, the American who simply boards a plane one day and takes on a new cultural identity, who becomes a member of “The Spanish” or “The British” instead of “The Americans.” My excitement has only grown from studying the brooding and sophisticated ex-patriot giants of literature - T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, among dozens of others. If these writers were so inspired by what was anything but American, why couldn’t I be?
I spent much of my childhood reading atlases, drinking up the names, population sizes, revenue, and anomalies of the nations of the world. I traced my fingers along their flags, testing the feeling of Switzerland, Germany, New Zealand, and Canada. Imagining unloading my piles of American-made merchandise into a new home in another nation, envisioning my return as a worldly traveler with a hint of a foreign accent, I couldn’t stop my heart from skipping a beat at the idea of something, anything new and exciting and distant. I would soak in the hustle and bustle of Tokyo, lounge on exotic Mexican beaches, and sit contemplating life, smoking foreign cigarettes and drinking black coffee in the cafés of Paris.
I’m eighteen years old and none of that has happened yet. The only time I used my passport was to travel to a stuffy resort in the Bahamas where the most exotic companions I met had journeyed from such diverse places as Mill Valley, California and Alexandria, Virginia. I hung my head and sheepishly reported my residence in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, just another branch hanging idly off the tree of metropolitan New York.
My friends say that maybe it’s my politics that separate me from homey, patriotic America. Maybe I am too much of a neo-hippie, they say, a liberal, an argumentative, stubborn college-bound kid. It’s not that. I don’t want to flee the government because I know as well as anyone else that it’s mainly because of the government, and my conservative hardworking parents, that I am able to afford such affinities as my laptop or my comforter set. I felt out of place - minute and ridiculous - at the two political rallies I attended. I wanted so much to be a part of something big then that I almost convinced myself I was. But, looking back, I know now that the whole time I just wanted to put down my banners, stop screaming propaganda slogans and go to Starbucks and buy a vanilla latte. And so a realization has since slowly started to envelop my conscience. I am not an ex-patriot at heart, only a confused teenager.
I don’t want to flee the government. I want to flee myself. I’m eighteen years old and I’m just beginning to realize that the feeling I have, the feeling of being trapped by my home, has nothing to do with the stars and stripes. It’s not the feeling of a frustrated American but the feeling of an eighteen year old girl who has just woken up to the fact that for almost two decades she’s allowed everyone else to pay for and arrange her entire life. It’s not the Hummers that make me restless, and it’s not the magnets or the shopping malls or reality shows or garrulous politicians. It’s only me.
The fireworks are exploding overhead and I am making wisecracks about how gauche the whole celebration seems to be. Every time one of the children gasps I emit a snort of self-righteous laughter. I lie back on my blanket and watch the millions of dollars of pyrotechnic special effects sparkle above me. People are chattering, yelling, clapping, singing - being embarrassingly loud Americans. I want it to be over.
The finale comes, a frenzied firestorm of redwhiteblue redwhiteblue crackling over and over again. I’m not paying too much attention, and think it’s over when the noise settles. But then one more firework is launched, a tiny blue orb floating gracefully upward. Suddenly nothing is exploding anymore, and nobody is talking or shouting. Suddenly everyone is watching in awe as this star soars higher than all the others. Many instants pass, and finally the dot bursts into a mammoth cloud of white sparks. We, the people of the United States of America, are silent and stunned. Even I do not have a wisecrack now. Even I, in this moment, feel patriotic.
I know in this moment that it doesn’t matter that in order to get home I have to trek along yet another infamous trashy New Jersey highway. It doesn’t matter that in a handful of seconds I will stand up, look around, and see a bunch of people who probably don’t know the difference between the early American Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties, people who have never studied the most famous cases of the Supreme Court, people who don’t know Molly Pitcher from Molly Ringwald. And for the moment it doesn’t matter. For the moment I close my eyes and feel closeness with these thousands of people I have possibly passed on the streets of New Jersey suburbia dozens of times. Couples, families, children, grandparents all gazing upward with their mouths hanging open and their eyes moistening. I see the man-made stars now as maybe the only way to reach everyone, to draw everyone together. And I know that in spite of everything, in America it is possible for me to gaze at the constellations and see anything I want to see. And in this moment I am once and forever, completely and inexhaustibly, American.
People see all sorts of things among the stars. Children camping out in their backyards for the first time, couples lounging in the park on a cool night, writers searching the skies for inspiration - all these and more find infinite numbers of unique connect-the-dot pictures. They see the faces of old lovers winking at them in the night sky, celestial ice cream cones floating gently overhead, and a number of members of the animal kingdom winking at them, and only them, in the blackness. And on this fourth of July, sinking into a thick blanket on a packed high school football field, I’m watching constellations of man-made stars piercing the natural serenity of the nighttime, fleeting bulbs of color screeching speedily towards no where in particular.
“I wonder how much the city spent on these. This all comes from your taxes. René,” I joke, turning to a member of the group of family friends who had dragged me here to see the fireworks.
René lives in the town that hosts the fireworks and schleps his family to the field each year, where he becomes a member of the mass of humanity known as the “patriotic Americans,” clad in stars and stripes, waving flags, sharing garbled American history lessons with their kids, babbling about redcoats, Andrew Jackson, the New Deal, and Condi Rice. These are the people who hang American flags outside their door-steps for a week - maybe two - every July, who hold barbeques for other patriotic Americans where on their stereos they play grossly and almost absurdly “American” tunes.
Forgive me if I strike you as cynical, even un-American. I’ve just never caught on to the whole fourth of July thing. It seems to me to be a chance for ordinary people to act more enthusiastic about their nation than they really are. As a burgeoning historian, newspaper enthusiast, and fairly strange teenage girl willing to pull over at highway rest stops named after favorite American historical figures, I’m sort of ashamed of the one overwhelming display of love of country Americans show on the fourth. Their actions strike me as distinctly gaudy as only Americans can be - as gaudy as giant strip malls the size of small island nations, as gaudy as the outfits and shimmering “bling” worn by America’s favorite celebrities, as gaudy as suburban-mother driven Hummers decked out with fifteen different multicolored patriotic magnets.
“Support Our Troops!” “Proud to Be an American!” “Land of the Free!” Patriotism has come to be summed up in trite little statements such as these, so that those who haven’t learned to express their national pride in cute slogans are cast to the outside, so that those who find reading history books and the New York Times more enlightening than searching for the best car magnets screaming politician’s names are pointed out and labeled as unpatriotic.
My relationship with America, at times, is as precarious as my relationship with pretty much anyone and everyone else. Such is the plight of the average eighteen year old American. Since I was very young I have always flirted with the wonder of the ex-patriot, the American who simply boards a plane one day and takes on a new cultural identity, who becomes a member of “The Spanish” or “The British” instead of “The Americans.” My excitement has only grown from studying the brooding and sophisticated ex-patriot giants of literature - T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, among dozens of others. If these writers were so inspired by what was anything but American, why couldn’t I be?
I spent much of my childhood reading atlases, drinking up the names, population sizes, revenue, and anomalies of the nations of the world. I traced my fingers along their flags, testing the feeling of Switzerland, Germany, New Zealand, and Canada. Imagining unloading my piles of American-made merchandise into a new home in another nation, envisioning my return as a worldly traveler with a hint of a foreign accent, I couldn’t stop my heart from skipping a beat at the idea of something, anything new and exciting and distant. I would soak in the hustle and bustle of Tokyo, lounge on exotic Mexican beaches, and sit contemplating life, smoking foreign cigarettes and drinking black coffee in the cafés of Paris.
I’m eighteen years old and none of that has happened yet. The only time I used my passport was to travel to a stuffy resort in the Bahamas where the most exotic companions I met had journeyed from such diverse places as Mill Valley, California and Alexandria, Virginia. I hung my head and sheepishly reported my residence in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, just another branch hanging idly off the tree of metropolitan New York.
My friends say that maybe it’s my politics that separate me from homey, patriotic America. Maybe I am too much of a neo-hippie, they say, a liberal, an argumentative, stubborn college-bound kid. It’s not that. I don’t want to flee the government because I know as well as anyone else that it’s mainly because of the government, and my conservative hardworking parents, that I am able to afford such affinities as my laptop or my comforter set. I felt out of place - minute and ridiculous - at the two political rallies I attended. I wanted so much to be a part of something big then that I almost convinced myself I was. But, looking back, I know now that the whole time I just wanted to put down my banners, stop screaming propaganda slogans and go to Starbucks and buy a vanilla latte. And so a realization has since slowly started to envelop my conscience. I am not an ex-patriot at heart, only a confused teenager.
I don’t want to flee the government. I want to flee myself. I’m eighteen years old and I’m just beginning to realize that the feeling I have, the feeling of being trapped by my home, has nothing to do with the stars and stripes. It’s not the feeling of a frustrated American but the feeling of an eighteen year old girl who has just woken up to the fact that for almost two decades she’s allowed everyone else to pay for and arrange her entire life. It’s not the Hummers that make me restless, and it’s not the magnets or the shopping malls or reality shows or garrulous politicians. It’s only me.
The fireworks are exploding overhead and I am making wisecracks about how gauche the whole celebration seems to be. Every time one of the children gasps I emit a snort of self-righteous laughter. I lie back on my blanket and watch the millions of dollars of pyrotechnic special effects sparkle above me. People are chattering, yelling, clapping, singing - being embarrassingly loud Americans. I want it to be over.
The finale comes, a frenzied firestorm of redwhiteblue redwhiteblue crackling over and over again. I’m not paying too much attention, and think it’s over when the noise settles. But then one more firework is launched, a tiny blue orb floating gracefully upward. Suddenly nothing is exploding anymore, and nobody is talking or shouting. Suddenly everyone is watching in awe as this star soars higher than all the others. Many instants pass, and finally the dot bursts into a mammoth cloud of white sparks. We, the people of the United States of America, are silent and stunned. Even I do not have a wisecrack now. Even I, in this moment, feel patriotic.
I know in this moment that it doesn’t matter that in order to get home I have to trek along yet another infamous trashy New Jersey highway. It doesn’t matter that in a handful of seconds I will stand up, look around, and see a bunch of people who probably don’t know the difference between the early American Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties, people who have never studied the most famous cases of the Supreme Court, people who don’t know Molly Pitcher from Molly Ringwald. And for the moment it doesn’t matter. For the moment I close my eyes and feel closeness with these thousands of people I have possibly passed on the streets of New Jersey suburbia dozens of times. Couples, families, children, grandparents all gazing upward with their mouths hanging open and their eyes moistening. I see the man-made stars now as maybe the only way to reach everyone, to draw everyone together. And I know that in spite of everything, in America it is possible for me to gaze at the constellations and see anything I want to see. And in this moment I am once and forever, completely and inexhaustibly, American.