They’re not a people at all, just a collection of randomly chosen characters milling about without any herd instinct. They wander here and there around the globe, which is where they came from, and then, without any preliminaries, proclaim themselves a nation.
But they’re not a nation. They lack the first requisite of nationhood. Everyone knows who the Russians are, and the French and Germans, too, for that matter. They have their own language, habits, history ... In short, their own nationhood. But these ever-new Americans, what holds them together? They’re always dissolving, then reforming. Yet it’s clear enough they’re patriotic, as they will demonstrate when threatened from without. They remain a puzzle to those of us who know not only what we are but have been and will forever be.
Maybe it’s just economic growth that has drawn them together and always has. Look at where they were a couple of centuries ago. You’d hardly recognize the change. No five-year plan could compete with all the unplanned changes the Americans have made. Back then they had no electricity, indoor plumbing or central heating. Their women were more hewers of wood and carriers of water than anything we would recognize as human today. Like our serfs under the tsars or Negro slaves on the plantation. The women cooked and cleaned for themselves and for their families without ceasing. Only the well-cushioned lives of the upper classes were protected from the ebbs and flows of economic fortune and misfortune.
As a rule the men weren’t exactly living in the lap of luxury back then, either. Those in the work force put up with a six-day, 12-hour-a-day week of work, whether on the farm or in the factories. They might be crushed in collapsing mines or railroad crashes. Yet they didn’t rebel. Instead they built. Where is their spirit, I ask, yet those of us they’ve engaged in peace and war know better than to rouse it today.
That must indeed be the key to these Americans: unhindered economic growth. Early in the last century, they were setting the standard of living for the world without needing mass mobilizations or labor battalions. Clean water had replaced typhoid-breeding cesspools. Mortality rates had dropped dramatically. The cities and little towns had come into their own thanks to the spread of electrical power. And the middle class was born complete with refrigerators in place of ice boxes, washing machines instead of scrub boards, and soon just about everybody was driving one of the new-fangled automobiles.
Then came World War II, for the world had to start numbering them by now, followed by television and air travel and computers, which now have evolved into hand-held iPhones. And now some argue, as some did then, there is nothing left to invent. But I would never underestimate this strange people. They’ll keep surprising us. And will always bear watching, with their talons now stretching across the globe even as they remain a mystery to me.
They seem to be forever adolescent, the kind of people who when given a choice will make it. And when presented with a fad will follow it. Now you take an American politician like Bernie Sanders, he understands. What do these perpetual adolescents need with a choice of 23 underarm deodorants when we their betters will tell them which fashions to follow and which to discard? Why do they need 57 varieties of charter schools, each suited to their individual tastes, when we’ll tell them where to send their children? Why do they need to change their minds from year to year, even hour by hour, when what’s needed is stability, order, and the kind of rule well known in every police state on record?
Yes, we Russians grow, too. In all directions, taking over every captive nation in our path. Crimea, whatever part of the Ukraine appeals to us, and so unstoppably on. But we do it the old-fashioned way: by force, not suasion. Definitely. As for the Americans, they remain not just a wonder but a mystery to me. But their hour clearly has come and, if they continue to dally, will soon be gone, too.
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Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.