A Republic...

Six minutes ago, it was officially Uncle Sam's 230th birthday on the East Coast. I thought I'd take a moment and commemorate that. Don't miss Slate.com's "Today Pictures."

I don't intend to wax poetic; I'm not a poet. I won't get sentimental about my 3rd Fourth away from the US; I'm not in the least. However, I felt like saying something about something that feels to be drifting away whether in reality it truly is or not.

yanquimike.com.ar is directed mostly to expatriates. While some definitions contend that this term combines both the temporary and the permanent conditions, I contend that an expat is someone that intends to return someday in the future. Lacking that, immigrant is the proper term. While I count myself in the latter catagory, I've never stopped my obsession with the question that "any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."

My native land's preoccupations leading up to late 2003 were not a major consideration in my decision to emigrate but I wonder if I would have actually made the leap under different circumstances. It probably wouldn't have made any difference; you'd have to go back a whole bunch of those 230 to find a time in which The Bill of Rights could have passed again.

That having been said, however, I can point back through several stages in which being an American has had distinct characters. To my mind, there is a progression through those characteristics. (btw, we don't call ourselves Americans out of ego...we call ourselves that because that's what the British called us. Like Yankee Doodle, we adopted it.)

Being tremendously geriatric, I qualify not only as a "Baby Boomer" but also as a "Sputnik Baby". While still en utero, the papers raged with the Soviets' success in space during the Eisenhower administration. Perhaps lacking many other available iniciatives, a tremendous national push was made to improve the state of the national education toward producing more engineers and scientists. Coming during the still great shadow of the New Deal, this was considered ambitious but not as radical as it would be today. The Cold War took on a new dimension, as well. Maps of Europe were one thing but being able to see the tiny man-made Russian "star" in the Indiana night sky brought a whole new dimension to the call for the necessity of foriegn involvement.

We were made to fear in the following decades. First duck-and-cover, then the Kennedy assasination, then the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution's blanket use of force granted to the Texan president who described it as being "like ol' gramma's nightshirt. It covers everything." If you ever went through periods then suspecting sudden nuclear anihilation...try describing it to an Argentine. Even the most worldly and informed Porteño will be puzzeled.

Sociologists and child psychologists will tell you that there comes a crystallizing moment in everyone's young life in which they look up from their sandbox and make the realization that there is a world outside their backyard. Not only that, the connection is made that the world outside that is connected to another world. In short, that there is an interconnectiveness of not only the land but of the people on it. Depending on what the child feels is happening in the world during that realization it will strongly shape him. It usually occures around 7-9 years old.

I came to that point with Walter Chronkite, Life & Look magazines, Rock & Roll, and long-haired people flashing me a two fingered sign into the back seat where my brother and I played slug-bug when they weren't trying to sell me the Free Press at bus stops downtown. I found it exhilarating. Contrast that with those born only 10 or so years later looking up at the Iran Hostage Crises and a funny looking Brit that numbered the days for us on TV and morphed into something called Nightline. The eighties had arrived.

I didn't and don't have much good to say about the then new president with his "morning in America" and his call to "return to the days of 5¢ Cokes and hardworking White people" though I think he and I would love the graphic at the top of this post. America spun nose-first into an era where it became OK to defame the poor and the black and where it became acceptible for perhaps the first time in almost 50 years to begin to jettison portions of the social contract in pursuit of massive personal gain. We told ourselves that it was only "the pendulum."

The 90's took on a truly "race to the bottom" feel ameliorated by a press full of stories of grand accumulations of wealth and a Democratic president that out-conservatived the sitting conservative legislators. But the spiral continued with insurgent right-wing hell-bent on installing one-great-man that would end tolerance once and for all.

In the weeks following 9-11 I began to feel like a European Jew in the 1930's, equivocating between whether threats to my way of life, my beliefs, what my country stood for, and my liberty both literal and figurative, were real or imagined...and whether or not I would wait too long.

During these 3 years here, in a country that practically invented the guise in which European fascism would appear in the New World, I confess to feeling safer and more secure in the knowledge that my new-found countrymen have gone thru the crucible and now, battered and wiser, to a great degree have no more taste for such things.

And so I look back over 10000 kilometers and wish the land of my birth well, unable to forget the words of the Declaration and the consequent Constitution and it's first 10 amendments while trying to forget about national identity cards, freedom of movement, assaults on the privacy of individuals and their ability to be secure in their homes and persons.

I pray for the end of this downward spiral without any great damage and the beginning of good news. I would like to blow the candles out and feel that the great-grandchildren of the 1947 Texan in the above graphic will feel about being an American the way he did.