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July 3, 2006
Ugly Americans? Maybe we are just young!
By DEANNA DAHLSAD
Americans are often considered loud, rude, rebellious people who think they can buy their way in or out of everything. So I thought on this anniversary of our nation's birth, we'd take a look at our history as young punks.
Nations are formed of real people, and like real people, our identities were formed in our youth. We Americans, like any young adventurous adult struggling to find ourselves in the world, left our family homes in England, looking for some form of independence. Like those who enter college, we lived away, yet were still tied to the Crown's apron strings.
Much like today's college students, we began to chafe at the expectations of our parents -- only instead of turning in good grades and being grateful for all our parents were doing for us, our role as dutiful child meant we had to pay taxes as well as behave. Soon we felt we were not only not being given enough credit, but we weren't being given any respect. Taxation without representation was the equivalent of paying our own bills yet still being told what to do. When we'd had enough, we did what any young person would do: We rebelled and made a stand for our independence.
Along with winning our independence, we decided to stick our noses up at anything we deemed part of the establishment we so rebelled against. We saw the highfalutin manners of "polite society" as not only very passé and Old World, but as contrary to the egalitarian New World we were creating.
We citizens of this 20-something year old nation were full of ideals and ready to act upon them daily. Affirmations, of sorts, we demonstrated our lofty aims for a class-free society in loud, coarse, and rough behavior and language. If we met someone with more genteel ways, we became downright rude. Upon meeting a rather well-to-do gentleman with polished manners, the course of action was logical: Give him the "I'm as good a man as you" attitude, complete with sneers at his polite airs.
But then something happened; the Industrial Revolution.
A time of tremendous social and economic change, this revolution created a consumer economy and a huge middle class that felt that they had 'arrived.' Not only at a higher level of income, but at a higher plane of existence. The farm and the tenement beliefs and social customs would simply not do for those of us who had made our way in the world.
Like the Nouveau Riche, this new middle class believed they could purchase appropriate manners to accompany their newly purchased homes, stylish clothing, and other gadgets. Commerce was happy to feed them.
From the 1850's on, the market was flooded with etiquette books, which gave us the rules of "polite society". Where we once mocked such airs, we now happily bought them, literally. In our silly quest to buy the proof of our status, we didn't consider that the rules we were buying were based on (if not taken directly from) the practices of the 18th Century aristocrats that we had rebelled against and their society that we had overthrown and made obsolete. We bought the books, but we also bought the ideals. For many of these books described 19th Century America as it was, but as we hoped it would be.
These manners gradually diffused throughout society, and by the 20th Century, these manners were in use by all Americans. By the time WWI had ended, there were no longer such Victorian notions of class and behavior, but a more watered down version of common courtesies for all. What was kept were the common sense rules such as "Don't chew with your mouth open" and "Don't interrupt people" -- the sort of things your mom still tells you.
What we can see from all of this, are our roots as loud, rude, rebellious people who can buy their way in or out of everything. Where some see character flaws, I see a nation of people who have gotten where they are today -- a free nation with the least amount of class restrictions and mammas who raise us with common courtesies.
As nations go, we are still rather young, and it remains to be seen how we will grow and mature. But there is certainly reason to celebrate being American. Ugly or not, we do have the greatest country in the world. Even if we do say so ourselves.
Posted by photocartoonist at July 3, 2006 11:58 AM