On Being a Bad American

Or, Further stages of grief

I’m a bad American. I don’t own a car. I own my own home, but it’s an apartment and our building does not have even one square centimeter of green space. I haven’t mowed a lawn in over twenty years. I don’t even own a pair of jeans! (They’re heavy and uncomfortable and they chafe — wake up, sheeple!) Hence when I first heard the creepy new car commercial declaring that Americans can do anything if they put their minds to it — except stop being American! — it registered as a threat, almost the voice of fate itself. There are so many ways in which I wish that I could stop being American, that I could shed the heavy baggage of what America and Americans mean for the rest of the world. Like many intellectuals, I have fantasized about living abroad, even before recent events made one suspect that may one day become a necessity. How nice it would be to be away from [gestures broadly at everything] all this.

But I know I would never stop being American, and the more I travel abroad the more I realize how deeply American I am. I’m American in small stupid ways, like my love of junk food and pop culture ephemera. I’m American in big important ways, like my preference for forthright speech and my distrust of status hierarchies. Even the ways I’m out of step with the broader culture are still deeply American in their own way. I’m a working class autodidact at heart, not a properly housebroken academic, and I have found my tenuous perch in higher education within the Great Books tradition — the only pedagogical tradition I’m aware of that was once propagated by tacky door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen. My life trajectory looks a lot like the fulfillment of the promise of which the Great Books encyclopedias were a touchingly naive example, the promise that high culture—from literature and the fine arts to the greatest achievements in philosophy, math, and science—was for everyone, and in my teaching I try to help my student live out that promise.

Yet as with my evangelical heritage, the way I’ve taken up American values has wound up alienating me from the broader culture—sometimes profoundly. Oftentimes my negative reaction to American lifeways stem from my own idiosyncratic experiences growing up that made it difficult to enjoy our cultural traditions in the way that most people do. But I can’t help feeling that my contingent personal alienation gives me a certain epistemic privilege, an ability to see something “off” about things that others can take for granted.

This tension tends to arise most frequently in late autumn and early winter, which is when many of the most important American cultural festivals take place—or at least the cultural festivals I find unappealing. Summer traditions are fine: I like encased meats and beer as much as anyone, possibly more. And come to think of it, Thanksgiving has never been a big problem for me, especially since gathering with “chosen family” has become more mainstream. Even the gesture of centering the meal on a difficult-to-prepare food that nobody really wants strikes me as somehow touching. In short, I guess you could say I have no quarrel with overeating in the grand American style.

But for everything else, I notice that I will go through a cycle of “are they still doing this?!” I went through it with Christmas, after I decided to stop celebrating and found it somehow offensive that everyone else was doing so. I went through it with “Black Friday,” which seemed to surge out of nowhere as an ugly spectacle of desperate consumption. I did it with Halloween, when it became clear to me that what I thought was a joke — young adults continuing to dress up for Halloween parties — was a full-blown irreversible trend that grown adults would continue to participate in until the day they died. I even went through it with the suburbs as such, after the merger between Shimer College and North Central College forced my return to that milieu.

This year, it’s sports, specifically football season. Maybe part of it is that my school is, at least at the Division III level, a genuine football powerhouse. Maybe part of it is that the omnipresent sports gambling has led people to focus on, and therefore talk about, football much more than in previous years. In any case, after many years of not giving it much thought (outside of being sad when Bob’s Burgers was preempted), the realization that football season was beginning again hit me like a ton of bricks, and every “sports talk” conversation I’ve overheard has rankled in a way it never did before.

As with the other American phenomena mentioned, there are idiosyncratic reasons why I feel alienated from sports. It so happened that my dad was not into any sports, and so I never got into them. In the natural course of school and summer programs meant to get me out of the house, I tried my hand at a few and didn’t feel like I had much aptitude or interest. There was an incident of bullying in junior high that drove me to do marching band in high school due to the promise of getting out of gym class—but honestly, I was always going to do marching band in any case. Overall, this isn’t really an area of “painful memories” for me. I don’t regret or resent my lack of participation in athletics. My few experiences of sports were more boring than embarrassing. (I think I may have literally done the Calvin and Hobbes thing of not realizing we were changing sides in baseball and just staying deep in the outfield oblivious.) In fact, if anything, I’m more “athletic” than I ever have been before, with my rowing routine (suitably de-sportified by the accompanying Star Trek rewatch routine). It’s just something that I never developed receptors for, just like some people never developed receptors for comic books or religion or ranch dressing.

That makes it especially jarring to me now that sports, and particularly football, represent our only shared cultural reference point—or at least the only shared cultural reference point that doesn’t risk starting a conflict if you talk about it. Even the weather is politically charged now, thanks to climate change! Sports are the only “safe” small talk topic, and football is the most popular sport, so I can do the math and understand why people are talking about it.

Yet that is not the only reason they are talking about it. Recent decades have seen a bizarre gamification of fanhood itself, first with the advent of fantasy football—which incentivized investment in every single game, not just the ones involving one’s own team or rivals—and then the rise of online sports gambling. I’ll be frank: the latter offends and even scares me. I can understand why society was caught off-guard by unprecedented technologies like smart phones and social media and allowed them to spread without anticipating the harms they would do. But everyone knows what gambling is and does, and still we are conducting a society-wide experimentation in omnipresent, always-on sports betting with no apparent democratic debate or deliberation. That means that the one “safe” thing in American culture is no longer actually safe — it’s a site for exploitation.

But as the saga of Colin Kaepernick shows, it was never as “safe” as people think it is! The growing popularity of football in our young and terrible century went hand in hand with its politicization. It was easy to overlook because the political signifiers at first appeared “neutral”—the flag, the national anthem, the military—but once someone took the politicization at its word and used the football field as a site of actual political contestation, the veneer of neutrality was briefly punctured, only to be forcibly reestablished. The resentment of Kaepernick’s gesture was a reflection of our cultural resentment of political contestation as such, our hatred of the obnoxious self-righteous protestor, our impatience and even outrage that someone would feel entitled to interrupt the smooth flow of our daily life.

Yet football is anything but a smooth flow. In its constant gridlock and stasis, its arcane rules, its incentivizing of technicalities to run down the clock, and its rare bursts of decisive action, surely it is a kind of spiritual echo of our Constitutional system itself. And the whole thing culminates in a game that fully embodies the American “bipartisan” ideal—a meaningless confrontation between two interchangeable sides, which serves only as a backdrop for the consumption of advertisements. Our political-media system may have completely broken down in practice, but in the fantasy world of football, the postwar settlement still holds. Maybe I’m beginning to understand the appeal.