America - The Owner's Manual: How Your Country Really Works and How to Keep It Running

AMERICA –

THE OWNER’S MANUAL

How Your Country Really Works and How to Keep It Running

by Harvey Asher, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2012: Harvey Asher

Smashwords Edition

For permission to reprint any portion of this book, please contact the author at [email protected].

The material in this book originally appeared on the blog of the same name at http://americatheownersmanual.wordpress.com.

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For Sandy, best friend, talented writer, and relentless editor.

This is our book.

"Posterity: you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it."

John Quincy Adams

"There is nothing wrong with America that the faith, love of freedom, intelligence and energy of her citizens cannot cure."

Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Patriotism is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime."

Adlai Stevenson

CONTENTS

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

THOSE WERE THE DAYS – AND SO ARE THESE

POLITICS AS USUAL

THINK NATIONALLY – ACT INDIVIDUALLY

AMERICAN CAPITALISM: MOVING BEYOND BLIND FAITH

PART ONE – RAT LAB REVISITED

PART TWO – WHEN THE CAT’S AWAY

IMMIGRATION AND THE MYTH OF THE ONE TRUE AMERICAN

ON RACISM, RACIALISM, AND POST-RACISM

YOU CAN’T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT – AND WHY IT SEEMS TO TAKE FOREVER

HERSTORY: REMEMBERING THE LADIES

DIVIDED WE STAND: RELIGION IN AMERICA

CITY ON A HILL REVISITED: EXCEPTIONALISM AND AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY

PLAYING WITH FIRE: PARANOID POLITICS AMERICAN STYLE

EXTRAS:

WE CAN SURVIVE – AND CONTROL – POLITICAL GRIDLOCK

REALLY READING THE NEWS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION . . .

Daily reports in print, on television, and over the Internet make it easy to conclude that the United States is going to hell in a handbasket. The economy is in tatters. Race relations remain strained despite the election of the first African-American president. Sexual escapades flood the media. Public schools perform poorly, and turn out incompetent students. Communication technology has morphed into a Frankenstein monster. And if all that weren’t enough – and there is more! — deep flaws have developed in our national character. Our culture reflects a lack of good taste. Intellectual pursuits are viewed with suspicion and resentment. Shallowness and selfishness dominate the sentiments and beliefs of the majority. The government is broken.

Critics on both the Left and Right consider ours the worst of times in American history. These modern-day Cassandras and Nostradamuses lay doom-laden bets on the when of America’s demise. They describe a funeral procession already underway, although the soon-to-be-deceased (America as we knew it) remains unaware of its imminent burial.

Had enough?

America: The Owners’ Manual shows how apocalyptic scenarios simplify complex situations. They’re meant to alarm, convince, and convert, not to illuminate. American life is not a binary affair; notions of America the Blighted or America the Beautiful do little to help us understand America the Real.

The many problems besieging the United States today need to be evaluated in the broader and longer contexts out of which the American experience continues to evolve. Doing less makes it impossible to tell whether present difficulties are new, or simply warmed-over versions of the same old, same old. Most of the time, the latter is true, giving us evidence that we’ve survived before and we’ll bounce back again.

America: The Owner’s Manual is all about perspective. That’s the tool needed to understand the broad contours of American history, aspects of the past that have shaped the present and can guide us through the present and into the future. Only perspective can allow us to distinguish what is real and true, reduce our unfounded fears, and help us move forward with confidence.

America: The Owner’s Manual addresses major developments in economics, politics, foreign policy, and cultural and social issues that have significantly shaped contemporary America. It does so without bias toward the left or the right. Examples come from a wide variety of sources, both academic and popular, to create a full picture of how Americans have lived and dealt with trying situations over time.

This book is meant to serve at least two audiences. One is adults who care about what’s happening to the country and are feeling anxiety and confusion about it. The second includes teachers of high school through college classes, who may use it to supplement coursework in modern American history, historiography, and contemporary issues.

Moderation might be considered a tough sell in a market driven by cuteness and sensationalism, but moderation is the unique, pervading quality of this book. Its moderate conclusions will please neither conservatives nor liberals whose work focuses on polarization. Likewise, its conclusions will disappoint those who see a United States forever basking in sunlight. The no-nonsense, golden mean approach of America: The Owner’s Manual is so NOT radical, it stands a good chance of becoming the new norm for people tired of endless shock and awe.

THOSE WERE THE DAYS — AND SO ARE THESE

Once upon a time, Americans were soft spoken, polite, and well-informed. They tucked their shirts in before they went outside, and donned hats and gloves before venturing into town. They kept a civil tongue in their heads. They treated their teachers, elders, and one another with respect. They attended lectures, concerts and the theater. They read newspapers, magazines, and books. And they taught their children that George Washington never told a lie.

These days, restaurants, street corners, cars, trains, buses, and airports are used as individual broadcasting stations from which the chronically connected blast forth the banality of their daily existence, often punctuated with profanities. When polled, most people say they consider this behavior rude – but not in the case of their own conversations. Boorish narcissism seems to have reached new heights.

Or is it that people have always been rude, but cellphone conversations make their lack of consideration for others more obvious? We’ve had sidewalk spitters as long as we’ve had sidewalks. The young used to haul boom boxes around instead of listening to iPods. Phone rudeness is nothing new. People who remember party lines recall neighbors who listened in on private calls as if they were radio shows.

No, we’re assured by experts, things are definitely getting worse. Intellectuals, academicians, and writers bemoan the fast-deteriorating life of the mind in American culture and the corresponding coarsening of our society. They find signs of decay everywhere: public indifference towards learning, fixation on the trivial, unawareness of—and even pride in—ignorance. Citizens, they claim, cannot distinguish among rumors, lies, propaganda, and facts. For all too many Americans who dozed through American History 101, claims Kenneth David in Don’t Know Much About History," the Mayflower Compact might as well be a small car . . . Reconstruction has something to do with silicone implants."

Naysayers frequently contrast twenty-first-century Americans with the Greatest Generation, selfless men and women who won World War II and then built a prosperous postwar society without boasting of their achievements and sacrifices. Praise for the heroes and hard workers of that time is richly deserved.

But were the good old days really that good? If Washington never even chopped down that cherry tree (and he didn’t), how does that make today look by comparison?

Let’s see.

Today’s culture critics are hardly the first to complain about the atrophy of American intellectual life, its philistine culture, the loss of its moral underpinnings, and the vacuity of middle-class life. What makes them unique is that they are the first of their kind to declare hopelessness about the situation ever changing for the better.

In Letters from an American Farmer (1782), a Frenchman named Jean de Crevecoeur defined an American as he who leaving behind him all prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced. He applauded Americans’ lack of reverence for the classical education received by the antidemocratic European aristocracy. De Crevecoeur later became a U.S. citizen.

Transcendentalists in the 1830s and 1840s lambasted the philistinism that came in the wake of commercial and industrial development. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s goal in promoting the cultivation of the mind and the divine spark within was to offset the materialism he noted all around him. The same could be said of his contemporary and disciple Henry David Thoreau and the latter’s Walden Pond musings: Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

French traveler and observer Alexis de Tocqueville worried in Democracy in America (1848)