Going Nucular Page 13

  But as those exit polls showed, most Americans don’t see the wealthy as a separate class. Say “upper-class” to most people and what comes to mind is Thurston Howell III, not Jack Welch. My guess is that if you asked him, Welch would be quick to describe himself as upper-middle-class, pointing out that he still prefers beer to wine.

  That’s the trick to all this talk of “class warfare.” Middle-income Americans may be painfully aware of the gulf that separates them from the wealthy, but they don’t think of those in terms of class lines. To a high-school principal making $80,000 a year, the only class difference is between herself and the school janitor, not between herself and a coupon-clipping investor. Class is a word that sets Americans to looking over their shoulder. I think of what my friend Bob said many years ago as we were nervously chaining up our bicycles outside a restaurant on upper Broadway in New York: “When you buy a ten-speed, the class war comes home to you.”

  Special Effects

  As British demonstrators were organizing for yesterday’s anti-Bush protests, the right-wing Daily Mail warned that if they damaged the relationship with America, they would damage Britain as well. “This is our closest and most reliable ally,” the paper said, “tied to us by a shared commitment to freedom, by a common language and a common history, not to mention immensely important trade links.”

  The references to a common language are de rigueur whenever Britons are defending the “special relationship,” a phrase that they use a lot more than we do. But historically speaking, it was the special relationship that created the common language, rather than the other way round. It wasn’t inevitable that the two nations would think of themselves as speaking the same language—people often distinguish separate languages with varieties that are no more distinct than British and American are, like Dutch and Afrikaans or Norwegian and Danish. In fact, in the decades following the American Revolution, people like Adams and Jefferson argued that Americans should break off their linguistic ties with England, just as they had thrown off its political yoke. Not that we were about to switch to speaking Greek or German, but over the course of time American would become a language “distinct from the rest of the world,” as Noah Webster put it. And to make the point symbolically, Webster went about altering American orthography so that Americans and English-men would wind up writing “honor” in different ways.

  Fresh Air commentary, November 20, 2003

  It wasn’t until fifty or sixty years later that the English and Americans somewhat grudgingly decided to maintain their linguistic union, like a couple that goes through a trial separation and then decides to stick it out. That realization no doubt reflected the pull of a common literary and political heritage—as Anthony Trollope wrote in 1862, “[An American] separates himself from England in politics and perhaps in affection; but he cannot separate himself from England in mental culture.” But it also owed a lot to the neurotic dependencies that can bind families more closely than mere history does. If England and America didn’t think of themselves as speaking the same language, the English couldn’t accuse us of mangling it, and we wouldn’t have the satisfaction of knowing how much our cheeky linguistic high jinks annoyed those stiff grown-ups back in the parlor.

  The British have always had a high time portraying Americans as backwoods buffoons who spout a mixture of slang, malaprops, and bloated pomposities. For them, America was the source of all linguistic corruption, in something like the way that we think of California today. In 1869, the English critic G. F. Graham accused Americans of taking liberties with the language. “‘slick’, ‘spry’, and ‘boss’ are not English words, and we may pretty confidently expect that they will never become English.”

  It was around then that British critics began to use the phrase “President’s English” in a mocking way. When an American news dispatch announced in 1864 that General Grant was going home to “recuperate,” using the verb in a new, intransitive sense, a writer in Punch asked “How can people who call themselves members of the Anglo-Saxon family use such language? . . . you who owe allegiance to Her Majesty, and are in duty bound to maintain the purity of the Queen’s English; consider all such English as ‘Recuperate’ President’s English, spurious, base, villainous: pray you, avoid it.”

  That has been the dominant note in British commentaries on American English ever since—a mixture of affectionate condescension, ridicule, and occasionally genuine bile, particularly when relations between the two countries were strained. While the Civil War was raging in 1864, the Dean of Canterbury wrote: “Look at the process of deterioration which our Queen’s English has undergone at the hands of the Americans . . . and then compare the character and history of the nation—its blunted sense of moral obligation and duty to man . . . ; and its reckless and fruitless maintenance of the most cruel and unprincipled war in the history of the world.”

  True, the British have usually overdrawn their depictions of American speech—Dickens rendered it so broadly in American Notes that Emerson felt obliged to complain that “no such conversations ever occur in this country in real life.” But if no American actually talks like those caricatures, George Bush comes pretty close. British critics of Bush and his policies may make a point of saying that their beef is with the president and not the country. But it’s certainly convenient that Bush fits the negative stereotype of Americans so neatly—he’s a self-made straw man.

  The London Sunday Times, which has been generally supportive of Bush, recently asked 2000 Britons which characteristics they most associate with the U.S. president. The largest proportion said he was “a danger to world peace,” but that was followed closely by the adjectives “stupid” and “incoherent.” And in the Times of London last week, the conservative columnist Matthew Parris observed not entirely approvingly that these days any English comic can get a laugh with a joke that depicts Bush as “a loud, bumptious, ignorant, crass, narrow-minded, conspiring, lethal zealot.” As Parris notes, “The trouble with Bush jokes is that they are really about Americans.”

  Of course, a lot of people on this side of the pond think of Bush as an America joke, too. That’s the price we Americans pay for the special relationship—we all have a little introjected Englishman perched on our shoulder, clucking his tongue at our ignorance and faulty grammar. And it can be embarrassing to see the flesh-and-blood embodiment of those defects sharing a platform with Tony Blair.

  But nowadays Americans seem to be making less fun of Bush’s linguistic derelictions, whichever side they’re on. Before the September 11 attacks and the Iraq war, the president’s supporters could make light of his gaffes as harmless foibles. Now even that concession seems to undercut their efforts to drape a Churchillian mantle over the man and his language. An article in National Review goes so far as to describe him as “speaking with Churchillian clarity.” I doubt whether even the Daily Mail would have ventured that description for a British audience.

  Bush’s language has become a less important issue for his American critics, too. Not that they don’t still regard him an ignorant bumpkin (or worse, a pseudo-bumpkin) who embarrasses the country, but now they’re concerned that he’s making America look bad in much more dangerous ways. That anger has nothing to do with the fact that Bush doesn’t talk like Tony Blair—or for that matter, that Tony Blair does.

  Symbols

  A Date to Remember

  Back in 1979 when I was living in Rome, the singer Francesco de Gregori had an odd hit with a kind of alternative national anthem called Viva l’Italia, which has since become a classic. The song is laced with an ironic affection for Italy with all its faults—the tone is more like My Funny Valentine than the love-it-or-leave-it swagger of our patriotic country songs or the angry repudiations of our protest music.

  Viva l’Italia, it went, “plundered and betrayed . . . half garden and half jail . . . Italy with its eyes shut in the dark night, Italy unafraid.” The last verse went: “Viva L’Italia, Italy of the 12th of December, Italy in its flags and Ital
y naked as always, Italy with its eyes open in the sad night, Italy that resists.”

  I had to ask an Italian friend about that reference to the 12th of December—it turned out to be the day in 1969 when neo-fascists set off bombs in Milan and Rome that killed sixteen people and wounded more than 100, initiating a long period of violence and instability. The Italians are always using dates to refer to important events. In Rome alone there are streets named May 24, September 8, September 20, February 8, October 25, and November 4, all of them commemorating various events of national significance.

  Fresh Air Commentary, September 11, 2003

  The Italians aren’t alone in this. The French still refer to the major developments of the French revolution as the 9 Thermidor (the overthrow of Robespierre in 1794) and the 18 Brumaire (Napoleon’s coup of 1799), using the names of the months in the revolutionary calendar, and they’ve kept up the practice for recent events. An article in Le Monde last week asked whether the socialists might be heading for “a new 21st of April,” the date of the first round of the 2002 presidential elections when the party was eliminated by the far-right party of Jean-Marie le Pen. The Germans use “June 17” as shorthand for the uprisings against the East German communist regime in 1953, and the Portuguese use “April 25” to refer to their 1974 revolution.

  As it happens, we Americans are one of the few nations who don’t refer to historical events this way. There’s the Fourth of July, of course, but we only use that date to refer to the annual holiday, not the approval of the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress in 1776. We talk about “Pearl Harbor,” “V-E Day,” and “the Kennedy assassination,” not “December 7,” “May 8,” or “November 22.”

  September 11 is the one exception. That may be because the events of that day happened in several different places—giving the date is more compact than saying “The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and in a plane over Pennsylvania.” But even so, we seem to feel the need to assign the date a special form that’s distinct from the way we refer to dates in conversation. Since the attacks, “September 11” has been steadily losing ground to “9/11.” That’s the way we write a date in headlines or on a check, not what we say in conversation when someone asks for our birthday. In fact for many people the “9/11” form has been detached from its calendric meaning, which is what leads them to pronounce it as “nine-one-one.” That’s partly due to a confusion with the police emergency number, of course. But we’re never tempted to say “nine-one-one” when we’re reading a date off a check stub.

  Of course you could say that our reluctance to refer to events by their dates is simply a matter of avoiding ambiguity as to which year we’re talking about. But people in other nations don’t seem to have any problem understanding these references—“Would that be next 18 Brumaire you’re talking about, or the one back in 1799?”

  For the French or Italians, that’s the point of referring to events as “December 12” or “April 21”—it appeals to the collective memory of a community linked by a common daily experience. You have the image of a people turning the pages of the calendar in unison and marking the important dates in red letters. It’s the same sense of history that allows families to refer to the dates of birthdays and anniversaries without having to remind each other what their significance is.

  That familial sense of national community comes more naturally to a homogeneous people with a history that transcends regimes and revolutions. We Americans don’t really think of ourselves as a people in that sense—when we talk about “the American people,” we usually continue with “are” rather than “is.” That may be why we’re uncomfortable with the kind of patriotism you hear in de Gregori’s Italian anthem. When my sister and I talk about our relatives we can allow ourselves a tone of fond exasperation, without having to worry that anybody’s going to accuse us of being anti-Nunberg.

  As families go, at any rate, we Americans aren’t good at remembering the dates of our anniversaries. Shortly after the Battle of Lexington and Concord in 1775, John Adams’ wife Abigail wrote that the 19th of April would be “ever memorable for America as the Ides of March to Rome.” But outside of Massachusetts, where Patriot’s Day was regularly celebrated on April 19 until it became a moveable feast a few years ago, the only people who mark that date now are the decidedly unfamilial far-rightists who associate it with Waco and the Oklahoma City bombing. Most Americans couldn’t tell you when the shot heard round the world was fired—or for that matter, by whom and at what.

  That may very well be the fate of the date of the terrorist attacks of 2001, too, within a couple of generations. But in the meantime, there’s something to be said for referring to the events simply as September 11, rather than with that bureaucratic-sounding 9/11. It’s only two extra syllables, and it locates the events where they happened, in the middle of our daily lives.

  Our Nation’s Favorite Song

  The events of September 11 have set everyone to rethinking the significance of patriotic symbols, but change was in the air anyway. The last time we overhauled the apparatus of patriotism was around the turn of the twentieth century. The Pledge of Allegiance was composed in 1892 by Francis Bellamy, a Boston socialist and Baptist minister. And it wasn’t until 1916 that President Wilson issued an executive order that made The Star-Spangled Banner our official national anthem, around the same time he declared Flag Day a national holiday.

  The Star-Spangled Banner is the most vulnerable of all of these symbols. People have been complaining for a long time that the song was too militaristic. During the First World War Congress criminalized singing the third stanza, with its line “Their blood has wash’d out their foul footsteps’ pollution,” which was held to be offensive to our British allies. And not long ago, a school board in Madison, Wisconsin, instructed schools to use only an instrumental version.

  That’s not entirely a fair charge—after all, those rockets and bombs were coming from the British ships that were bombarding Fort McHenry as Francis Scott Key watched helplessly from the harbor, and a song about America surviving a foreign attack should be very much à propos right now.

  Fresh Air Commentary, October 26, 2001

  Still, a lot of people would as soon have an anthem with no war images at all. And The Star-Spangled Banner does have insurmountable musical deficiencies. It’s fun to cheer at a baseball game when a diva hits the high note on “land of the free.” But there are times when people want to be able to sing an anthem in unison without having to strain.

  That may explain why people have been spontaneously adopting auxiliary anthems. During the last few weeks of the major-league season, baseball teams began playing God Bless America just before Take Me Out to the Ballgame at the seventh-inning stretch, and a lot of spectators were responding just as they do with The Star-Spangled Banner, standing and removing their hats. It’s certainly the catchiest of all the contenders, and it would be fitting for America to have an anthem originally written as a show tune. But the title would be controversial, and most Americans would want their official anthem to be a bit mustier and more decorously phrased.

  America the Beautiful has a suitable pedigree. It was composed in 1892 by a Wellesley professor named Katharine Lee Bates. The movement to make it our national anthem goes back to 1926, and has gained support since September 11. Willie Nelson closed the all-star TV benefit on September 22 by leading everyone in singing the song, and ABC News correspondent Lynn Sherr had a book high on the bestseller lists with the title “America the Beautiful”: The Stirring True Story Behind Our Nation’s Favorite Song.

  The appeal of the song isn’t hard to explain. America the Beautiful may not be a stirring hymn like Battle Hymn of the Republic, the only patriotic song that America has produced that could go elbow-to-elbow with the Marseillaise and Deutschland Uber Alles if it came to a showdown in Rick’s cafe. But it’s a pleasant tune (and more than that, when Ray Charles sings it), and it’s one that we can join in on withou
t self-consciousness.

  But what really endears the song to Americans is its lyrics, with their invocations of coast-to-coast brotherhood and above all their pretty scenic pictures, like a set of old chromolithograph postcards. Even so, it troubles me to think of America the Beautiful as a national anthem. I’m made nervous by its overblown language, with its contorted syntax and fulsome descriptions. You have to be wary of any verses that have that many adjectives in them, particularly orotund vocables like spacious, amber, purple, and fruited—and beautiful, for that matter, which is usually something better implied than said.

  This isn’t just a stylistic quibble. That overwriting is typical of the late-nineteenth-century sentimentalization of a vanishing rural America, and the fear that urbanization and industrialization were eroding traditional American values. (That notion is picked up in later stanzas, where Bates complains that the “banner of the free” is being stained by “selfish gain” and hopes for an age of “nobler men” to “keep once again thy whiter jubilee.”) Modern Americans can easily sympathize with those themes, given our own concerns about the threatened environment. But, now as then, it puts the essence of the country far from the daily lives that most of us live. As a kid in Manhattan, I remember singing about purple mountains and waves of grain and thinking that America must be a distant place, somewhere out beyond Jersey. And Bates’s sublime landscape has no more to do with the country that most Americans inhabit now, a land of spacious parking lots and amber traffic signals.