Op-Ed Columnist - American Stories - NYTimes.com
Op-Ed Columnist - American Stories - NYTimes.com
Americans are decent people. They’re not interested in where you came from. They’re interested in who you are. That has not changed.
But much has in the last eight years. This is a moment of anguish. The Bush presidency has engineered the unlikely double whammy of undermining free-market capitalism and essential freedoms, the nation’s twin badges.
American luster is gone. The American idea has, in Joyce Carol Oates’s words, become a “cruel joke.” Americans are worrying and hurting.
So it is important to step back, from the last machinations of this endless campaign, and think again about what America is.
It is renewal, the place where impossible stories get written.
It is the overcoming of history, the leaving behind of war and barriers, in the name of a future freed from the cruel gyre of memory.
It is reinvention, the absorption of one identity in something larger — the notion that “out of many, we are truly one.”
It is a place better than Bush’s land of shadows where a leader entrusted with the hopes of the earth cannot find within himself a solitary phrase to uplift the soul.
Americans are decent people. They’re not interested in where you came from. They’re interested in who you are. That has not changed.
But much has in the last eight years. This is a moment of anguish. The Bush presidency has engineered the unlikely double whammy of undermining free-market capitalism and essential freedoms, the nation’s twin badges.
American luster is gone. The American idea has, in Joyce Carol Oates’s words, become a “cruel joke.” Americans are worrying and hurting.
So it is important to step back, from the last machinations of this endless campaign, and think again about what America is.
It is renewal, the place where impossible stories get written.
It is the overcoming of history, the leaving behind of war and barriers, in the name of a future freed from the cruel gyre of memory.
It is reinvention, the absorption of one identity in something larger — the notion that “out of many, we are truly one.”
It is a place better than Bush’s land of shadows where a leader entrusted with the hopes of the earth cannot find within himself a solitary phrase to uplift the soul.
posted by charles at 3:46 AM
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