[and i chose america is the tentative title of a series of texts about my personal experience with America, American society, its people and the American dream, twenty two years after I landed in Pittsburgh on a graduate scholarship to pursue a graduate degree in Japanese literature, history and culture.]
I spent most of my adult life away from my homeland of Romania. The past 22 years I alternated between study and work in various places around the United States, two to three years in one place, and study and work in various places around Japan, no longer than two to three years at a time. I have not put down roots anywhere beyond my homeland, but the breadth and wealth of experience I accumulated along this global nomadic existence swinging between individual encounters, regions, languages, communities, state systems, institutions, and corporations, have yielded staggering learning opportunities about people, histories, and customs that many around the world don’t have the privilege to experience. As someone who grew up without any sort of privilege, an ethnic minority person from a poor family in a poor country on the geographical, spiritual, and economic fringes of Europe, at the height of the nationalist-communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceauşescu, I am all too aware of that privilege, and I am grateful for it. And although full of loneliness and challenges in many ways, I am also grateful for the unique perspectives this sort of experience has offered me. The past 22 years, as I entangled my own growth and maturity from young adulthood to middle age with major historical events and social shifts, have allowed for some important insights on humans, humanity and myself as well as my particular position in the world at this particular historical moment inhabiting this particular physical and cultural body.
Here are some of those insights.
Regardless of who we are and where we live, we humans are motivated and set into action by shared feelings of fear, pettiness, greed, and abhorrence of (certain) Others. At the same time, we are capable of humbling generosity, sacrifice, selflessness, and dedication to and desire for connection with each other. Alas, it is not the darker feelings alone that inhabit and animate those of us who are not moved into action by the more altruistic feelings and vice versa. That would be, of course, too simple. Too direct. We all embody both; it is only by our choices that we manifest our bleaker or better selves. This tension is what makes us the proud, the inspired, the anxious, the giving, and the murderous beings we are.
As humans, we tend to value comfort, peace, and familiarity and desire to pursue the lifestyle and worldview that we learned at our elders’ knees. As the ancient Romans said once upon a time: Humans do not aim for happiness, but to be content and comfortable. Panem et circenses, as Juvenal put it. Food and entertainment will suffice for most of us. At core, we are not agents of change; most will probably always choose continuity over change, or in harsher terms, stagnation over progress. The way we managed to advance our material existence throughout our recorded history was overwhelmingly due to the push of a handful of visionaries, outliers, heretics, rule-breakers, revolutionaries and learned people in each generation for thousand of years, who, in most cases, ended up being eliminated by their communities for their ideas and challenges to the accepted worldview and its accompanying lifestyle. And if and when they were accepted, their ideas, their innovations were used for war and destruction rather than for harmonious living and the perpetuation of peace. As a matter of fact, with very few exceptions, it was conquest of others’ lands and elimination of their culture, combined with greed for their resources (natural, material, human or otherwise), and impetus to make everyone adhere to our own manufactured systemic ideologies (religion, state, “civilization”) that made us push ourselves out of the comfort zone we so crave and do something (anything) out of the ordinary.
As humans we crave power, authority over others, and aim for those others’ willing obedience, approval and admiration. Power—military, financial, or cultural—allowed yet another handful of us to control and subjugate the many and take advantage of them. Paradoxically, our will to be conservative (i.e., to “conserve” that status quo-ensuring comfort) also made us vulnerable to those who found themselves in power. And it led us not to question, not to learn, not to want to understand the system of power they created and the epistemological paradigm coming with it, and to even be afraid to do so. The comfort was, of course, easy to accept, as limitations on learning were established and imposed by duress and decree, as a way to perpetuate the system. Revolutionaries who did not accept that status quo, who went out of their way to learn, to find out, to look beneath the masks and the pomp of the system, more often than not paid dearly for their questioning that threatened the systemic continuity and the power behind it.
Finally, although I am doing my best here to sound as if I know what I am talking about, the older I get, the more I see how infinitesimally little I know about anything, how tiny of a speck of stardust I am in the universe, and I can only allow that humility to wash over me. I know it all sounds like some cheesy quote, but it’s truly what I came to learn about myself (like so many others before me) over the years. My only wish is to become able to accept that reality without anger and undue passion and push myself to continue to learn more for the sake of our humanity (please read: the qualities that unite all of us, the spirit that flows between us all, and not “humanity” as “all humans”) that so deeply and equally inspires and disappoints me.
With that in mind, I proceeded to write down the texts I gathered here, and which originated from the realization that the years I spent in the United States of America have taught me a number of things about the realities of that society, probably the largest sociopolitical experiment in modern nation-state creation. Viewed from the outside, there is much about American society that remains invisible, hidden, either owing to state propaganda or to the cultural colonization process that American pop culture unfolded globally for the past century or so, and which obfuscates many of those hidden truths about the system, the country, and the people.
The image I had of American society prior to living there, the tropes of success undergirded by meritocracy, capitalism, democracy, equality, and opportunity for all have been deconstructed and dismantled piece by piece by the actual experience of living in an apparently successful society that in effect is a plutocracy that arguably never worked as intended for everyone (or anyone?) nearly as soon as it was founded. And I must admit here that perhaps I could have gained better access to the realities of America before I moved there in the year 2000, as a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, but I operated under the spell of the above-mentioned propaganda and did not bother to delve in any deeper. For that, I take full responsibility.
On the other hand, the disenchantment I began experiencing with America pretty much right after the September 11 attacks of 2001, only a year after choosing to go to study for my master’s program there, had the unexpected effect of turning me into an “political pilgrim” “in search of the good (read ‘perfect’) society”, very much like the ones that Paul Hollander researched in his 1981 book. Compared to them, the intellectuals of the 1920s and 1950s, I foolishly thought myself to be less naïve: I could have never been duped by the mere “outside” image of a place and think it perfect. It turned out that I did… Or at least that I did so to a certain extent. After all, I had grown up with a solid and sustained critique of America, Western Europe and the capitalist system in constant “putrefaction”. Every mandatory class on socialism, Marxism, and all the other isms we were force-fed emphasized the weaknesses of the capitalist system, and vehemently opposed America’s savage oppression of the working masses, the inhumanity of the imperialist system, and so on and so forth. To us the children of 1980s Romania, however, that was all a bunch of garbage, as we could plainly see for ourselves how corrupt and destructive our own so-called socialist system was, and we would all laugh on the inside at how we knew that, in fact, America and capitalism were much better than what we had to live through, and that it was only envy and fear of the ultimate success of capitalism that made those communist party activists spew insanities that they themselves most probably did not believe.
And that is why I so often feel disheartened when I am forced to contemplate the real America, the truth behind the propaganda, and the insistence with which Americans pound their chests and fill their cheeks with air before saying “freedom”. I am heartbroken because I realize that, very much like we were living a lie back then in 1980s Romania, they are also living a lie. And their tragedy is that there is no place for them to aspire to. At least for us, the teens and preteens of insane dictatorship Romania, dreaming of good food, warm homes, pop music, coca cola, and nice clothes (or, in my case, unlimited access to books and a decent life as a public intellectual and scholar), there was still the possibility that we could somehow escape our reality and emigrate somewhere else, leaving the nightmare behind. For most Americans there is no place to go. Both for those whose ancestors came here willingly in pursuit of wealth and freedom and opportunity, and for those who were kidnapped and forced to generate that wealth and freedom and opportunity through their sweat and blood, the world is closed. Either due to lack of materials and financial means, or lack of imagination, they are stuck here, imprisoned in a system that turned them all into slaves, regardless of their ancestry. And that is a reality that is hard to accept, especially for someone coming from where I come from.
Finally (but in direct conjunction with the lines above), the desire to write about some of the topics I include in this series was informed by my attempts over the years to engage with and explain them to fellow Romanians, with the belief that my direct experience in America will lend me some credence. That has not been the case. My accounts of deeply entrenched issues in American society, politics, economy, and so on were (and still are) met with skepticism and outright derision at various levels of the public discourse. The propaganda that had made me see America through deformed and unrealistic lenses is still working well in the case of my compatriots, even those I expected to have the discernment necessary to separate fiction from reality, mystification from truth (not that “fiction” and “mystification” are synonymous). From refined intellectuals and public opinion leaders to friends and family, my ardent public discussions, mass media articles, and social media interventions concerning America’s entrenched system of racial discrimination, the acute need for political correctness due to its deep roots in said system, for social welfare and a better model of the nation-state are more often than not dismissed as ramblings of yet another “student gone to the West and turned Marxist.” I often feel that I had turned into the very object of 19th century Romanian romantic poet Mihai Eminescu (with his own vigorous streak of xenophobia) mocking verses such as Ai noştri tineri... (Our Good Ol’ Youth): “To Paris our good ol’ youth go all the way/To diligently learn to make a bowtie/And they return to bliss the people of the lay/Their proud long faces dullness testify”. My appeals for and staunch defense of political correctness, for instance, have been so far been dismissed with the blanket statement that “PC” is nothing more than just another instance of censorship. The historical roots of the concept and the acute need for it in a global, mobile world mean little, and in any case, are usually decontextualized. Cases of systemic oppression of minorities, systemic racism, and de facto slavery never prove sufficient to at least elicit a proper engagement with the concept of political correctness, if not its practice.
Anchored as it were in this double-pronged impetus, I proceeded to write about my own experiences of America. And as I do so, the only disclaimer I have is that what I write here are my own thoughts and my own understanding of America based on my own experience of the United States and not a general statement about the country, the people or the society they built (how could I ever generalize anything about a nation of 328 million souls with a million more immigrants, documented and not?). I am also aware that my own emotional experience of America and its society differs greatly from that of fellow Romanian Americans or other recent immigrants, in part because I married an American woman and so do not, even at home, have a Romanian cultural refuge where to retreat when culture shock—gruesome as it comes even decades later—takes its toll. Indeed, in some ways, American society, its customs and beliefs, is in my bedroom. On the other hand, I was never truly committed to the idea of immigrating to America or anywhere else, and the fact that I ended up living far away from where I grew up is more the result of how my life played out in the end than the desire to live abroad. As such, the experience I capture here carries no more (or less) weight than anyone else’s who has ever lived in America.
And perhaps one final disclaimer is in order. As evidenced in the first part of this preamble, humans everywhere are very much the same. And, in the end, the humans who happen to be inhabiting and co-constructing the modern political structure called the United States of America are, in the end, just that: humans. And to expect more from them just because they are part of the disjointed and rather dystopic reality of 21st century America would not be fair. And that is not my intention at all. (to be continued)