It’s a strange thing to suddenly realize that I had never really bothered to define a word that I had so readily accepted as part of my identity, and it’s even stranger to find that word just about indefinable. If one thing caught my attention about these readings on what it means to be American, it was how widely (and sometimes subtly) the answers to such a fundamental question varied.
There’s undoubtedly a temptation to shy away from uncomfortable ambiguities when identity-defining terms like American come into play, and I think that explains some of the historical interpretations described by Morrison and Horsman. It would be convenient to define American in terms of something as (supposedly) neatly delineated as skin color or religion, but if either ever served as passable definitions they certainly no longer do.
To me, Walzer’s treatment is the most satisfying, as it makes no attempt to oversimplify what is necessarily an incredibly broad and complex question. Walzer understands that a country with such a large and varied population of immigrants could never really act as the sort of all-assimilating melting pot envisioned by many of the nation’s early philosophers; he acknowledges that today’s Americans often hold on to much of the culture and tradition handed down to them from the countries of their ancestors. And yet at the same time, he does not question that there is indeed a culture that is truly and distinctly “American.” Tap-dancing and spaghetti westerns and hot-dogs aren’t just dismissed as Frankensteined amalgams of various foreign cultures. When, like the authors of several of the other readings, Walzer writes about “hyphenated Americans,” the hyphen doesn’t mean that they are somehow less American or that they have merely failed to Americanize out their ancestral cultures: it is a symbol of the whole broad spectrum of cultural symbioses that all help define what it means to be American.
Also: CAPTAIN AMERICA!!!!
