I Loved America

"I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands: one Nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

I loved America because three ships risked the cliff edge of the world to find her, and only two made it home.

I loved America for the Mayflower and New World pumpkins, for her rough, patchwork corn and tobacco shared in thin, clay pipes — for schoolbook Indians standing quietly beside long Thanksgiving tables.

For the bundled papoose on her mother’s back and the paddling of midnight canoes and the carving of totem poles in mossy Northwest forests. For the roadside names of a thousand orphaned towns and Connecticut rivers and Dakota states, signs that paid respect to their forgotten stewards as silently as Quakers.

For the sounds of “Apache” and “Sioux,” and “Cherokee” and “Iroquois.” Names that could be felt but not explained.

For an Indian chief who stood by a city highway weeping.

A million buffalo.

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I loved America for Jack London’s dogs, Steinbeck’s Red Pony, Hemingway’s whiskey, Mark Twain in a seersucker, lost poems tucked in Emily Dickinson’s desk.

They were ours, all of them.

Robert Frost in the snow.

Ours.

*

I loved America for her piano student ragtime, flapper-girl Jazz, Muddy Waters and the Chicago Blues, for Aretha and Stevie, Waylon & Willie, for Me and Bobby McGee. Sweet Caroline in the seventh inning stretch.

Because Bob Dylan.

Because Oklahoma was spelled out on high school stages from Maine to Hawaii. Because Rhapsody in Blue’s lush melody was the nation dreaming of itself. Because Louis Armstrong’s Wonderful World became an American prayer.

And when Ray Charles sang America the Beautiful, he made it our national hymn. He sang it for all of us—for each of us—his head rocking in whatever holy place that song carried him, to a land of hope. Black and White, and red, white and blue hope.

When he sang of peace, we felt America in our bones.

I felt her in my bones.

*

I loved America because Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird, because the Hollywood sign, and the trumpet fanfare and searchlights spinning from a 20th Century Fox light tower. Because Gilligan and Mary Ann, James Dean and leather jackets.

Marilyn Monroe with the wind in her dress.

Coca-Cola.

Play-by-play radio baseball announcers who were models for American men and knew how to lose.

And America’s stammering Everyman Christmas Eve in Bedford Falls then hoarse at a Senate podium. The 1940’s movie stars who visited our gaunt troops, boys who chain-smoked and dreamed of home and felt the aching bliss of bare leg for a few hours.

And painted Vargas girls with see-through dresses on Air Force fuselages — and you know the boys could do that, they should do that, because they were fighting for all of us, and they might never come home.

And Playboy cowgirls in three-story haylofts, bursting out of their staples. Goddamnit, they were glorious, and they were ours. Every last month of them.

And the Redfords and the Newmans.

There were no men more handsome or women more beautiful than in America.

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Because redwood forests and Gulf Stream waters and waking up in a tent on the valley floor of Yosemite and seeing Half Dome for the first time.

Because the steamboat Mississippi traveled high to low, and if you drove U.S. 1 all the way down to Key West her bridges stretched out like skipping stones.

I loved how Vermont leaves turned red and gold on kitchen calendars back-to-back with wintry covered bridges and Arizona cactus, or posters of Route 66 in black and white with deserted gas stations and glass bulb pumps.

An American child held a puzzle piece of Texas or Florida one time and remembered it forever.

Nothing would ever sound more American than “Colorado.”

*

Wyoming cowboys lit Marlboros by sunset cattle and Pennsylvania Dutch rolled up their sleeves and taught their sons to raise barns. Oregon hobos watched the sun come up from boxcars.

They were poor—poor but free, but more than free—free in the Land of the Free.

We had garages in Silicon Valley. We had all the best doctors and all the best hospitals. We cured polio. We invented the lightbulb. We planted our flag on the moon.

(Perhaps it is there still.)

*

When Americans paraded into the Opening Ceremonies, we were the greatest nation on Earth — because our boys and girls were all nations with their youth and innocence and easy, wide smiles.

Then we proved it in the rink and on the slopes and the mats and the parallel bars.

We proved it with our skin, and our eyes, and our hair, with our heads low and our fists high.

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We spoke truth to power: high-ho, high-ho!

And what did we want and when did we want it?

We wanted it now and now and now.

In America, the church and state had respect for aisles and pews.

You could speak your mind.

You were innocent until proven guilty. It took twelve men and women from your peers to send you to prison.

They appointed you a lawyer if you couldn’t afford one. They read you your rights, and the police couldn’t make you talk even if they tried to trick you.

Quiet librarians defended our books like she-wolves.

Fourth graders knew we didn’t torture.

A single man with the courage to ask, “have you no decency?” could make it all stop just like that.

*

We had Rosa Parks. Then, praise God, we had a preacher with a dream. And more than a dream—more than Malcolm, more than Martin—we had a little girl who walked alone into an elementary school, where the windows were papered over so they wouldn’t shoot her.

She was a blessing we hadn’t earned, and we didn’t deserve her, but she was ours, too.

*

We lived in a land where every vote was counted, and all men were created equal.

Because if you were born here, then goddamnit, you were an American, the same as everyone else, no more and no less, even if you traced your people back to the Mayflower. There were things that couldn’t be taken away from you here, and the whole world, like us or not, knew it.

I loved America for her “I Voted” stickers that reminded us to vote and the no-nonsense, ancient Black women who volunteered to run elections in the Bronx. They checked off names like accountants, scolded voters into their booths, and kept the nation’s blood pumping.

I loved our citizenship ceremonies in the flickering fluorescent light of county courthouses, where judges handed out pocket Constitutions and gave the children tiny American flags.

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We had the White House and the Capitol and the Washington Monument towering over her own reflection. We had America’s temple, where the hands of the greatest American president steadied the nation from his marble chair. The miracle of his words rose so high beside him, we had to crane our necks to read them. We held our children’s hands there.

Our Justices were just, and they knew how to lose.

Because right was might, and we had Susan B. Anthony and Obergefell v. Hodges to prove it.

I loved America because the Founders negotiated an imperfect dream in the heat and sweat and stubborn frustration of a Philadelphia hall. Jefferson and Hamilton agreed on nothing but a shared dream of thirteen stars, then Betsy Ross rocked in her chair and stitched a flag full of them.

I loved America because her ashen firemen wandered in a daze through the ruins of the Twin Towers searching for the hopeless dead.

Because a single Capitol policeman led a raging mob down the wrong corridor and saved our nation from frothing tyranny.

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I loved America because the huddled masses came here from everywhere, sailing into her harbors on black smokestacked steamships.

Their tired and poor crowded onto the bows, saw America’s lamp and wept. They’d come home.

And Germany’s Einstein was America’s, because it was safe for a genius to do great work here in peace. He was our genius, and we were proud of him, every Jew and every Gentile.

In that America, Mexican workers gutted it out in golden valleys, working hours no natural born citizen would work, picking what I would never pick.

Then they huddled together in Home Depot parking lots, laughing into the foggy morning air.

In that America, Korean bodega owners closed up shop the day their children graduated from expensive colleges, and Dominicans and Puerto Ricans prepped onions and potatoes in restaurant basements and pushed racks through steaming dishwashers listening to Spanish radio stations. They worked two jobs to send a few bucks home.

They got on with it.

With dignity.

And the Kikes and the Wops and the Polaks and the Micks and the Chinks and the Spics — and the one word in English we put on an altar and sacrificed from shame — we got to know all of them, our Koufaxes and DiMaggios and Aarons and Clementes, and we cheered for them as they rounded the bases of our baseball stadiums.

We all did.

I did.

I loved America.

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Oh, America! Sweet America! Sweet land of liberty! Your endless skyways, your ribboned highways! Your wheat fields waving, your dust clouds rolling! Purple mountain majesties! Fruited plains!

(And you know when I was in school, we used to sing it something like this... listen here…)

Oh beautiful, for heroes proved, in liberating strife

Who more than self their country loved — and mercy more than life

America, America, God shed his grace on thee.

(You know, I wish I had somebody to help me sing this…)

America, America…

(I love you, America…)

You see, my God, He done shed his grace on thee.

‘Cause he crowned thy good with brotherhood —from sea to shining sea.