Getting to Know America, Again

By Adam Wojack

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ometimes I feel like Borat, the Sacha Baron Cohen character, experiencing this culture of America through the eyes of innocence or ignorance and making Old World value judgments about New World things and not fully understanding our peculiar but seductive ways.

 
I am American by birth, upbringing, education, majority residence and service in the United States military. But because of my job, as an officer in the U.S. Army, I have spent the majority of my active duty career outside of the country. I have served short or long tours in Panama, Korea, Saudi Arabia, Hawaii, Germany, Kosovo and Iraq. Most of my time overseas has been in Germany, at which I first arrived in 2002. Ever since, subtracting a year for schooling in Leavenworth, Kansas, I have lived on the other side of the Atlantic.

Life in Europe is different than life in the United States, as many well know. What is surprising is what happens to an American’s perspective when European or Old World ways start feeling normal and American ways feel strange. After almost eight years in Germany, with two combat deployments to Iraq during this time, I returned to the states for a year of professional schooling – the Army’s way of preparing me for the next ten or so years of my career. After experiencing in Germany a life of quiet Sundays, uniform prosperity and a gentility of interaction amongst people, I returned to an America that seemed to me the opposite: round-the-clock commerce and activity, a conspicuous division of wealth, and a constant buzz of provocation between people over all things – which I thought was saying it kindly.

At first, I found much to dislike and criticize. Some of it was silly and selfish, like complaining about not being able to find the same kind of fresh, crusty bread that had been so cheap and plentiful in Germany, or bemoaning the shortage of true Pilsner beer on tap, the way they make it back there.

Other things, though, made me wonder if we as a nation had made much progress toward the “Great Society” President Johnson had envisioned back in the 1960s. While I was in Leavenworth, I chose to rent an old house, built in the 19^th century, on one of the oldest streets in town. My street for a few blocks in either direction was loaded with what locals called “historic homes,” all of which were well maintained by proud homeowners. The neighborhood directly behind mine, however, was blighted and poor. In fact, most of the old city center of Leavenworth was like this – pockets of stately historic homes surrounded by poverty.

As a result, most of my classmates – fellow Army majors – opted to live in brand-new housing developments miles away from the city center. Essentially, they clustered themselves in socially homogenous enclaves, separated from other local areas by farm fields, four-lane roads and driving distance. Their only interaction with folks unlike themselves were at shopping centers, such as the local Super Wal-Mart. And, they seemed to like it like this. When one classmate told me that he and his wife had driven by my house and admired its historic charm, he added that he could never live “there.” Unless, he joked, he had his Glock with him whenever he went out into the backyard.

At a liquor store in town to pick up some beer, I stood at the glass door of the chiller straining to decide which from the dozens of strange but wonderful microbrews from all over America I would purchase. As I deliberated, an older man in overalls walked in the store to buy a pack of cigarettes. When he heard the price, he complained that the same smokes were cheaper in Missouri. The man behind the counter said he knew this, but that state tax in Kansas was higher. At that, the man blurted out loud, “Taxes. That’s why we’re supposed to kill all the politicians every seven years. I think it says that in the Constitution, don’t it?”

Hearing this made me stop searching for Pilsner amongst American pale ales, straighten my back and look over at this man. He was just frustrated, but now, so was I. I turned to face him and told him I couldn’t remember reading that in the Constitution, and asked him if he could tell me which part said this. He seemed only a little surprised by my remark, but didn’t bother replying. He ignored me, picked up his cigarettes and left the store.

At school, in a class of 16 field grade military officers almost all of whom were currently pursuing or had completed graduate school study in fields such as history, business, management or international relations, we carried on emotional arguments about whether President Obama’s healthcare initiative was in the nation’s best interest. As a recent returnee from a complex multinational continent with a nearly unified belief in social welfare, high tax rates and increased public services for citizens, I was mystified by any negative attitude toward providing the poorest Americans more access to a better life.

One classmate, whom I considered a good friend and with whom I would share many after hours beers at a local hangout, believed wholeheartedly that America could not afford such a benefit for those in need. He spoke in terms of dollars rather than investment in future health and increased productivity, but the terms mattered less than how intractable was his – or my – position. I felt as if we were replaying a news-entertainment debate between liberals and conservatives on Fox or MSNBC, and in many ways we were.

In these first few months back from Germany, I knew I had a problem. I complained so much about minor aspects of life in America – the condition of the roads, the food, the driving – that a woman I had just started dating told me to “go back to Germany” if I didn’t like it here. After we stopped dating, I experienced a string of quiet months where I became re-acquainted with concepts American: variety and variation of consumer product, creative enhancement of common items and an optimistic-democratic belief that like a vote, every opinion on every subject matters.

I hadn’t forgotten how commerce in America was geared toward consumption, and that a great way to perpetuate consumption was to design disposability into products, or to create “new and improved” versions of the same old thing. I knew but didn’t miss the American spin on classic Old World coffee products like cappuccino and caffe latte or on most foods and desserts, which seemed larger, sweeter, creamier and more caloric, as if the American stomach was empty and more sugar and fat were the fix. Most irritating was the background racket of opinion, which almost always began with, “Well I think…” Hearing this made me want to walk in the other direction and wonder if the First Amendment wasn’t our nation’s intellectual ball and chain.

But here is also where it started to change for the better. Rightly so, one or more people without the burden of my “superior” worldview called me out, like the woman I dated, for my snobbish criticisms. I found myself alone with my own haughty opinions, and realized that I cherished my views and forced them on others believing they were as valuable to all as they were to me. It clicked. I was being an American—really, a re-born American bringing his optimistic ideal of how this life can be better, if only we build a new, improved set of ideas (or houses or beers or coffee products) away from the old ones, and do away with the current politicians or policies and create new ones because this will rightly cure what ails. We can do this, I realized, because we have the room to do it.

I traveled from Kansas to San Diego in April during that school year for a family wedding. The flight took three hours and when I landed, I was still in America, but in a completely different type of America than I’d been in Kansas. That’s when I had my “What a country!” Borat moment: The sun, the ocean, the beautiful people, the prosperity and the idea of this sprawling nation of opinionated folks from all over the world disagreeing on how to make this nation and this world a better place but still believing it is possible. And all of this culminating, on the go, in something as desirable and attractive as this notion of potential realized or rebuilt. And looking as glorious as San Diego did that weekend.

Whether in Kansas or southern California, it was the same ideal: American optimism. I have found this nowhere else in the world, and it still amazes me. What a country.