The Americans

After de Tocqueville

5 After de Tocqueville Rather the ice than their way, said Eric the Red. Or think of Cortez, who burned his ships on a Mexican beach so his men couldn’t mutiny and cruise home. We’re happiest when drinking and dancing and giving our daughters away. Our people waited on landings to board packet ships and steamers. They clapped to a fiddle or handmade drum wherever the sea tang was bracing, then sailed not for cities of gold or to scan panoramas but to bugger up drinks and dance. This land is our land and your land and such. If you go back and read the accounts, there are many entries about the wind. Must nostalgia walk like a prince through all our rooms? Every Coyote leading a pack over the border knows it’s not the tale that pleases, it’s the telling. Satchmo backstage, mopping his brow, said, In every city I’ve gotta hear lions roar. There’s this sense we’ve ravished every petal from Columbus’s flower. Maybe we’re better off when our heroes are personal, when they fade in the fumes of the Moose Lodge 6 or die in a shoebox of Polaroids on a closet floor. We’re happiest when drinking and dancing, next happiest in leisure, then work, then prayer. In every anthem we hum at the stadium, caps at our sides, we ignore crops wasted, vacant stores. Why do we love the apocryphal— a cherry tree falling—but forget the Choctaw sending money to feed the starving Irish just sixteen years after the Trail of Tears? Wherever we came from, we left mules and gulls behind. But somehow we swept rain into our disposition. We feel clouds gathering—miles above the sugar-beet region and agro-farms based in Topeka. Did they ever exist, de Soto’s green fountain or the threshed abundance on Cather’s floor? Newer, faster. Behind our heat is a fever. Even in religious fervor, said our prince Walt Whitman, there’s a touch of animal heat. Maybe only a truly great stranger can see it. Said Kerouac to Robert Frank, You got eyes. ...