As if we needed more proof of my nerdhood, consider my Monday of Spring Break. While thousands of college kids spent their afternoons laying on a beach in Acapulco, sucking down accessorized drinks, vigorously trying to bronze their pasty winter skins, I wandered around a museum that’s main attraction is a room consisting of 48 actual-size bronze statues of the Founding Fathers.
On Sunday my friend and I somehow concluded that the best way to show his visiting college friend — a Kansan — the City of Philadelphia was to take her to the National Constitution Center. This was a terrible idea. If we wanted to show her Philly we should have taken her to an Eagles tailgate where hundreds of drunken fans gather around a burning pile of Terrell Owens jerseys, not a borderline propagandist museum devoted entirely to the glory of the Constitution.
But I woke up Tuesday morning just in time to hop on the Constitution Center bandwagon as my candidate of choice and Man Crush in Chief Barack Obama was in the middle of delivering what is probably the most important speech of my lifetime in the same building that I visited just the day before. At that moment my impression of the museum went from “it’s okay” to “it’s pretty sweet.” Instead of obscuring our visit by telling friends, “Yeah we just went downtown and stuff — it was cool,” I found myself boasting, “Yeah we went to the Constitution Center. You know, the place where Obama gave that speech. Yeah. It was sweet.” Its like if Brad Pitt came out and said he loved Star Trek: the trekkie freaks would pour out of their mothers’ basements and into the streets.
Since that Tuesday my excitement has subsided. I saw the speech as a brilliant, sophisticated take on race in America that was impossibly deep for a politician. I saw the next president of the United States — assuming the war-mongering bullshitter Hillary Clinton doesn’t destroy the party by stealing the nomination, and the senile shade-ball John McCain doesn’t stop being really, really old — talking honestly and without peripheral motives about an issue that no one will touch. Yet the speech didn’t take hold as it should have. Pundits so desensitized to anything substantive couldn’t quantify it outside the context of the horserace. It’s almost as if the speech was too rich, too complex to talk about in eight minute increments. So self-obsessed commentators like the beady-eyed nihilist Pat Buchanan (whose attitude can only be described as menstrual) simply filtered out everything in the speech that was thought provoking and mature and nakedly real, and lamented Obama’s loyalty to his extremely loud, incredibly radical pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
This strikes me as really, really stupid. A presidential candidate talks about the root of prejudice in America and all these slow yuppies at MSNBC and CNN and Fox News can talk about is how women between the ages of 18 and 35 in rural Pennsylvania will respond to Obama being so close to such a staunch critic of America. We are a month away from a primary involving a candidate whose chief legislative achievements are failing miserably to bring about universal healthcare and helping to start a war that has killed hundreds of thousands, caused our economy to crumble and made everyone everywhere less safe and all we can talk about is the time her opponent’s buddy said, “God damn America.”
What is the root of this stupidity? Why are Americans so blindly patriotic and shallow?
Part of the problem lies within the very building where Obama gave his unforgettable yet fated to be forgotten speech — The National Constitution Center. As I said before, the museum is probably as cool as a museum can be. The exhibits are interactive without being jokey, the history is deep and varied and there’s even a section where Ben Stein is prominently involved; but the place is scary pro-America. It’s so patriotic it could be the lovechild of Toby Keith and that “This is our counnntry” Chevy commercial. There’s even a station about the virtuousness of jury duty — this is hardcore stuff.
One of the main attractions is a Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? style theatre in which visitors are given a 20-minute speech called “Freedom Rising” about the glory of our country and the brilliance of American freedom. While a paid actor speaks, images of America are splashed across a 360-degree screen at the top of the theatre. The actor cringingly mentions America’s “unproud moments” before again gushing about our great nation. It was all very triumphant and when it ended I turned to my friend and mockingly chanted, “USA! USA!” but it really speaks to a darker American reality.
We live in a country of idiots who don’t have to question America. We can point to our superficial stability relative to the crazy brown people dancing around in turbans on TV and we can say America is the most free, glorious nation the world has ever seen. We can look back on our history glowingly and dismiss blemishes as “unproud moments” without ever questioning whether or not America is just a series of unproud moments.
So when one of the most powerful people in the most powerful nation in the world comes out and talks candidly about the enduring chasm in American life — race — everyone simply dismisses the deep stuff and stays on the surface. Pundits theorize about how the label “unpatriotic” will destroy the Obama Movement without even questioning what it means to be unpatriotic — without even considering whether or not our nation warrants the sort of blind patriotism we are expected to garner. A presidential candidate talks about the issue in American life and we are too dumb to listen. God damn America.