Given that we’re sitting atop the rubble of a historic economic meltdown right now, it doesn’t seem like a good time to pull up stakes and go on a huge road trip. But in a lot of other ways, the timing for this trip is perfect; not just because of where the other people on the bus and I are in our lives, but because of where we as a country are historically.
See, any good American road trip needs to be, at least in part, about figuring out what America’s all about. Everyone has their own ideas about what embodies the American spirit, but I don’t think I can necessarily talk about it with any authority when there are still broad swathes of the country that I am woefully ignorant about. Which, of course, is a big reason why I’m going on this trip.
I will say this about the American spirit, though: even if few people know exactly what it is, nobody doubts it exists. Compare that to, say, the United Kingdom, where I spent the last semester of college: one of the things that experience repeatedly drove home was that there’s virtually no sense of a “UK identity” or of a set of values that bond the nation together.
American identity, on the other hand, is remarkably strong–sometimes to a fault. Look at how much of the last presidential election revolved around endless battles over which ticket was more “American” in some abstract, barely-hinted-at sense. What it all came down to was two very different visions of what American identity was.
And that’s why the timing of this trip is so important in a historical sense: the America we’re going to be traveling across is going to be significantly different from the American Jack Kerouac tried to discover, or even the America of a few years ago. The election of Barack Obama represents a significant shift in how Americans view their own Americanness–and, incidentally, one of the reasons why Campus Progress is a perfect home for this blog is that our generation took the lead in forcing that shift.
After all, it wasn’t too long ago that virtually anyone you asked wouldn’t hesitate to tell you that the white dude with the military record and reputation as a maverick was infinitely more American than the biracial guy with the foreign-sounding name, partially Indonesian upbringing, history of drug use and background in academia.
Clearly, though, that’s not how most people in my generation thought. I can only speak for myself, but I don’t think I was alone when I looked at the candidate Barack Obama and saw a living, breathing symbol of America’s ethnic and cultural diversity, who pulled himself up from humble beginnings through hard work and careful scholarship. What, I thought to myself so many times during election season, could be more American than that?
A few decades ago, an idea like that would be absolutely flabbergasting. But now Obama’s our president, and by extension the face that America chose to represent itself to the rest of the world. That’s a huge shift in the consensus on American identity in a very short period, and it’s why the country I’ll be exploring this summer will seem, in some ways, to be brand new.
