While we were all busy being Irish yesterday I found time to reflect on the famous American Melting Pot, and how it seems to be melting. Soon after I first came to America, I was in Baltimore on Saint Patrick’s Day, and so I just had to see the parade. It was much like any other parade, until a marching band appeared in full Scottish highland dress, playing energetically on the bagpipes. Half of them were African Americans. The concept of an Irish African American Scottish bagpiper must be something unique to this nation, and was almost beyond the capacity of my alien brain to grasp. Now I understand it better, but I don’t understand it completely. For some things, you have to be born here.
There are about forty four million immigrants like me living in the United States, forty four million aliens, like an invasion from outer space, and you could easily mistake us for regular people. The fact is that most of us don’t stay aliens for long, and this is the genius of the Melting Pot. On the one hand governments attach great significance to the accident of a person’s nationality, and try to control it with laws and passports and walls. On the other hand most of us often choose to ignore it completely, so that society can continue its benevolent task of mixing and blending the recipe. It’s a delicate balance, a gift we are always in danger of losing to nineteenth-century style nativism and prejudice, with all the sad machinery of deportation and exclusion.
The phrase ‘The Melting Pot’ originated in a play of the same name performed - in retrospect ironically - in Washington DC in 1908, in which the immigrant hero makes a moving declaration of faith in America. We don’t hear so much about the Melting Pot these days. It seems to have gone the way of the American Dream – a hackneyed and slightly embarrassing confession of optimism in a pessimistic age.
When the distinguished British journalist Henry Fairlie was asked, in an interview, why he loved America, he spoke for many of us aliens when he replied: "Because I feel free here." It's not so much freedom to do or say anything in particular, or even the more valued freedom to buy lots of stuff and throw it away. The freedom America offers is within the brain itself, slightly to the right of the center of rational thought. Something in the atmosphere, or maybe something in the immigration department water coolers, liberates the precious gift of self-creation. In America the advice to "be yourself," doesn’t mean the self you painfully built up through life experience, but the self you want, the self you would like to imagine yourself to be.
And surely this is what everyone in the world wants, to create a self and have that invention accepted, without awkward questions about origins or motives. There is or was an unspoken social contract here that not only will we be nice about the Emperor's new clothes but about everybody's new clothes, no matter how transparent they seem.
So every American can be Irish, or anything else at all. This nation became a kind of universal all-inclusive global culture, partly because of Hollywood but also because it represents a universally appealing version of the good life, the one place where everyone can be themselves, or, even better, be somebody else.
Copyright: David Bouchier
