Independence Day

Eight months ago my wife and I  moved from New York City to America. Now and then I get a startling reminder of this fact, like when I see evangelicals protesting in front of the local branch of Planned Parenthood, or when I drive by the Trump barn, on the front of which there is a sign in big cut out letters in the colors of the American flag, “TRUMP PRESIDENT 2024” (there is also an Obama barn, which has “HOPE” painted on it), or when music of genres other than hip-hop blare out of cars parked on the red light in front of my window (I now realized that I am not nostalgic for Motley Crue). My newest discovery is a house about ten minutes away that has the following hand-painted signs crudely nailed together, “Trump for President,” “Impeach Joe Biden,” “Nazi Democrats Ruined America.” 

Otherwise, our town is pretty and quaint and full of nice restaurants and cafes populated on weekends by Manhattanites who come here when their island gets taken over by the bridge and tunnel crowd. As far as much of the population goes, I call our town and its surroundings a retirement colony for New York City creatives of a certain age. I am of that age.

Today is Independence Day, though we are not celebrating because we are both down with Covid. Also, we have not made enough friends yet to get an invitation to eat highly processed food and drink bad beer. Also, I don’t celebrate Independence Day anyway (nor Thanksgiving, but I’ll save that story for November).

The reason I don’t celebrate Independence Day is that I am fundamentally conflicted about my adopted home. Not in any woke way: though I think I know the history of the United States fairly well, I will not be publicly acknowledging that the Victorian townhouse in which we rent a lovely apartment with a bay window stands on Native American land before I bite into a hot dog. It’s enough for me to know that it does, as does all of the country. But the tragedy of our world is that we only have one history; believe me, as a Jew, I know this.

On Independence Day I like to recall the times when Americans told me to go back where I came from. I’ve always wanted to point out to them the irony of that statement, considering that their ancestors were immigrants, or perhaps even political refugees like my family. I wanted to tell them about the times the Belarussians, including one of my school teachers, told me to get the fuck out of their country, even though my Ashkenazi ancestors have lived there for generations. 

My parents hid our Jewishness as much as they could. We never changed our last names, but I’ve always wondered why the Passover matzos were hidden in the back of a closet in my parents bedroom. Not that we celebrated Passover or any other Jewish holidays. When people ask me today about Jewish holidays, I usually shrug my shoulders and point them in the direction of Wikipedia. I’m Ok with this. My Jewishness came much later, after reading At the Mind’s Limits by the philosopher Jean Améry, an Austrian Jew who fled to Belgium from the Nazis, joined the Resistance, and survived Auschwitz. In the book he talked about how he wanted to be nothing more than a faithful citizen of Austria, and that he embraced his Jewishness because it was the Austrians who told him, in no uncertain words, who he is, after the Nuremberg Race Laws were passed by Hitler.

Like Améry, I felt I had no home. Not particularly wanted in any of the two countries I lived in, and not particularly in touch with my roots, as a teenager I constructed my identity through culture; books, music, art. I went for the moral, for the ethical, for the just, not for the religion or ethnicity, or patriotism. The results were mostly teenage angst with a dollop of narcissism, because when you turn inward you spend a lot of time thinking about yourself. Still, I found more kinship in Trent Reznor and Francis Bacon and Mikhail Bulgakov than I did with my parents or at school. That’s why to this day I relate to those who were also ostracized by those they considered their own and had to construct their identity (see: Rick Owens).

My working class / poor / immigrant Brooklyn highschool was my first culture shock. It was a dog eat dog world, populated by kids whose first aspiration was to be a gangster. Our teachers were mostly ignorant housewives, leftovers from the time when women were emancipated and went to work. The women of this part of Brooklyn were shoved into a teaching profession, hastily trained to be one chapter ahead of the students, and that was that. The only useful skill I learned in high school is the one I am engaged in at this moment, typing. The school administration did not care one bit for the students; all it wanted was to get rid of us, the animals, as soon as the final classroom bell rang. Mine was considered one of the better schools, probably because it had only two cops assigned to it and no metal detector, which allowed me to safely store a butterfly knife at the bottom of my backpack. All of my friends but one dropped out eventually, not because they were too stupid, but because they were smart and bored out of their minds by the stupendously dumb curriculum, in which the math we did back in the Soviet Union in 5th grade was offered in 10th. Eventually, my highschool reached a 70% dropout rate and was put on the list of schools that mayor Bloomberg wanted to close for nonperformance. In one of the more surreal moments of my life, I ended up writing a recommendation letter for my former guidance counselor. 

The kind of Americans such a school could produce were all around us; unmoored from their bearings by the neoliberal, technocratic world order that broke the American social contract that postulated that one could make a decent living from an honest blue collar job. Those jobs went abroad the decade before my family arrived. What was left was poverty and misplaced anger and irresponsible consumption induced by the same capitalist class that broke the American contract. That anger at immigrants multiplied as the Russian-speaking Jews and the Chinese and the Indians who arrived with nothing but education and chutzpah began to come into their own. How could that be, that people from these poor, socialist countries ran circles around those who were taught from day one that they lived in the greatest country in the world? No wonder they were angry.

What happened next is novel-length. I’ve learned a lot along the way. I’ve been frustrated and infuriated by the injustices of my adopted home, by the things that those of us who grew up with the modern Enlightenment ideals believed should not happen in the 21st Century. I marched in protest against the war in Iraq. I was horrified when Bush was re-elected after stealing his first election, and after doing what he did while in office. Needless to say, the prospect of Trump returning is even less comprehensible. I used to think that no matter how crazy America gets, that it is built on pragmatism, and invariably returns to the sane mean. I no longer feel this way. Mostly I see deep ignorance and dark anger. I seriously contemplate moving to Europe, though things are looking pretty dim there as well. So, yeah, not much to celebrate this Independence Day.