I Saw America One Afternoon In A Bar

Politics is discussed below.  Read at your Own Risk



Like pornography, I don't know what America is but I know it when I see it.

Whites hate blacks, blacks hate whites and everyone hates Hispanics. Democrats and Republicans are at each other's throats. Gays are kind of like our gall bladders - we don't know what it is but its part of us so we better take care of it.  Anger, distrust, fake everything, and lies.  Our national landscape is adrift in a hollow, roiling turbulence. 

America isn't the lying, conniving, ignorant, pussy-grabbing, self-centered, fire-those-athletes, constitutionally-deprived presidency.  Eventually even the disaffected, disenfranchised, true-blue party followers will come to their senses and help the majority of Americans flush the stench and bile of this acrimonious period down the toilet of other crackpot episodes we have successfully gone through.  Charlatans can't pull it off forever before their act wears thin.  Americans tire of un-American actors. And no longer will we tell all children, regardless of ability, reasoning capability or mental aptitude that someday they, too, can become president.  Mothers, don't let your amateur children become president.

America is neighbor helping neighbor, not building walls but building friendships and alliances.  Its expanding our parks, not making them smaller and exploiting them for corporate greed.  Let's face it, every nation has its embarrassing and distressful past.  If you don't see it you are blind and kidding yourself.  In horrible times we turned to our darker impulses: slavery, Indian massacres, lynching, manifest destiny and colonialism.  But then we turned the page and came out better.  We helped others win two world wars, passed civil rights, built great infrastructure, went to the moon and for a time invented everything that was great.  That is America.

America is a quiet strength, not braying, not bullying.  We work hard and then we rest and play the same way. Sadly America now spends far more on war than it does roads and bridges and we have fallen in almost every category worth noting to the point that you don't hear the chant We're #1 quite as often as you used to.  Even the flag-clutchers have loosened their grips.

Its harder and harder to see America these days, but if you look close, it's there.  It's in the relief fund dollars from kids all over the country helping Texas and Florida.  Its in the army of power company electricians, like my old friend Steve and his brother Neal, who left the quiet normalcy of Henry County and flooded those states with the same determination the water did.  It's in the thousands of volunteers who climb out of their easy chairs and climb into ERV's to assist. My old and dear friend Pat, who is 80 or close to it, spent two weeks in Houston and is now spending two weeks in Florida with the Red Cross. That is America. 

I also saw it first hand one afternoon at a small bar in the center of America.  An Englishman named Bob, he of 23 years service in Her Majesty's Royal Air Force was touring America.  His local host invited him to join a few of us at a place called Beer Bellies in a town called Aledo.  It is like many small-town saloons - familiar friends telling stories, laughing, and embracing each other emotionally, if not physically.  It is a place where Bob tried to understand the sport of baseball and still didn't quite get it, but said he'd love to buy a baseball somewhere and take to his son, who does get it.  And then I saw my brother leave.  

When he returned he handed Bob, an Englishman visiting America, a real major league baseball he caught during a real game a few years ago.  You could still see the special mud stain on it that umpires use to prep each game ball.  That is America.

Bob and Neil went on to tour through the heartland  toward the east coast.  They took in a Broadway play, saw the Statue of Liberty, and fell silent at the World Trade Center memorial.

A week and a half later when his host returned  one of us asked what was the most impressive thing he saw on his trip.  Without pausing, he said Bob was most impressed with small-town Aledo and a small-town bar, Beer Bellies.  And my brother who got him a baseball. 

No, you won't find too much of America in the nation's capital.  Blathering politicos padding their own fortunes in a bubble far from the daily grind of small town America..  Lying rich folks who listen to donors rather than their constituents.  People who vote party over country.  A president who doesn't understand the meaning of America and thinks the free press and half the people in it are political pornographers.  Go, instead to a small bar in a small town.  Maybe even a place called Beer Bellies.  That is America.