I am not an authentic American....but neither is President Bush

Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendentalism challenged the establishment of his day. He was an "American Scholar" who challenged Americans to produce authentic American ideas or else risk the fate of Europeanism which had become to dandy, to formal, and to precocious. Walt Whitman inherited these ideas and pursued them by challenging men to pursue democracy. Men, according to Whitman, should pursue education, literature, and become authentic individuals in a democratic community. Only then, he believed, would America escape the destiny of Europe. Whitman hated English intellectual Mathew Arnold and despised the term "culture" for it had become a way for elitist Europeans to dominate society. Whitman believed in the authentic American individual. Fast forward to the 1940s/1950s when Jack Kerouc and the Beat Generation reinterpreted Whitman to protest the consensus consumerism of the 1950s. Kerouc, Allan Ginsberg, and others rejected the establishment and pursued an authentic American identity through drugs, sex, literature, and rock and roll. The beatniks morphed into the counterculture movement which lost its way in the social turmoil of the late 1960s and died in 1968 on Haight-Ashbury Street in San Francisco, CA.

What is an authentic American? And what contributions can an authentic American make to the global community? I must admit that I thought I was an authentic American but I am not so sure anymore. Living in America for most of my life, I grew up in a midwestern religious family that valued genuiness, hard work, and frugality. It seems to me that these are ideas embroiled in Europeanism. Christianity, whether Catholic or Protestant is a European influence, which is why Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Whitman moved away from it. I grew up in a working class family but I admit that i am suffering from embourgeoisiement. I am not happy about this. I am not happy that I have never found my authentic American self. In fact, I never thought I was American...I was just a dude....and the dude abides....until he learns he can consume. I didn't like American girls. They were boring and uninteresting to me. I didn't like them to the point that I began dating only European women. But my love affair with Europe seems to be waning. Maybe because my European friends have been telling me how crap America is. They don't like the nation's politics, culture, or position in the world system. They think that President Bush is the most authentic American that the U.S. can produce. What they fail to realize....and what seems impossible to make them understand is that President Bush is no more an authentic American than they are. (By the way, neither is Bill Clinton. Although the did give a copy of Leaves of Grass to Monica Lewinsky, he didn't do it to spread ideals of an authentic democrat, he did it to get into her....well, you know what happened.) True Whitman would like W's vision of democracy but not his definition of imperialism and the poet would detest the President's intolerance of other cultures and ideas. Emerson would despise the President's simplistic view of the world and Thoreau would not like his cowboy actions that seem void of any reflective thought of nature such as he found at Walden Pond. President Bush does not protest the world system, he drives it and he forces us all to participate in it whether we want to or not. Because I cannot make my European friends realize the inauthenticity of the President at the moment, I have found that I dislike European ideas more and more. The formality, the proper way of doing things, the keeping up appearences. I don't know if I can handle it. Maybe my embourgeoisiement has made me to dandy, to precocious, to formal and I have grown to dislike it. Isn't life more spontaneous, casual, flexible, individual? If you ever meet an authentic American, you will know what I mean. Few exist anymore....but they are very refreshing. They have courage to do their own thing. They are organic intellectuals who are not afraid to challenge the system just like Whitman did even though they will probably have to pay for it much like Thoreau did when he practiced civil disobedience. Whitman challenged the language of gender and laissez-faire capitalism at a time when few others did. No wonder the beatniks appreciated him. I am afraid that I have made a mistake; my search for security by throwing off my working class roots and accepting the consumer appeal of bourgeois sensibilities has made me fear too much. This is the problem with consumerism...it steals our souls from us. I am no longer as courageous as authentic Americans are. But I envy them, oh how I envy them. I want to be them but I have forgotten how they do it and that is why I am not an authentic American.