FORTNIGHT JOURNAL :: Documenting the Promise of the Millennial Generation

HYPHENATED-AMERICANS

FROM DE TOCQUEVILLE TO TACO BELL, AMERICAN IDENTITY EVOLVES. GRAHAM ENDS HIS TENURE WITH
HOPE FOR A YOUNG NATION.

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In the grand scheme of existential questions, “Who am I?” is a close second behind “Why am I here?” Identity remains the catalyst for countless struggles within families, communities, states and nations. The heyday of 1960s-era identity politics may have passed, but we live in an age of unreconciled, increasingly fluid social boundaries.

The failed Articles of Confederation presaged Shay's Rebellion, and the final Constitution used today. We struggled through a bloody five-year civil war before reuniting...

the idea of a single American identity is a relatively recent construct. During the American Revolution, it was hard to find a single unifying idea beyond that of throwing off the yoke of British rule. But after the war was won, the fledgling Republic suffered its own trials. The failed Articles of Confederation presaged Shay’s Rebellion, and the final Constitution used today. We struggled through a bloody five-year civil war before reuniting, even if at gunpoint. There has always been tension and impetus in different directions here; the United States has always been a restless melting pot.

Today, we’re anything but united. Politically, ethnically and regionally, we’re split even more

than perhaps we realize. The number of overlapping identities and allegiances that exist lead to an incredible number of constructed personas. Are Americans a collection of adjectives –Jewish, gay, Christian, Muslim, white, black, Arab, female, young, old–or, are we something more than the sum of these parts? And in an age of ever-increasing fracture, what do we still have in common?

Shifting priorities mean that the one man’s Irish heritage, so lionized, may be subordinated in favor of his new fear of Middle Eastern extremism. John Bull goes from enemy to ally in an instant. Joel Garreau’s The Nine Nations of North America now seems like a woeful underestimation of our disparate identities. The magisterial project of Rick Aschmann, his map of “North American English Dialects,” looks more like the splintered America that exists today.

Even the most physical of concepts, our location, will vary depending on the context. In Boston, I’m from Concord. In New York, I’m from Boston. In Chicago, I’m from Massachusetts. In Canada, I’m from New England. In London, I’m from America. In Asia, I’m white. None of these designations are mutually exclusive, but our frame of reference will dictate which we use. Like it or not, we’re constantly redefining ourselves.

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Of course, it’s possible that even in the midst of greater fragmentation, there’s coalescence elsewhere. The European Union crosses traditional lines of sovereignty, and supersedes many aspects of nationalism. And yet, Belgium as a unified country may have no future. Its citizens might find it preferable to split into Flanders and Wallonia. Subdivision doesn’t necessarily equal separation; it’s the difference between New York City seceding from New York State and South Carolina leaving the Union. So in the end, maybe we won’t have to choose between the Orwellian superstates of 1984 and the microstate ‘franchise nations’ of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash – Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong can just as easily fit into Oceania or Eastasia. The only point of contention is, to which one are our allegiances owed? After all, origin is a huge part of identity.

So how are these identities constructed? Many of the traditional markers of ‘otherness’ have vanished into the category of superficiality. In all the furor over American flags on Cinco de Mayo--and illegal immigration from Mexico and other points south, the ‘refusal’ of Muslims to assimilate properly into the Anglo-American mainstream, and the fear of losing ‘traditional’ white culture to new arrivals--it’s been overlooked to a large extent that not only are proponents of ‘traditional’ American culture simply outnumbered by the

children of immigrants, but that those Americans who can claim a hyphen – the Irish-Americans, the Italian-Americans, the German-Americans – are perhaps even more an embodiment of the American spirit than the old breed itself.

The European Union crosses traditional lines of sovereignty, and supersedes many aspects of nationalism.

We don’t really care where you’re from anymore. Many, if not most Americans have various heritages that we’re proud of, be it our Irish ancestors from the turn of the century, Germans who settled in the Midwest, Scotch refugees of the Jacobite Rebellion, or any of the countless “mixed miscellaneous British Isles” pedigrees in America today. We celebrate our histories, blame our fondness for Guinness or whiskey or gin on them, engage in mock rivalries between traditional arch-nemeses. But for the most part, we don’t actually care. Heritage is not the measure of a man, but rather, adds to the distinctiveness and fascination of his personality. We young Americans find it an element interesting, not defining.

If anything, there is perhaps a sense of longing among the ‘traditional’ Americans – those with British ancestry of mixed origin, and last names like Smith or Jones or Wilkins – for a similar

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shared cultural heritage, for membership in that exclusive club of distinctively Polish- or Italian- or Chinese-Americans, which each come complete with distinct passwords, rituals--and, most importantly, cuisine. The fear among white Americans, who by now include Italians and Irish and other formerly ‘lower’ ethnicities, is that the newcomers will displace them in turn.

In his otherwise all-too-forgettable alternate history trilogy, The Domination, S.M. Stirling envisions a Europe overrun during World War II. His grim scenario includes the conquest of the British Isles, whose inhabitants stream west as refugees and arrive like so many before them in New York City. As the blue-blooded, Boston-bred chief of Stirling's OSS muses:

The English were the latest wave all along the Atlantic coast … It was a little embarrassing, for an old-stock Yankee. He could remember when a British surname was an elite rarity here; now every second waiter, hairdresser, and ditchdigger was a new-landed Anglo-Saxon. Not to mention prostitutes, pimps, street thugs, and the gangs who were pushing the Mexicans and Sicilians out of organized crime…'1'

It’s a nice twist on the traditional fear of certain last names. The Ellis Island Americanization is no

more, which to certain segments of the public appears as a grim specter. But it is in fact the “historical accidents of names like Ramos, Gomez and Suarez” that will last, and little more than that. If American history is any guide to the road to whiteness, the newest ethnicities in America will eventually be just as legitimized and homogenized. Their ethnicity will become “a near-empty signifier, a container for ‘identity’ that holds little beyond foods, family stories, and a few half-remembered phrases in the tongue of the Old Country.” At this point, what is the ever-shrinking Little Italy, except a place to get over-priced Italian food?

If American history is any guide to the road to whiteness, the newest ethnicities in America will eventually be just as legitimized and homogenized.

But while we may have convinced ourselves that we’re tolerant and welcoming with open arms, even those who most feel assimilated themselves often have the harsh reality of a not-yet-postracial America brought home. Korean and other Asian adoptees who feel as white as the kids they grew up with are often shocked into the realization that not only do they not look like the white kids, but that people seem to care. It is in many respects a harmless racial realization – none of the overtly

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racist bigotry of the past – but our generation is still well aware of differences in skin color.

Perhaps our awareness of the phenomenon is a product of our education. I know I’m not the only one to question the early integration of racial awareness modules in classrooms. How aware would my classmates be of race without classes on Apartheid-era South Africa and slavery in the United States? Without a precise demolition of historical “scientific” arguments regarding racial superiority? Lessons on our tarnished history put differences in starker relief. To me, even if these differences didn’t make one less American, they made one more different-American – striking a blow to the idea of a truly integrated society.

Even today, the census of France does not require self-identification of any ethnic group.

What makes one a citizen of any country today? The French have always had pretty simple qualifications: you learn the language and accept the idea of the republic. Besides that, there is a French character, a certain je ne sais quois that simply makes one French. Of course, that traditional root of identity is increasingly under attack (or at least perceived as such), leading to such laws as the ‘burqa ban.' But whether the idea

of being French is under siege, or that its definition requires expansion, is at the core of their debate. Is Islam French? Color-blindness has always been one defining characteristic of French society, and one worthy of pride. Even today, the census of France does not require self-identification of any ethnic group. In Greater France in Africa, William Sloane recalls his experience in 1904 when:

A very handsome, smartly dressed black man with an equally smart white wife entered the restaurant where 'I' was the guest at luncheon of a French friend. Perhaps 'I' stared a little, but no one else did, and 'my' host casually remarked: “We rather like that.”'2'

Contemporary France obviously has its own internal issues of culture and segregation to work out. Witness the 2005 violence in the outlying banlieues of Paris, where aggrieved youth, mostly Muslims of North African origin, torched cars and rioted for days after two of their peers hiding from the police in an electrical substation were electrocuted. But the riots, while fuelled by the underlying physical segregation and existing social situation, were seen as an aberration – not as the logical conclusion to preexisting tensions. The riots, in other words, were not in keeping with the idea of France. That nation certainly has

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seen its share of revolt and revolution, but those events have always been justified by class, not race or ethnicity.

The only means by which we might find a unity through race is in our unique inability to get over it.

The United States, on the other hand, has a rather damning history when it comes to race relations. Between slavery, Indian removal, Jim Crow, segregation, the Chinese Exclusion Acts, and Japanese internment, this nation has a tremendous stain on it that can never be removed. The question of race has always been at the forefront of the American experiment. The only means by which we might find a unity through race is in our unique inability to get over it. And so we’re forced to turn to alternative concepts of identity to figure out who we are.

One might think it easier to find overwhelming national characteristics now than in the past. The provincial America of the nineteenth century was so vast a country, and so difficult to travel, that naturally, regional differences were accentuated. Even on the East Coast--where in a single day one can now eat breakfast in Philadelphia, lunch in New York and dinner in Boston--there is the

enduring weirdness of New England clam chowder, versus that of New York. Maine crabs versus Chesapeake. At risk of being pilloried by long-time natives, only in that insular United States could one find the miniscule differences enough justification to create two entirely separate foodstuffs in the Italian beef of Chicago and a Philly cheesesteak. And how many Americans – particularly writers – have been defined by their city, rather than their country? Poe was from Baltimore. Chandler from Los Angeles. Alcott, Thoreau, Emerson all from Concord, Massachusetts. Robert Parker from Boston. It’s a common enough association that Wikipedia even has a category for “American writers by city.”

Cities may be a poor measuring tool for a truly national identity; after all, by definition, they represent something more local. But for a time, certain cities were the embodiment of the spirit of the nation as a whole. New York has always represented the melting pot and the availability of anything imaginable – the American dream, urban-style. Chicago was the heart of American dynamism, enterprise and sheer size for many decades. Chicago's political corruption and crime of the Capone era also stood in for aspects of America as a whole. But now, the city stands for little more than itself.

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As Fredric Smoler muses:

By the time I was a young man Chicago was conspicuously represented in popular culture only by one TV police show and by the teen comedies of John Hughes, and neither was too explicitly identified with Chicago. I suppose when we thought about ourselves in those days, we were reduced to two nations, and Chicago was a reasonable venue to serially dramatize that, in principle no different from someplace like Philadelphia.

Without an overwhelming ethnic, racial, or urban definition of “American,” one must turn to other ideas to really determine the core of our identity, of our shared presentation to the world. Is it our obesity? Our refusal to learn other languages? Our fun-free work ethic? The dour puritanism of much of the country? Stereotypes have their root in truth, but what do the symptoms say about the cause?

The idea of an American character is an old one, and ironically, it took a Frenchman to really define it for the first time. Alexis de Tocqueville’s magisterial survey Democracy in America was the first instance in which disparate aspects of the Republic were compiled and analyzed as a whole. His account of what we were is mostly

flattering. Tocqueville’s America possesses a “manly and legitimate passion for equality”; political devolution and fragmentation, particularly in New England; factions without conspiracies; and a willingness to improve itself – “her ability to repair her faults.” We’ve absorbed the flattery, but forgotten the caution.

Character changes, too. Historians used to attempt to answer the question of American character, but in recent years that task has instead fallen to sociologists and other social scientists. As John Higham has observed, “for many influential historians of the United States today…the nation is simply a convenient arena within which some spectacle that interests the historian is easily observed … The ‘field’ of American history…is not about America but merely about what happens in the United States.” The discord between what we say and what we do is well-noted, but even more important is the difference between what we do and what we are. Whilst the latter is obviously informed by the former, the whole point is that there’s something more to American character than the sum of our actions. But in modern times, our qualities seem to have abandoned even vestiges of past virtue.

Perhaps there’s only one word necessary to describe modern America: hysterical.

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Everything’s blown out of proportion; no one has an ounce of common sense; we’ve all lost our collective shit. An author writing online under the name of ‘Truedog’ offers a most intriguing explanation:

Here’s my theory: I think everyone in America shares an unconscious, often hidden, and largely unarticulated conclusion that we fucked up, the glory days are over, the country is in deep shit, and there’s no way out. We know in our bones that we’re falling apart and the rest of the world is moving ahead. Forget about being #1, we’ll be lucky to level off at #17. I think that panic is shared across the political board. Although ideology plays a strong role in who is blamed, the hysteria comes from a common root. This isn’t just about now or the unemployment rate. It’s deeper and more primal. It taps into our inner terror of losing our grip and never getting it back. Hysteria is just the vibration in our national fuselage as the American empire noses over and loses altitude. People sense they have lost something and are frantic over it.

The sheer pettiness of what consumes us today points to the absence of any larger, more meaningful uniting ties. Clearly, we're not

resilient in the way we used to be. Our grandest establishments, crowning achievements of our own superiority, our egalitarianism, our sense of justice and fair play – the buildings that enshrine these values are no longer open from the front. The majestic edifices of Washington, DC are almost entirely closed to pedestrian traffic. Subterranean civilian entrances to buildings like the United States Congress have proliferated, and there are new proposals for an underground approach and airport-style security as a prerequisite for entering the Washington Monument. Bruce Schneier suggests that we close the monument instead. “We can reopen the monument when every foiled or failed terrorist plot causes us to praise our security, instead of redoubling it.” So who are we, then?

Scared.

For inanities like airport security and the “rape scanners” that the Transportation Security Administration is pioneering, a backlash finally grows. As hysterical and frightened as we Americans are, there are limits to even those qualities. And all things change. While the “millennial” generation has a reputation as fickle, trite consumers--flitting from one interest to another, before dropping interests all together--I think that we nevertheless approach life with a certain degree of calm. Some things are just out of

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our control. And as worrisome as a loss of control is, there’s still a certain agency to accepting that fact.

My generation is an agent of change. We’ve rejected the usual markers like cars and large houses, former status symbols that have lost their luster in an age of excess. It’s hard to defend us as less conspicuous consumers when so many of our subcultures (I’m looking at you, hipsters) are defined solely by what they do consume. But, does consuming ironic t-shirts, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and skinny jeans really compare to McMansions and automobiles? Young Americans do not define the country right now, but one day they will – bringing with them their own standards and ideas as to what constitutes America. And, from this vantage point, the kids are alright.

'1' S.M. Stirling, The Domination (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 1999), 564.

'2' William Milligan Sloane, Greater France in Africa(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1924), 85.

Graham Jenkins is a nascent military scholar who studied at the London School of Economics. Graham published six essays that ranged from discussing the recession and the millennial generation, military history and innovation, and the state of immigration in the United States. WIRED contributing editor and top military blogger Noah Shachtman responded to his work via a recorded video chat. Since publishing with Fortnight, Graham has been asked to present papers at top academic institutions, including the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Graham is currently a researcher at a D.C. area Federally Funded Research and Development Center.

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A MULTIMEDIA DOCUMENTARY PROJECT ON THE MILLENNIAL GENERATION: THE LAST GENERATION TO REMEMBER A TIME WITHOUT THE INTERNET.