Those of an age likely recall Don McLean’s 1972 megahit, “American Pie.” Though an easily sung, melodic tune, the song is a stream of forlorn allusions that when woven together become an elegy, a melancholy paean to a time past, a pop rendition of John Milton’s Paradise Lost.
“American Pie” came on the heels of a tempestuous decade, which had followed a superficially placid, bland one. Some critics rank it among the great pop songs. Although its place in music legend is a matter of debate, what isn’t debatable is that McLean captured the essence of a substantially changing America.
It’s no accident that McLean references pie in his lyrics. Apple pie has become an iconic symbol for Americana and remains part of our cultural mythology. Recall the tale of Johnny “Appleseed” Chapman, who planted apple trees from the Allegheny Valley of Western Pennsylvania to the Midwest.
In addition to being a scrumptious dessert and a symbol, pie serves another purpose due to it being a circle. Statisticians, demographers, and economists use it regularly to depict the microscopic sliver of America’s wealth that’s yours, which I’m assuming is considerably less than the square root of the square root of Pi.
Historians love to categorize stretches of time into ages or eras: e.g., the Age of Reason, the Industrial Period, the Progressive Era. Interestingly, there’s never been an Age of Innocence. It’s been tumultuous from the get-go. Vibrant, healthy democracies tend to be that way. Nevertheless, underneath the turbulence lies a nostalgia, a yearning for a past time even if you hadn’t lived during it or for something of the past that elicits a romantic feeling. One for me is captured in Arlo Guthrie’s rendition of “City of New Orleans,” Steve Goodman’s tribute to the train, which helped shape, connect, and mold the ethos of America.
John Koenig coined a word for that sense: anemoia, which he defines in his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows as a “nostalgia for a time you never experienced.” It’s imbued in pining for “good old days.” But there never were good old days, at least in a collective sense. While a certain stretch might’ve been halcyon for you, undoubtedly others found it to be a personal or social hellscape.
If we dig deep into our psyches, we might discover what we’re reaching back for is a time when things were safer, simpler, less of a whirlwind. But like good old days, times weren’t simpler in days of yore. They had their own sort of complexity. Yes, your great-grandparents didn’t need to worry about their identity being stolen or malware infecting their computers. But brewing a quick cup of coffee, grabbing a fast bite on the run, or luxuriating in a hot shower on demand weren’t options. Outside of musing, for me it’s a futile exercise. The bottom line is that we’re not there but here, which leads to our quandary: What are we going to do about it?
How often have you heard some politico go on about what the American people want or expect? Whenever I hear that I think, “Really? How do you know what the collective body of Americans thinks?”
And on a darker note, how many times have we heard someone proclaim, “That’s not who we are,” when the truth might be that is who we are? Or becoming.
America is struggling with an identity crisis. Who are we as a people? What does America mean today? What is our purpose?
Are we like those who founded this country, who pushed the frontier west, who through ingenuity, hard work, and some admittedly shady manipulation and inhumane exploitation built the most prosperous and powerful nation in history?
Do we have the same moxie as those that saved the world from Nazi domination, put an American on the moon, and defeated the heavily favored Russians—aka Soviets—in the 1980 Miracle on Ice?
Have we evolved into a new American, an alien species compared to those who wrote our founding documents and to those who bled profusely to set and keep the land free? Are there vestiges of their DNA in ours?
In the early nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville did a deep dive into our fledgling republic and recorded his findings in his classic tome, Democracy in America. I recall reading it as part of my college studies, but other than excerpts, I haven’t read it since then. Nevertheless, I believe what de Tocqueville ultimately described, in addition to the intricacies of American democracy, was the character of Americans of that day.
In future essays, I plan to explore America today in a “We the People” series. I invite you to accompany me as I go spelunking down a rabbit hole in search for America 2025.
