“America, I Really Don’t Care, Do U?”

“America, I Really Don’t Care, Do U?”

Due to the covid-19 pandemic and the current division between haves and have nots (brain matter that is), the author, a former middleweight boxer and novelist, felt it necessary to express his un-American transcendence in the following controlled-scream essay.

Every family in this country has a American genesis story, some good, some bad, some awful. I’d like to think that mine is, as they say in Italian, mica male--not so bad. The story went something like this: Great-grandmother Carolina had her two tickets bought on the USS New York bound for its namesake and leaving from the Port of Naples in the summer of 1911. She was to follow her husband who had gone a year earlier to secure work and residency. Accompanying her would be her first-born son, Giovanni, eight years old. Then, with less than a week until departure, Giovanni got kicked in the head by a donkey. Yup, a donkey! He would live (a large scar with a bump near the top of his head would manifest the accident for the rest of his life--he was a baldy by age 40), but he would need time to recuperate. So Carolina embarked without him. He had three younger brothers and aunts galore, who cared for him and his siblings. A year later and unaccompanied, he left his mountainside village below three prominent massifs of the Monti della Mela that separate Lazio from the Abruzzo. Taking the same steamer from the Port of Naples, he joined his mother in New York. Even though there is no actual photograph of the moment, I possess a very strong image of him standing in the grand hall, clutching a suitcase half his size, a vacant almost animal look on his face, in the shadow of a newsboy cap, with loose woolen knickers, a white shirt, and leather shoes.  If you visit Ellis Island today, and you search his name, you’ll find him there in the records. Giovanni Vitti. No middle name. No parent or guardian listed. Just him. Carolina was an eccentric. She did this transatlantic shuffle seven times. She had seven kids, all of whom would eventually settle in the United States. Giovanni grew up in New York and Connecticut. He met my grandmother through relatives, all of whom had connections to his native village. My grandmother’s mother had actually emigrated from Argentina, but her people before her had lived up there in the mountains where the face of baby Jesus can be seen (“by those Holy enough to see it”) on one of the rocky massifs that look out over the Comino Valley. There is celebration in the village every summer, honoring a Marian apparition that took place up on mountains many years ago. My maternal grandmother, Filomena, Fanny to her friends and family, grew up in Hell’s Kitchen, where present-day Lincoln Center sits. This was the part of town where a young doctor named William Carlos Williams administered to the impoverished immigrants in the first decade of the 20th century. It was said that in his down time, he wrote poetry. I checked to see if his name was on my grandmother’s birth certificate. It wasn’t, but he was in the neighborhood. Fanny’s mother, my great-grandmother, Rosa, was a seamstress, just like one of those poor girls burned alive in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. There were a lot of tragic stories about those difficult early years at the turn of the last century, none of which I ever got to hear; they were too depressing. The only story I was told was that Rosa, who had died at 42, was a child bride. She had an arranged marriage, her hand promised to a man--a friend of the family--who was twice her age. She never loved him, even though she bore him two children--my grandmother being one of them. The unrequited love drove him insane, and the men in the white coats came and took him away one day. She remarried and had three other children before she passed away. My grandmother, married by then, had to raise her half-brothers, and sisters. One of them, my great-uncle Mike, was a decorated World War II soldier.

As for the paternal genesis story, that’s a harder one to exhume. It’s all a misty smudge of stories without beginnings or endings, and not necessarily because the records or memories are lacking, but because the embarrassment and squalor still bleed red. My paternal grandfather was born in the United States, in Port Chester, NY in the 1890s. His mother died in childbirth, but his father, an Irish immigrant, was a true willow-the-wisp. A drunk, a philanderer, a house painter, a drifter. There were stories about him getting in fights, being related to the great heavyweight champion, Gene Tunney. But there were also stories about my grandfather living in a barn out behind some distant relative’s house with his brothers because they had nowhere else to live, and it was winter… Before my father died, my sister and I paid for him to go back to Ireland to trace his roots. He found his relatives all right, somewhere near Galway Bay. And what my father had to say was this: “Ireland is sure a different place than it once was.” The Irish, as everyone knows, are shy people who are not inclined to air dirty laundry. As for my paternal grandmother. She also was born in America to Austro-Hungarian immigrants. She was a lunch lady, and my grandfather was the janitor in the school where they met. They had six kids. My dad was the fifth. My grandfather fought in World War I. He was a mail courier. Rode one of those big Indian motorcycles (that would be worth about a bazillion dollars today) through the mud-logged fields of Belgium. He received the purple heart. His first-son, my Uncle Vinnie, was killed in World War II on December 7, 1941. He was 20 years old. He was out washing the car he’d just bought from the extra money he had made from making sergeant the week before. He took seven bullets across the shoulders from a Japanese plane, specifically an Aichi 3A2, Val Type 99, single-engine dive bomber. He bled to death. He was at Wheeler Field, which is right next to Schofield Barracks and just a couple miles down the road from Pearl Harbor. He was the first Connecticut man to die in that war.

These genesis stories are relatively easy for me to tell so many years after the fact. While writing them down, my physiognomy didn’t turn dark and distant, my brain didn’t begin to flash PTSD warning signals, my hands and fingers didn’t begin to fidget and scratch at some old scar or recent blemish, nor did tears well up at the corners of my eyes the way they did whenever the folks I just limned began to speak of these memories. Of course much of this story is or would be an embarrassment for those of an earlier generation who knew all the unsavory details. But for me here in 2020, it’s smooth-sailing over these troubled waters; what I might even call white privilege. And that’s because there’s no slavery. No indentured servitude. No Trail of Tears. And by the same token, there’s no trust funds. No windfalls. No country manors with my name on it back across the Pond. Oh, there’s probably a few “No Irish Need Apply” or “Greasy Wop” moments here and there. Maybe I take all of this too much for granted. Maybe I assume that we all know by now where we come from and even why we came. Even my beloved tribal friends have to admit that they didn’t climb down out of the maples and oaks and sweetgums somewhere between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans a million years ago. They migrated over here, too, just a score of millennia earlier, but more on that later. No, I’m not a cultist. I believe science, not mythology. Humans, relatively speaking, are an infant species on this planet. In fact, from what I’ve read, it wasn’t our brains that secured our pre-eminence; it was our friend the dog. Not until we hitched our wagon to its wagging tail (so they could warn us about a pack of hyenas in the area) that we humans became anything other than just another journeyman species trying to make a living on this hardscrabble rock. Once we befriended the dog, we had a leg up on the competition, so to speak, and were suddenly set free to use our big brains to decode the DNA protein, work out the details of CRISPR (that’s clustered, regularly, interspaced, short, palendromic repeats), develop mRNA vaccines against zoonotic viruses, engineer jet engines, develop nanoparticles and particle accelerators, refine our nuclear arms and delivery systems, and make really tasty blue cheese packaged in forever plastic wrap. 

It seems to me, more so than ever before, that there is a ghastly lack of understanding in this country about ourselves, about our origins, about our good fortune, and about our profligate selfishness. I’m not sure, but I think another way to describe this sense of self is called “humility.” There’s certainly an inordinate focus on the self, on the future self, on the unrealized self, but almost no attention given to how we got here and why. I perceive among the majority of folks I know and work with and interact with, family members as well, that they aren’t truly invested in understanding the history of themselves or the world they live in; rather, they are focused on shopping for house beautiful, big-screen televisions and shiny pick-up trucks, AR-15s and all-inclusive vacations. It’s as if they believe these are natural resources, our manifest destiny. It’s as if there is an unspoken objective to consume everything to the point where we’ve used up all the planet’s oxygen, all our brain’s dopamine, all our money, and all our sense of wonder. Recently, the book Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire by Kurt Andersen describes America as a kind of cult with a “promiscuous devotion to the untrue.” No doubt Americans have replaced the real with the artificial and democracy with a kleptocracy. The Trump presidency is proof of this ersatz culture of ours. But why? What makes our citizenry so credulous, so materialistic, so unnatural? Macchiavelli, the great civic cynic, cautioned us five hundred years ago about how laws and leadership are constantly at loggerheads: “In every republic there are two different inclinations: that of the people and that of the upper class, and that all the laws which are made in favor of liberty are born of the conflicts between the two.” I think he’s right about that.

But Macchiavelli was more than a cynic; he was a philosopher, too. He reduced human action and failure down to three fundamental factors: fortune, virtue, and free will. (Has anyone ever suggested that he stole two of these ideas from Plato?) All three circumscribe the very essence of the American experience, from start to present day, for the yearning immigrant that is. I look at my humble beginnings as a prime example of how the constellation of these three human conditions led my grandparents and great-grandparents to embark on a new life in a new world. This is also the best definition of the pejorative term “white privilege.” It is with the full investment of one’s inalienable rights in the form of fortune, virtue, and free will that the immigrants who make up a good percentage of this population, traveled to America. Needless to say, lacking the latter attribute disqualifies the other two.There is no life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness without free will; and I would stretch that condition to include even the promise of free will being enough to validate the other two. So that is how, in just a generation or two, my forebears produced fairly noteworthy, and accomplished progeny. There were/are teachers and lawyers, successful businessmen, restaurateurs, state and federal officials, war heroes, professional athletes, writers, even a Hollywood celebrity. And in that short period of time there was not a single one who had inherited their wealth, their business or profited in any way as a result of nepotism, that scourge of the Old World. Likewise, there was no indentured servitude among my forebears. None was a slave. None was an autochtone ignominiously removed from his or her rightful land, imprisoned, exterminated, lynched. In defense of my grandparents and great grandparents, I doubt they had the education or the inclination to think beyond their own humble existence and discomfiture to consider those less “privileged” than themselves. Perhaps they did. But obviously not enough for it to make a difference. And that’s where I come in.

When I hear the term “American Exceptionalism,” I hear the word “opportunity.” America through the years, not for everyone, but in part for those with the three fundamental Macchiavellian attributes, has offered many immigrants (in varying degrees of course) a chance to be and do something new, maybe even something exceptional, and in most cases legal and unbidden. Unfortunately, those immigrants or autochtones who were not equally endowed with inalienable rights to avail themselves of all the opportunities percolating on the newly invaded and developed continent, were discounted not only by the history books, but also by many of the newly arrived immigrants. Like an overdue debt, it keeps accumulating more interest. The debt load has become immense. Something tells me that, psychologically, the guilt is driving the galloping consumption or how did Kurt Andersen describe it? “promiscuous devotion to the untrue.” Certainly it’s easier to avoid the truth than to deal with it. We’ve all heard that and probably have some first-hand knowledge of that hackneyed truism. I have held off blaming anyone to this point about where we’re at and what’s going on, but I do believe that this lavish, this resource-rich continent of ours has something to do with it. With its purple mountain majesty and fruitful plains...it has been far too ripe and far too available for so many of “the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Of course that is all requisite on the fact that 90% of the existing indigenous peoples were wiped out by the zoonotic diseases carried by the white urbanites and domestic animals. In fact, the continent was quite tame and well-ordered, what with the rich biodiversity of the prairies, woodlands and forests, all meticulously managed by the indigenous people with their controlled fires and replantings. So, fortune was on the side of those virtuous, free-wheeling immigrants and dare I say settlers. That coupled with all the advances made during the industrial revolution with slave labor to cheaply supply the ever-growing demand. Notwithstanding the free will, fortune and virtue blossomed into homes and businesses and wealth and me and my house and my family. I didn’t get here all by myself. I am exceptional in that I had the free will, good fortune, and virtue to be born when I did, where I did, and to whom I did.  

But now comes a reckoning. Times have changed. The world has passed certain benchmarks. There are nearly eight billion people on the planet today. There were two billion when my forebears arrived in this country. The world, in essence, has shrunk considerably. And grown much richer. American household assets top $115 trillion, which works out to be about $350,000 for each person if the wealth were distributed equally, but it’s not, not by a long shot. Recently, Bill Ackman, one of the billionaire class and CEO of a hedge fund, has called out our present system for what is: unequal and unfair to wit,”The American Dream has become a disappointment or worse for far too many, and if the system continues to leave people behind and wage growth lags, Americans will seek changes, potentially radical ones, to the current system, or seek an alternative system.” I actually agree with Ackman in his assessment of our unequal system. However, what he fails to mention beyond anything with a dollar sign in front of it are the missing benefits, the sine qua non of living in a caring and sharing highly developed society that doesn’t just offer good wages, cheap gas for your pick-up truck, and business opportunities. I am talking about a society that provides and promotes and nourishes; one that offers free health care, free quality education, arts, clean air and water, blindness under the law, human dignity. These are relatively new concepts, ones that have become more and more accessible as our technology and economies have evolved. They are not the fantasy of the snowflakes. They are real, and they exist in many places around the world, but not in the United States. 

And that’s why this nation has at last lost its swagger, has lost its relevance, has lost its place in the world order. Because the truth of the matter is that many of the places from which the immigrants emigrated have evolved into highly caring and sharing and nourishing nations that offer more than just freedom of opportunity, they are now nations with benefits. 

America with 5% of the world’s population has the highest number of its citizens behind bars--2.2 million to be exact. However, the majority of the incarcerated are in local jails, and the only reason for that is because they can’t make bail. Interesting to note, the bail bond business is a multi-billion dollar industry that traps folks further into poverty and crime. Moreover, bail for profit is another form of American exceptionalism. Today about 10% of Americans are living below the poverty line, but that’s only thanks to the coronavirus relief package, which kept 10 million people out of poverty. However, if there is no second relief package, poverty will be the catch word. Even though homeless is not a uniquely American problem, it is still a great embarrassment for the richest nation on the planet. Of the five cities in the world with the highest number of homeless living on the streets, the U.S. is home to two of those cities--#4 L.A. and #2 New York, the other three are #1 Manila, #3 Mumbai, and #5 Moscow. Income inequality in America is at a 50 year high. The top 1% own 15 times the wealth of the bottom 50% combined. Cops continue to murder unarmed people of color without consequences. A newly stacked and radicalized SCOTUS is agitating to deny immigrants entry or citizenship while they set the table to repeal abortion. And worst of all I can’t afford health insurance, and I’m sixty years old. And now with the pandemic raging, American exceptionalism turns out to be a death cult.

I didn’t set out to be au courant with the latest statistics and facts on incarceration rates and prison reform, or income inequality, poverty, homelessness, affordable healthcare, LGBTQ rights, Black Lives Matter, police reform, anti-gun legislation, campaign finance reform, tax code reform, immigration reform, Pro-choice, corporate lobbying, as well as a host of many other issues that represent a free and just and liveable society. The facts, the science, the “news” brought all of these issues to my attention. I have not been radicalized by my religious belief or by my favorite news outlet, and then indoctrinated to espouse lies and conspiracies against what is obvious. I’ve been reading and teaching and listening and traveling and playing music and walking in the woods and being a dad and a husband and a neighbor and a friend. Only lately have I become shocked to the point where I feel completely alienated by my country. In recent days I have found myself in my car stopped at a light behind a large pickup truck with a Confederate Flag decal in the back window. Raking leaves, I look across the street and walk down the road and on three sides of me are Trump flags. Mind you, I live in New York state. I actually live in a town and on the same street as the first woman medal of honor winner in American history, and right next door is a house listed in the national register of historic places as one of the last stops on the Underground Railroad--our road deadends on the shores of Lake Ontario. Something fundamental has occurred, and perhaps because I’ve been living abroad for ten of the last thirty years, I’ve missed something. This country has turned into a shithole. That’s why my kids live abroad. That’s why I’m moving over there to join them. Yep, it’s all pretty sad. Perhaps Melania Trump said it exactly as it is: “America, I really don’t care, do u?”