By Martha Quillen
Americans are romantics. For five centuries, people have been coming to America seeking land, fame, fortune, and glory. Eldorado, the Fountain of Youth, the seven cities of gold. From the beginning, we’ve been passionate believers in our dreams, our destiny, our freedom, and a chicken in every pot.
As Terry Coleman points out in Going to America, disappointment was routine:
It was an old superstition, sometimes half believed by the simplest emigrants, that the streets of New York were paved with gold. When they got there they learned three things: first, that the streets were not paved with gold; second, that the streets were not paved at all; and third, that they were expected to pave them.
Yet clearly cold reality didn’t squelch our romantic notions. On the contrary, Americans eventually concluded that they were the best, brightest, richest people on earth living in the world’s only superpower.
Then we got embroiled in two seemingly unwinnable wars and faced a financial crisis that was due to questionable innovations and practices introduced by our own political and financial institutions (rather than to natural disaster or foreign attack).
Consequently, our optimism faltered and our national mood tilted toward indignation, anxiety, and dissatisfaction.
Given our history, however, all of this is probably temporary. Presuming Americans don’t do anything rash like taking up arms or electing a fanatical tyrant as President, our national optimism will likely soar out of control again fairly soon, and we will …
What? What will we do?
Whenever things go wrong in the USA, citizens clamor to know exactly what happened and who’s to blame. Then we continue to clamor – even after the situation has been examined at length and in countless volumes.
Finally, when all the facts have been discussed and dissected, we usually refuse to believe most of them – probably because we are tireless investigators, but not very good at coming to a consensus on any course of action.
Looking back at the last 400 years of our history, it appears that Americans may harbor a real distaste for maintenance. Why fix things when we can build them anew?
Or just invent something new.
After all, we are not the people who stayed in Europe propping up 1,000-year-old cities and preserving 2,000-year-old ruins.
Whether Native American, American colonist, or Old West pioneer, Americans seem to have a penchant for wanderlust, fighting, and leaving things behind.
All in all, we are not an homogeneous bunch, and we tend to be contentious. But over the years, a significant number of us have managed to agree upon and adopt a cherished view of ourselves, our importance, our ideals, and the American dream.
According to this popular mythology, we Americans prize freedom, independence, hard work, self-reliance, rugged individualism, and our right to do things our own way.
The truth of this myth is somewhat suspect (since we are not always pleased when it is our neighbor being an individualist who does things his own way). But our fondness for these particular traits has been extraordinarily productive nonetheless.
At this point in history, good old American enterprise has generated so much stuff that we don’t know what to do with all of it.
American writers, artists, performers, producers, directors, politicians, computer programmers, construction workers, inventors, promoters, salesmen, advertisers, financiers, industrialists and manufacturers have created so much stuff and so many conflicting romantic ideals that it’s gotten difficult for anyone to settle on anything – especially together.
These days I find myself yearning for a little more simplicity, stability, and security, but I can’t imagine how anyone can find that in our society. Our lives have become jam-packed, our politics frenetic, and our options almost infinite.
Valentine’s Day is coming up. So how can a Salida man please his sweetheart? With candy, jewelry, or lingerie, skiing, hiking or swimming, a night at a local inn, or a weekend jaunt to Mexico or Vegas. He can purchase airline tickets online from Expedia, Travelocity, or Priceline. Hotel accommodations can be viewed, booked, and purchased on the Net, and boarding passes printed at home.
Or he can buy his sweetheart a CD by her favorite band, or download any music her heart desires. On Youtube he and she can hear the Rodgers and Hart song “Isn’t It Romantic” performed by Jeanette McDonald, Ella Fitzgerald, Chet Baker, Ron Raines, Rod Stewart and dozens of other singers and bands.
Or our would-be Romeo can order almost anything (books, food, cosmetics, electronics, clothing, furniture, art, and more) from places all over the world. And he doesn’t even have to pay cash up front; he can use plastic.
Or he can opt for drinks, dinner, and an evening watching any movie available at his local library or through Netflix, Dish, or other distributors.
As for what movies Romeo should consider, Google offers more than forty-two million sites under “romantic movies.” Of course, those millions all tend to focus on the same two or three hundred films, but today a Salidan can also order movies made in Bollywood, Asia, Africa, Europe, South America, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand, and in a dizzying array of languages, including Chinese, Thai, Macedonian, Serbo-Croation and Albanian.
Or if his ladylove has extraordinarily expensive tastes, he can shop online for an English cottage, Italian villa, or real medieval castle.
And if he’s smart, he’ll buy a little something locally, too, since the livelihood of his community depends on it.
Given all of this modern merchandising, it isn’t hard to understand how some Americans have charged themselves into serious debt.
Nor is it surprising that the rest of us, frugal though we may be, have accumulated too much junk, a mountain of plastic bags, an excess of toiletries and detergents in indestructible plastic bottles, and a lot of refuse like paint and oil cans, smoke detectors and computer parts that we don’t know how to dispose of properly.
Today modern technology offers us more choices than we can actually peruse, or even fathom. It’s changing our culture and us in ways that are neither calculable nor predictable. And there’s always more coming: Twitter, texting, flat-screen televisions, smart phones, video streaming, tablet computers …
But having more options is better than only having a few, right?(Or at least one can hope so.)
People my age often contend that things were better the way they used to be, but I remember working at a newspaper in a tiny Colorado mountain town in 1974, before cable television, the Internet, DVDs, or even good radio reception arrived there.
The high school kids came into our offices to lay out their school newspaper, and the next fall the top seniors headed off to college. But they were all back home within six months.
Those kids had been raised without access to VHS, NPR, and the World Wide Web. Rock and roll music was virtually unheard of there, as were art galleries, poetry readings, and live theater. Before leaving home, those kids had seen precious few documentaries, and no famous lecturers or professional orchestras. Except to attend rodeo and high school sporting events, they had seldom even left town before. But they wanted to, so it was sad seeing them back home again.
These days it’s amazing what a person can do while sitting at home, alone, right here in Central Colorado. You can take a college course, shop for a car, watch videos from all over the world, chat with friends, pick out a pet, learn a language, trace your ancestry, send movies of yourself to friends, apply for a job, or file your tax return.
Modern marvels are amazing and disturbing, exhilarating and exhausting. They’re astounding, confounding and they just keep compounding.
But are they romantic?
Nah, no way, because real romance still requires human contact.
Martha Quillen and her Valentine Ed moved to Salida thirty-three years ago, and despite the signs, haven’t found the exit yet.
