Evel Knievel’s Snake River Jump Monument (Photo by Gregory Rodriguez)
Twin Falls, Idaho
I was looking forward to visiting daredevil Evel Knievel’s grave in Mountain View Cemetery in Butte, Montana. But about 155 miles south of our destination, and without any advance notice, orange traffic cones shepherded us off the interstate. State Troopers had shut down a one hundred mile stretch of the I-15 between DuBois, Idaho, and Dillon, Montana, due to some pretty nasty high winds. It’s probably just as well since it was minus 26 degrees in Butte last night. So we turned around and headed south to Twin Falls, Idaho, where, in 1974, Knievel made his ill-fated rocket jump over Snake River Canyon. Looking down into the gorge would persuade anyone that Knievel was nuts. But I’m glad his daring is memorialized in this monument at the edge of the canyon. It’s a reminder that risk, courage, and not a little bit of craziness were once a more robust part of America’s national ethos.
The George Rogers Clark Memorial Bridge, Louisville, Kentucky (Photo by Gregory Rodriguez)
Athens, Georgia
We just got back from another road trip in search of America, the country where I was born but which I still find surprisingly foreign in so many ways. It’s the second such trip this year. Last spring, we drove around East Tennessee whose top historic sites included Davy Crockett’s birthplace along the Nolichucky River, Dolly Parton’s hometown of Sevierville, and Andrew Johnson’s gravesite in Greeneville.
This last trip was a six-day, five-state, 1,100-mile extravaganza that took us from Georgia, to western Tennessee, Kentucky, across the Ohio River into Indiana, then back south through North Carolina, and South Carolina. Among the key points of interest in Kentucky were Daniel and Rebecca Boone’s grave in Frankfort; Cane Ridge, the site of what was perhaps the most culturally significant religious gathering in U.S. history; a 170-year-old Trappist monastery near Bardstown where Thomas Merton lived, and Muhammad Ali’s gravesite in Louisville. Oh, and we saw Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace and ran a 5k along the way.
What most of these sites have in common is that they evoke both national mythology and popular culture. The more I study U.S. history, the more I am struck by how much and how often Americans wrap themselves in virtue and heroism in order to justify far less lofty, material goals. From the Revolutionary War to FTX cryptocurrency exchange, the nation and its citizens have had the unfortunate tendency to hide base desires and interests in high-minded idealism. (The CEO of FTX charmed investors by touting his belief in effective altruism, a social movement that encourages followers to make as much money as possible so they can give it away. And America’s Founders would not have looked so heroic had they simply expressed how angry they were that the British prohibited them from crossing the Appalachians and seizing land.). But then there are the genuinely heroic outliers like Ali and Merton, who puncture American myths but are themselves products of the nation’s remarkable cultural alchemy.
This little trip got me excited to return to the University of Georgia library, where I have a few more precious weeks to study this year before heading back to Madrid. Each day as I read–trying to understand the roots of evangelical Christianity, its link to America’s cult of individualism, and how they both relate—or not–to the country’s founding ideologies of liberalism and republicanism–I am reminded of what my late father used to say about Richard Nixon. In law school, poor Nixonspent so much time studying in the library that his classmates nicknamed him “Iron Butt.” So, yes, it’s nice to get off my butt and hit the road from time to time.
The coils of razor-sharp concertina wire that drape the 18-foot-high border fence that runs like a scar through Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, are low-tech weapons in a 21st century psy-op. Installed last year by the U.S. military ostensibly to add an extra deterrent to illegal crossings, it’s more likely intended to affect the hearts and minds of residents on the U.S. side than on anyone in Mexico.
For one, the wire is draped exclusively on the Arizona side of the fence, and two, crossings are relatively low within the city limits where much of the wire has been placed. Presumably, the Trump administration was trying to send a message to Americans that it was willing—and perhaps eager–to use lethal means to stop undocumented immigration. Walk up to the wire, as I did on a recent visit to the border, and you can imagine how its blades could easily slice into your flesh and even kill you.
I say psy-op because the sight of six coiled rows of concertina wire, which is mostly used by the military or in detention centers, is intended to provoke a reaction in those who see it in in person or in photos. It’s a clear display of aggression on the part of the U.S. Government. It also happens to be the physical embodiment of this president’s efforts to encourage Americans to distrust and fear countries and peoples outside our borders.
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I’m keenly aware that America has often relied on the threat of enemies to give its diverse population both purpose and cohesion. Our rivalry with the Soviet Union justified the building of the federal highway system, hastened racial integration, and got us to the Moon faster. Likewise, in American politics, there’s nothing like stirring fear and disdain for the other side to get people to the polls. But what Trump has done over the past few years is less targeted, sloppier, and more about self-aggrandizing chest thumping than about forging unity or rallying Americans to step up their game.
U.C. Berkeley political scientist Wendy Brown argues that in an era in which so much labor and capital move across international lines, border walls are almost always more about political theater than actual deterrence. She thinks the demand for them comes from a desire to shore up people’s crumbling sense of national sovereignty. I suppose that the segments of society that think their nation is losing control of its destiny are the ones who feel they’ve lost control over their own. Whatever the case, walls and concertina wire are supposed to make those Americans feel better about being Americans simply because they are not them.
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Most Americans’ understanding of international borders comes from the constant grandstanding over the boundary between the U.S. and Mexico. Trump certainly didn’t invent the issue. We even refer to our Southern boundary as the border. As such, in the American imagination, borders aren’t merely about jurisdiction or even culture. They’re not even about national security. Instead, they are hugely symbolic boundaries separating little old us from a menacing world. If only we can hold the line on the border, we are told, we can rid our society of all rapists, drugs, terrorists, criminals, and now viruses.
Of course, all borders are places of contrast and differentiation. In my travels, I like to ask people who live near one—international or domestic–what they think of their neighbors. Whatever the boundary, most people on one side will readily give you their opinion of what and who resides on the other side. Nebraskans like to say that Iowa stands for Idiots Out Wandering Around. Even the humblest of Tennesseans might tell you that Mississippi is like the “third world.” Lithuanians can tell you that going to Belarus is like going back in time, a bad time. And you know what Oregonians and Arizonans say about Californians.
A decade ago, after giving a talk at a university in Matamoros, just south of the border from Brownsville, Texas, an earnest Mexican undergraduate in a sweater vest asked me a question that would change how I think about the United States. “Why,” he asked plaintively, “are you Americans so scared of us Mexicans? After all, you are so powerful, and we are not.”
I could have given the young man a variety of cheap, easy answers. Fear of strangers, demographic change, or the history of nativism in America. But I felt the way he posed the question obliged me to go deeper. The average American, I told him, is not a small-scale Uncle Sam who speaks softly but carries a big stick. Believe it or not, I explained, despite our nation’s global power, the life of a typical American is actually full of an inordinate amount of insecurity. We talk a big, loud game to compensate for our fears. The flipside of the forward-thinking culture of opportunity is constant instability, and living with so much instability is not so easy.
The sight of the most powerful nation in history portraying itself as the hapless victim of impoverished migrants is unseemly at best. Talk of building a 1,000-mile-long wall is a testament to our profound sense of insecurity. It sheds light on the way Americans behave in the world—both as individuals and as a nation. Despite our military might, our posturing or even our largesse, we have an awful tendency to cower in the face of both real and imagined foreign threats.
If the world is a big, bad place from which we need protection, then what does that make Americans? Small and good, I guess. And isn’t righteous what Americans want to be seen as most, both as individuals and citizens of a nation? Our obsession with being protected from the world, then, is infantilizing. While Uncle Sam fights the bullies, the public remains innocent. Our hands are clean.
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For decades, social scientists have said Mexican migration to the U.S. served as a social safety valve that released pressure on a corrupt system that left too many Mexicans un- or underemployed. Were it not for mass migration northward, the logic went, Mexico would have exploded in revolution years ago.
In our own way, Americans have offshored too many of our problems and relieved ourselves of responsibility for facing them head on. It’s always someone else’s fault. If we can only hold the line on the border . . .
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The coronavirus pandemic has shown us that the well-timed closing of borders, however temporarily, can help slow down an aggressive virus. But it doesn’t stop it, and it doesn’t mean we don’t have to take care of the sick, help protect the most vulnerable, and prepare the public once it reaches our towns and neighborhoods.
This morning, my German father-in-law called to check up on my wife and me. She had never heard him so worried. “Why isn’t the U.S. Government testing Americans or dealing with the crisis? Why is it so slow to respond to this outbreak?” My wife, who became a U.S. citizen 6 years ago, was speechless. I wanted to tell her that now that she’s an American, she’s free to tell her dad that it wasn’t our responsibility. After all, it’s a foreign virus.
