What Americans Are Made Of

Josh Hammond on the makeup of a nation

© 2003 by Michael Finley

Josh Hammond asks us members to supply adjectives that might apply to teenagers. People suggest words like sloppy, defiant, fearless, ignorant, fitful, know-it-all, conformist, energetic, unpredictable, idealistic, self-conscious, and oversexed.

Hammond follows with the observation that all of these words could as easily be applied to the American character. In the aggregate, we are all those things -- it shows up in our politics, in our foreign policy, and in the way we run our businesses. Where the Europeans and Japanese impress with their patience and rationality, we are the eternal jitterbuggers, in too much of a hurry to be very wise.

In the course of the session, Hammond also compared us, at our best and at our worst, to jazz music, baseball, and cowboy movies. (His spiel begins with the stirring theme from The Magnificent Seven, the remake of the Japanese film The Seven Samurai that is nevertheless inimitably American.) These restless images, he said, are what define us.

Now you may object, and Hammond anticipates that you will, that calling Americans adolescent is an overgeneralization, that you are certainly none of those things, with the possible exception of oversexed. We were taught that it is wrong to deal in stereotypes.

But stereotypes are where it's at, statistically speaking. Hammond says the part of us we think is so unique, our conscious opinions, is only the tip of the iceberg of who we are. More powerful and more pervasive by far are the unconscious individual wants, cultural proclivities, and biological needs that lurk below our waterline.

Still don't like the stereotypes? Then consider that all Americans typically insist they are different from all other Americans. That insistence on our individuality is -- paradoxically -- universal to us all. And it is part of what makes us American.  

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