It's A Jumble Out There

By Molly Ivins

Since this is the week of our 223rd national birthday, celebration is called for, and I'd like to celebrate...us. It's fun to catalog the lovable stuff about Americans, especially since we have no shortage of public scolds telling us our morals have gone to hell, our families are falling apart, our kids are spoiled rotten, our government can't do anything right, and we are, in short, the sorriest bunch of decadents since the palmy days of the late Roman Empire.

Actually, I think Americans, on the whole, are amazingly nice and often funny too. Personally, I like us a lot. Our media so constantly inform us of the latest in rapine, pillage and murder, we tend to forget what a remarkable number of swell folks live here.

So here's a salute to the Americans who make waitresses laugh and to the ones who pick up litter on the beach, the ones who stop to help the ones who have flat tires, the ones who return wallets, the ones who pick and sing for fun and the ones who run the Fritos pie booth at the PTA school fair. Here's to the clerks who say, "Now you have a nice day, hear?" and mean it, and to the ones who say wryly, "If it was a snake, it would've bit you." Here's to whale savers and the wolf lovers and all the lovely birders. Here's to the citizens who organize the parades and the beauticians who volunteer to do the ladies' hair at the old folks' home. Here's to the people who make a lot of pickle relish and give some to their neighbors. Here's to the blue-haired ladies who put rhinestone collars on their miniature poodles and all the kids who wear their baseball hats on backwards. Here's to the break dancers and the rappers and the rock groups with names like Throbbing Gristle. And to the barbershop quartets sticking firmly to Sweet Adeline.

And even a salute to the finger waggers and Jeremiahs, who remind me of Vera Carp of Tuna, Texas. She used to say, "You will act like a Christian, or I will slap the snot out of you."

I've never understood why England is considered the great nation for eccentrics--in the U.S. of A. we have a world-class set. We've got folks who believe in flying saucers, horoscopes, the lottery, pyramid power, that John F. Kennedy was killed by the CIA and that you can get AIDS off toilet seats. We've got people convinced that they were Cleopatra in another life, that Elvis lives and that the flat tax is a good idea. We've got self-improvers out the wazoo, just improvin' themselves up a storm. We've got people who live for bingo, people dedicated to ballroom dancing as a way of life, people passionate about Fiestaware and people whose world revolves around Civil War re-enactments.

As the poet Marianne Moore once observed, "It is an honor to witness so much confusion."

Our democracy is under a slight cloud, on account of the President was recently impeached over 10 oral encounters, which was a little odd. But how else would we have found out the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court gets his fashion sense from Gilbert and Sullivan operas? We live in a great nation.

I am particularly fond of our habit of polling ourselves to find out how dumb we are. Almost weekly you can find the papers reporting some study that shows Americans know squat about history or geography or our own Constitution. Then we all clap our hands to our foreheads and bemoan the national dumbness once more. The most recent studies show that 72.6% of Americans believe Alexis de Tocqueville never should have divorced Blake Carrington and 94.7% think Chad is a men's cologne.

Crime is down, school scores are up and there is no baseball strike. We're no longer bombing the Serbs to make them quit killing the Kosovars, our first ever "humanitarian war." Latrell Sprewell has made a comeback, and no one in boxing has bitten anyone else's ear off lately. Henry Kissinger was not named Humanitarian of the Year this year. True, the President was caught diddling an intern at the White House, but all that happened was it cost Newt Gingrich his job. You think any other country could come up with a scenario like that? Could Canada put on such a show? Let's hear it for us.

So here's to America, from sea to shining sea. The full-throated roar of the people exercising their right to free speech is a little deafening at times; democracy does require a considerable tolerance for diversity and some fondness for dissent. But if we liked everything in perfect order, we'd be Germans. Personally, I think the Founders were right all along, but that the results are a lot funnier than they intended. I move a vote of gratitude that we live in a nation where so much confusion is allowed. God bless Americans.