"The country does not give back what its history promised..."

More Griel Marcus mind-boggle. The following passages are ones that I found in the chapter (the first chapter, no less) wherein Marcus meshes together analyses of two American novel trilogies, John Dos Passos U.S.A. trilogy and Philip Roth's American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain as well works and lives of Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sinclair Lewis and many others, all the while harkening back to speeches by Abraham Lincoln, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Thomas Jefferson and many others, connecting them all to numerous references in culture (pop and otherwise) to come up with a blindingly real impression of American identity.

This-

The country charges its citizens with the mission to create themselves, just as the republic was created--but if each American carries the republic within himself or herself, then each American can become a lost republic. "This country is frightening": part of what is frightening is the apprehension that the republic itself can vanish in an instant, leaving each American unknown to every other, with nothing in common, in a state of nature, "a war of all against all," where the mob can come for anyone at any time. Jefferson opens a continent; it is filled up with great cities bursting with speeches and commerce. Blink your eyes and it is filled up with the zombie cities of Invasion of the Body Snatchers...with the citizens bent on the destruction of liberty even as an idea.

I love his language here. Its a challenge. Accountability, self-discovery, good will toward man--all of that. And more. It's like he's scaring us into it. Marcus is a smart man--is that what it's come to?

And this-

...the U.S.A. is a place and an idea and a speech of the people that always maintains its power to surprise and shock anyone who thinks he or she has seen it for what it is, because...American identity cannot be taken away any more than it can be granted. It is found discovered, made up, a declaration that each must make.

This, at once, gets to what it is great and awful about America--a fist in the air to the confusion and frustration and a charge to those of us who claim America has no identity of its own to dig a little deeper, into the country and into ourselves. This also puts us on the same playing field as our "founding fathers," for what do they got that we ain't got? We're just as American as they are, no older no newer, because we are constantly reinvented. Each day a declaration of independence. And here is why--

In a country based on an idea, made up, not merely the Declaration of Independence promulgated and the Constitution adopted but that nation promulgated and adopted, you don't [ever really] know. As captured in a few of Lincoln's words even more than in its founding documents, America is an idea--an idea that mapped the landscape and shaped the people in it, or failed to.

We need this right now. We will decide where to take our country in the next few months. And though I used to think that voting was the most important thing because it was all we had, I am realizing that we have way more. And it starts with US.

mark.