America

“I am an American tourist, and am thus ex officio large, fleshy, red, loud, coarse, condescending, self-absorbed, spoiled, appearance-conscious, ashamed, despairing and greedy: the world's only known species of bovine carnivore” David Foster Wallace from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

Tomorrow marks the half-anniversary of my time in New Zealand, an occasion I am using to discuss my unavoidable Americaness. In fact, I find that when most people want to know my nationality they ask if I am Canadian (I believe this is because Canadians are deeply offended at being mistaken for Americans, while Americans just evoke a haughty laugh when they are incorrectly pegged for Canooks). The moment that I reveal my true identity it's as though a bright neon sign flashes above my head and it says, “American whipping girl: free shots for all”.

When people ask me about life in America, at first it appears to be a earnest inquiry into my thoughts, but usually it's just a polite segue into their long-winded lecture about why and how much they dislike America. I don't (usually) don my oversize stars and stripes tracksuit in public yet people continually make me feel like my being American is a spectacle. Let me clarify, people accuse me of being American, like they want me to apologize for having been born there, that I am somehow to blame for what they perceive America and its citizens to be. I feel like they want me to humiliate myself with some jesterial (apparently not a real word, but such a good fake word that I am staking claim on it) song and dance in order to justify their righteousness. Before I have a chance to reason through the mess of implications people hurl at me, I am defending and usually professing some degree of remorse on behalf of both myself and the U.S.A., then, once I have had time to comprehend what is actually being said, it's too late, I am irritated, annoyed and angry for having been so easily guilted into defending my nationality.

The fact is, if I was just a little calmer under pressure I could respond to these attacks with the poise and caustic wit that's always just a little too delayed. Maybe if I was a little more “American” I would just say, “fuck you, what you think you know about America amounts to nothing more than what media decides to show you, you xenophobic fuckwit”(1) . You are probably wondering where, if anywhere, this rambling his headed.

I am not ashamed of being American nor am I ashamed of America, but most of the time I am not particularly proud either. My identity is not reliant on being American, inextricably connected, sure, but so are the facts that I am also white, a woman and an atheist; these things inform my identity but are not paramount. Never will you see me attempting to indoctrinate anyone into being more American (or more like me for that matter) and I only (half-jokingly) discourage it and if that is a cop-out, so be it. I am not vapid reality tv stars, I am not McDonald's, I am not Barack Obama and I am not a twisted, cynical, shallow, hyperreal American, I am Kristen Fraley born and raised in the U.S.A, do you still want to get to know me? Or in other words, “quit hatin'”.


(1)-In honor of DFW. Here is a good contemporary example of what I mean, The NZ Capital's paper, The Dominion Post, recently covered Obama's ceremonial awarding of the Medal of Freedom to Joseph Medicine Crow. A hugely symbolic acknowledgment of the large role Native American's played in WWII. The picture shows Obama tangled up in the feathered headdress of Joseph, his face a near grimace, desperately trying to avoid sneezing. Obviously, the big joke (as uttered in the picture’s caption) was Obama trying not to sneeze, never bothering to mention what the ceremony or medal were about until much later, although I can’t prove that because the Dominion “online” is owned by Stuff.co.nz and archives their information in such a radically different way (or not at all), that I actually can not get to the article, you just have to trust me.