Happy Birthday, USA

The photo above shows my grandfather’s family growing up on a farm in North Dakota.

The United States has now survived slightly less than half the time of the Roman Republic and the Italian city-states of Venice and Florence; has outlasted Athenian democracy by far; witnessed the collapse of every empire of the 19th century, from the Ottomans to the Qing; has maintained the oldest modern constitution in the world; and has the unique historic achievement of being the only pre-modern national government to still stand, after all, our constitution predates the Enlightenment, feminism, and the industrial revolution.

Americans were the first to reach the moon in Apollo 11 and joined a Swiss man in first touching the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the Challenger Deep. In literary achievements, we have given the world many great writers of global merit, including my favorites, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Hemingway. In science, we split the atom, and in the 21st century, we gave the world the modern computer and laid the groundwork for rudimentary artificial intelligence. We pioneered both film and radio as mediums of communication and entertainment, first with The Dickson Experimental Sound Film and later with Boris Karloff's Frankenstein and War of the Worlds. In painting, we developed a distinctive style: simple, cartoonish often, encompassing both the patriotic Americana scenes of Norman Rockwell and the heights of abstraction with Rothko, with a detour, of course, for Georgia O'Keeffe, who granted us Dead Rabbit, Summer Days, and Ram’s Head, developing the kitsch of the American South. For cars and guns and beer, I will say nothing, as other Americans will say enough themselves today.

In sex, we gave the world the modern transsexual, the modern alpha male, and the idea of the bombshell in the person of Jayne Mansfield. We did not invent or pioneer modern homosexuality; we can thank Europe for that. While we did not give the world feminism, we did give the world great feminists, including Jeanette Rankin, our contemporary Valerie Hudson, and, of course, Margaret Fuller. In food, we gave the world the New York slice, apple pie, McDonald’s, the Michelin star, and arguably the best food on Earth: Cajun cuisine. In religion, we gave the world the Mormon Church, Scientology, the Southern Baptist Church, and black choirs and black churches. We also gave the world consumerism, which is not a religion, but the death of religion all the same. In music, we have given ourselves and the world only one instrument, the humble banjo, and only the banjo is truly and distinctly American.

And though all of this and so much more has been given to the world, we stupidly and most beautifully of all, kept something sacred for ourselves, something special. We gave ourselves the highway, the easy way through hard lands, where the barest ditch on the side of every road screams how enormous this still-empty continent is. These highways take us by ancient paths, along the trail of Lewis and Clark, over craters of the moon, and through sunshine valleys. They take us to another American gift, the National Park—which we gave the world—and to the debris of long-ago Americans, to family farms and country sunsets over Montana mountains. Sunsets that tease your doubt in God, as really, how could bare sunlight and indigo, grey rock clutched by pines, tear at a doubtful heart like a wolf?

America has given us and the world so much, but what I admire most is what we have kept from and for ourselves. The empty land, our selfish West, which has but one concession: the highway, which takes you from here to there, through still, raw and empty plains, as perfect today as 250 years ago. If God—my father calls Montana His Country—is good, the land will still be perfect 250 years from now, when we have outlasted the Roman Republic, but not the mountains or ourselves.