Singing in Rain

I just flew back from The Netherlands, and boy are my arms tired. This old sepia-toned quip still charms me with its Americanness – its nod to Henny Youngman and to the large, ornate pre-television radios families once gathered round, heads bent in rapt concentration. But, yeah. Holland is a round trip 20-hour journey through the lower stratosphere that can test a fraidy-cat’s mettle. “The airplane stays up because it doesn’t have the time to fall,” explained the damnable Orville Wright – a sentence made more palatable by the neat triple scotch you splashily snatch from the startled flight attendant’s hand.

As I’ve explained before to your possible exhaustion, my wife is from the Netherlands, and my mother-in-law – a loveable gnome comprised of a tungsten steel/ carbon fiber composite – turned 90 this year. At the crowded party thrown for her in a community room near the village center, she danced, gamboled, and conversed with no visible sign of senescence. I could feel my own pulmonary system sag as I watched her joyously work the room. Hendrieka “Riek” van Vliet has been in my life since 1987, her daughter Judie, my ex-girlfriend and delightful “wife,” for a year or so longer. 

I lived with Judie in her hometown on the Dutch channel coast for nearly two years in the late ‘80s, and we returned to the U.S. through Washington, D.C. to visit with my brother and his family for a week or so before continuing on to Santa Barbara. 

The architectural gigantism of D.C.’s National Mall proved the perfect re-entry for my return to a country whose cultural psyche is as bracingly nutty as it is improvised. I vividly remember being on a D.C. bus shortly after arrival and choking up at a diverse throng of luminously American teens in worn Chuck Taylors and Levis laughing and roughhousing. You return home from abroad and see everything anew. This happened again this past Wednesday. 

I don’t exactly know what a Patriot is (apart from a brand of defensive missile…you know, ‘cuz ordnance is the soul of any great convocation), but I do know, and have long known, that the United States of America is an attitude. Yeah, it’s also a “country,” but almost incidentally. Yup yup yup: there are delineated borders and a legally defined continental seabed. There are mountains out west and the middle part is flat. The states in the older, eastern part of the place are shaped like psychotic jigsaw pieces and grow more childlike and squarish as you head to the Pacific, the surveyors clearly wearying. But “America” truly is an attitude – one that is utterly absent in the Archie and Jughead Halls of Power^®, no matter who’s in charge.It’s reflexive to think “America” is a throng of overdressed, jittery nitwits endlessly bitching at each other. “We’re gonna pass this law now and it’s really really good!” “You are not gonna pass that law!” “Are so!” “Are not!” 

Shaddup, kids! And make your beds!

If you believe these laughable jackanapes on Capitol Hill have anything to do with the actual American spirit, you have been hijacked by the hypnotic drone of the news cycle, which currently leads the Probable Extinction Event Jamboree, followed closely by AI and an errant asteroid the size of Rhode Island. Can you spot your country’s actual avatar in the “National Character Dinner Party” crowd? G’head, look around. Hint: the Johnny Mercer guy across the room, he of the poorly chosen necktie and guileless gap-toothed smile frantically waving you over to the Martini station? Try him. 

Moses Supposes 

The people in the photo that leads this essay are (clockwise from left) Lenny Bernstein, choreographer Jerry Robbins, writers Betty Comden and Adolph Green. These four wrote and choreographed On the Town, a joyous, groundbreaking ‘40s ballet about sailors on shore leave – and a harbinger of Bernstein and Robbins’ wondrous West Side Story, in which big Bill Shakespeare’s doomed Romeo and Juliet are given blue jeans and circle skirts and turned balletically loose on the streets of Manhattan. Comden and Green wrote the movie Singin’ in the Rain. That movie could not have been written anywhere else in the world by any other people. Or peoples, as social scientists call them. Who else could’ve written that unbuckled joyride? The descendants of Hannibal, or whatever? Look at these four and you are
looking at America.

America is not a political or economic system, not a judicial framework, a parade, a manhunt, or a password-protected cabal. America is the guy at the end of your block who borrowed your new Toro Riding Mower and then drove it into his pool, announcing the mishap on your front stoop – soaked to the skin – with a sheepishly proffered six pack of Pacifico. America is the cashier who slammed her finger in the drawer at the seafood place and let out a cursing yowl that made the evening better by half. America is the old guy who invariably tips his hat to your mom in the retirement village dining room. The rest is distracting compost. 

Did your corner grocer install the Shah of Iran in 1953? Uh, no. Which of your pickleball partners is most likely to throw someone into an unmarked van? The people on the street – everywhere – are you and me; with a few sartorial variations. When a friend group of swinging Tehran hipsters filmed themselves dancing to Pharell Williams’ Happy, but for their charmingly clunky moves they could’ve been a bunch of pals in Brooklyn. Check it out on YouTube.

So, what are we? America is Bing serenading Grace with a Cole Porter tune in High Society. We’re not deportations, speeches, and glowering news cycles. We’re not Trump, not Biden, not Obama, not the Keebler Elf who runs the House. We’re Bernstein, Robbins, Comden and Greene. We’re Gene Kelly when he abandons choreography and just wheels around in the rain, his umbrella uselessly outstretched, his giddy puddle-stomping that of a hope-stung breakaway nation still finding its geist, his upturned face taking the rain with a serene grin that makes all the right promises. God shed His grace on THEE.

We’re the happiest accident history has yet produced. Remember remember remember what we Are. REMEMBER. And spread the word.