American Studies

Looks like I'm to be the new college advisor at our school for American Studies (they've called it American Culture), taking over for the history prof who's done it for many years and is now anticipating retirement. 

I was telling Younger Daughter about it on our way to the Loveless Cafe for a special lunch yesterday. Power went out before we got our food but I'm glad we stayed and tolerated the extra warmth, the biscuits and gravy and "chicken-fried chicken" more than compensated. That's some real Americana.

She warns me to look out for "skinheads" and other hyper-nationalists being drawn to the program. That's not really a concern, I think, but something else she said could be.

She said students of her cohort--she graduated in '21--just aren't into America, aren't interested in studying its traditions or holding out much hope for the realization of its highest ideals. Sad if true. 

I harken back to what Richard Rorty said in Achieving Our Country, that (paraphrasing) the success of any serious progressive movement here will depend crucially on reviving a sense of patriotism rededicated to those ideals. Freedom and justice for all is what America's always said it's supposed to be about. It's what they had us reciting by rote in elementary school. Say it, but don't think about it, was the implicit instruction. Surely somebody here still wants to study the conditions under which those ideals might actually be made real. 

And then there's American culture in all its other dimensions. Thinking of our old Lyceum guest Carlin Romano and America the Philosophical, Louis Menand's American Studies, Emerson and Thoreau and Fuller and Transcendentalism, all that great Americana roots music, my Democracy in America and Evolution in America and American Philosophy courses, Jacques Barzun... 

So I can imagine really getting into American Studies myself. We'll see if I have any company.