A 'FEEL' FOR BEING AMERICAN

...Is not the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson the American philosopher and Henry David Thoreau the most consistently challenging American because both force as back into the basic point in ourselves where we share a spiritual but absolutely real union with God, with Nature and our fellow men...

...Washington still has the smell of Watergate and the pardoned Nixon...

...Except for the location, it sounds like a learned paper delivered at an American Studies convention...

...A Bicentennial toilet seat, Rexall Minuteman vitamin tablets, a Bicentennial electric warming tray, a Mickey Mouse Bicentennial watch...

...In lower Manhattan a new $10 million pumping station will soon open to process the three million gallons of raw sewage the 110-story World Trade Center has been flushing into the Hudson River for six years...

...For some it is a trap...

...At least the nation has been spared the obscenity of having Richard Nixon, who interpreted the American Dream in terms of his own emotionally deprived childhood and his own delayed eminence as the "most powerful man in the world," preside over its 200th birthday...

...Across the River and to the North is Hyde Park where, on an old Dutch estate, the brave and crippled bones of Franklin D. Roosevelt lie beside those of his strong and lovely wife...

...The third was Trenton itself...

...Mylai...

...Meanwhile millions stared glassy-eyed at "Helter Skelter," the Academy Awards and Miss America...

...The presidential candidates have realized this all too well...

...This is our problem...

...It is here, as far as the public is concerned, that the great betrayal of the last decade took place...

...They know that the last candidate to promise to "talk sense to the American people," Adlai Stevenson, was quickly awarded status as full-time prophet (i.e...

...We are color and noise-and power-but, today at least, partly because we refuse to allow time for it, we are not very good at analyzing who we are...

...As a result, there is no focal point...

...and certainly the most depressing aspect of this campaign has been their refusal to face the dark underside of American life, to come to grips with our sick pride, racism, violence, corruption and imperialism...

...Perhaps, politically, Carter could heal the wounds of Vietnam...

...And even the impeachment process ran away from Nixon's real crimes-the Christmas bombing and the invasion of Cambodia-because they were public acts the guilt of which so many "good men" shared whether they would admit it or not...

...At its best an anniversary is like a spiritual retreat, a return to the basics, the roots, a retapping of the deeper well of human consciousness where the individual knows instinctively that he is at home with himself, with his community, his land, and his God...

...to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world...

...Now, half through the year, it is far from ready...

...I'm not afraid for my life," he said...

...But, for the most part, the year will remain, as my student friend John Harney says, like the comet Khoutek, always coming, never really visible, but still already there...

...For "the system" pardoned him too...

...In Hopewell, New Jersey, a peaceful farm, once owned by our family friend, the late Representative Charles R. Howell, is being turned into a farm museum, with old tractors, harrows, wagons, a combine and carriages, plus cows, calves, chickens, roosters, pigs, horses, cats and dogs, all reproducing American farm life between 1920 and 1940...

...It's the first time since Peter Stuyvesant that we're not going to be discharging raw sewage from the 'old city' of Manhattan . . ." said the Water Commissioner...

...glittered away unwatched...

...But ex-movie stars Loretta Young, Irene Dunne and Grace Kelly will represent American womanhood-ample evidence of our unflagging devotion to illusions...

...And on TV, one New York Times critic (May 27) wrote: "If the Bicentennial had been a television series it would have been canceled after 13 weeks...

...Perhaps now more than ever to be American is to get a feel of a place...

...failure...

...or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion...

...Thoreau entered his cabin on Walden pond on July 4th, 1845...

...New York State will send a $1.5 million Bicentennial "Festival Barge" on a four-and-a-half month journey through its waterways loaded with historical memorabilia...

...Manufacturers have made it "buy-centennial," attaching the Bicentennial label to every imaginable product (20,000 estimated in November 1975...

...The decision shifted around, was put off and changed...

...Even the impeachment ritual and Nixon's removal has not restored public confidence in "the system...

...Mother of the great Republic-mother town below these fantasies of glass that crowd our sky and hatred like a whirling paper in a street tears at itself where shame and hatred meet...

...A Sense of Place From the beginning there has been some discussion as to who should "own" the Bicentennial...

...The Jesuit General, Rev...

...But, from the political, historical and moral point of view, the most important fact about the Bicentennial is that it coincides with the 1976 presidential campaign...

...how the Founding Fathers might be received if they were running for the Presidency in 1976...

...But, on the level on which most Americans are touched, what has the Bicentennial wrought...

...Outside my window is the Storm King Mountain from whose bald summit I can look North and South to the horizon, up and down the Hudson River Valley...

...He supported it consistently, but now seems to have undergone a conversion...

...an at-home-ness with the values the place preserves and conveys...

...Only the poet, 83-year-old Archibald MacLeish seems to have caught the agony of the nation summed up in that ancient town: City of Man, Oh, City of the famous dead where Otis spoke and Adams' heart was bred...

...Attica...

...We delegate our self-scrutiny...

...and he has fashioned a series of subtly ritualistic TV commercials that evoke fundamentally religious feelings without talking specifically about God...

...The second was through World War II, the parades, the weapons' displays-mortars, tanks, machine guns-in the park, the "Star Spangled Banner" played, sung and projected on the screen between double features at Sunday night movies, the air-raid drills at night, and finally the gold star going up in the windows when sons were killed...

...The fourth was Franklin D. Roosevelt...

...But he had become a Middle American, benignly fascinated by the hideous "mobile home," comparing Niagara Falls to the Bond's Clothing Store advertising waterfall on Times Square, and tossing his garbage into the water like any polluting nomad...

...Toward the end of June, Karl Thomas will take off in a red, white and blue helium balloon, the "Spirit of "76," for England, France, or Spain...

...It is hard for me," he said in a New York Times interview (May 21, 1976) "to explain the dichotomy which exists among the American people, which is certainly mirrored in my own feelings, about the war...

...A few minutes to the South is West Point...

...and the humiliating collapse of Vietnam and the unspoken realization that those who died died in vain...

...There will, of course, be July 4th celebrations in Philadelphia, "the cradle of American independence," followed in August by the 41st International Eucharistic Congress...

...and then turn around and come back...

...Meanwhile Washington is renovating the center of its Union Station into a Bicentennial visitors' center...

...In the Bronx 200 Bronx High School students staged a Bicentennial pageant using 10-foot-high puppets in a review of Baseball from the 18th to the 20th Centuries, "Changing Faces of Baseball: Myth or Reality...

...the killings at Kent State...

...Perhaps it will be done by Inauguration Day in 1977, when the so-called Bicentennial will be over, and perhaps we will have a president we can respect, who will do a little more to restore our confidence in our nation and ourselves...

...But Philadelphia has twice elected as mayor a racist whose very existence should be a national embarrassment...

...But this disclosure does not seem to have weakened the power of his spirit to inspire us...

...I have been told by a Jesuit friend who has traveled in Europe recently that there is a great deal of interest there in our Bicentennial...

...No one event or place that will hold national attention-rather a series of happenings, each laden with its own conflicts and ambiguities...

...It is a little like the forgiveness of sins without having to say you are sorry, the goodness bestowed on the people by their leader's smile and assurance rather than a new innocence earned by confronting the evil in ourselves and putting it into perspective...

...The essence of democracy, is self-confidence in the people, self-reliance, not a longing for a special Someone to come and save us...

...to live deep and suck out all die marrow of life...

...The Point is having its Bicentennial cheating scandal, the biggest in its 174-year history, and its Bicentennial cover-up...

...We invite essayists to summon us to periods of national self-examination with about the same fervor and same results as the troops in my battery in the Army in the 1950s brought to their sessions with the tough chaplain who "really put it to them" and gave them a "royal chewing out...

...Have I outgrown my childhood need for a Franklin D. Roosevelt...

...The Encyclopaedia Britannica has published a special edition in red, white, and blue binding...

...This is such a brilliant idea it will get nowhere...

...And Vice President Rockefeller used a Bicentennial address in Frankfurt to attack Russia and make himself look tough...

...He walks across his peanut fields into the sunset, stoops down, and he tests the earth with his fingers, leans over the conveyor belt and runs peanuts through his hands as if he were Midas and these were his coins...

...and every year a bunch of local college students dress up in Revolutionary costumes and reenact George Washington's conquest of the Delaware River ice chunks and his surprise Christmas Eve routing of the sleeping Hessians...

...The nation is at some kind of a turning point when we realize that future generations are in danger of growing up without having seen a real farm, so now we must preserve them as if they were whooping cranes or Chippendale chairs...

...But I heard about the most outlandish Bicentennial gimmick from Pat O'Connell, a student, on the lawn in front of my dorm: Bicentennial car-bottles of air from historic cities like Boston, Washington and Philadelphia, sold as a set...

...Or, in this respect, will this day be like the past 365, busy and boisterous, but essentially empty and silent...

...Donald W. Russell observed in a letter to the New York Times (May 12, 1976), "One wonders...

...I'm only afraid of not making it...

...Will anyone call for a Congressional investigation just to find out what went wrong, so the mistakes will not be repeated again...

...With so little effort I can enter the imaginations of the men who have lived by the River and taken some new sense of themselves from their feeling of the place-such a representative mixture of American artistry, patriotism and greed as Washington Irving, John Jay, Jay Gould, and the painters of the Hudson River school...

...Only Roosevelt did well...

...Somehow he knew that young John Kennedy was going to pull us into a new spring, out of our "winter of discontent," and when the knights of Camelot carried the torch passed at Kennedy's inauguration into Vietnam Father Steinbeck went along to bless the battle, now part of the injustice he had made his name opposing...

...And it indicates something about America's need to feel the essence of its leaders that so many presidents and candidates since Roosevelt have tried to make us think, by appropriating his rhetoric and style, that he was still alive in them...

...Jimmy Carter, who will most likely be our next President, has correctly sensed that in so far as there is an American religion that is the American religion religion it is his-Baptist-Methodist evangelical Protestantism, the faith of the farm and the frontier...

...That's one way to celebrate the Bicentennial...

...Perhaps one of our greatest mistakes in recent years has been to look to leaders to tell us who we are...

...Not long ago we learned that Roosevelt was, for many years, involved with two women who were not his wife...

...The first was from my father who had won the Distinguished Service Cross in World War I by singlehandedly wiping out a machine-gun nest full of Huns, and who now, on national holidays, showed us how to display our huge American Flag on the front porch...

...Travels with Charley was our Nobel Prize winner's most mediocre book-after the inflated Look magazine article, America and Americans...

...Perhaps too he has simply been telling us half truths so that he can get elected: that they, not we, were responsible for Vietnam, Watergate and the CIA activities...

...On Broadway the new Lerner and Lowe Bicentennial musical, "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue," a multimillion dollar upstairs-downstairs pageant about masters and black servants in the nineteenth-century White House, died within a week...

...We had hosted the Battle of Trenton, we had a Battle Monument which today looks down on an impoverished neighborhood...

...It's more likely that they would be turned off as too threatening...

...We are more like a collage, a gestalt of a thousand disconnected but overlapping and interacting images coming together as a single visual impression, or a huge grammar school choir in a "changing" neighborhood where every kid is allowed to sing publicly whether he/she can carry a tune or not...

...Indira Gandhi confessed she was much moved by Thomas Paine and Henry David Thoreau-but did not say how much they would be allowed to publish in contemporary India...

...It is as though no one wishes to be reminded, as though the nation needs several more years just to develop the strength to remember . . . Will any of the Democratic candidates pay their respects to this anniversary, will President Ford have a special word just to commemorate those Americans who died in that long and terrible war...

...Ironically, although the "twice-born" Carter himself went through the traditional religious "conversion experience" following his defeat in a Georgia election in 1967, he dpes not offer the same experience to the nation...

...And far too many Americans realize that the alleged peoples' victory over Nixon was part chance and part political suicide...

...He talks about how hard he has always had to work...

...the 41 American servicemen lost in "retaking the Mayaguez...

...Show me, old friends, where in the darkness still stands the great Republic on its hill...

...But, to a great degree, this is an un-American hope...

...It was 1960 and Steinbeck sensed it was a watershed year...

...In Gerald Ford we have simply one more vindication of Alexis de Toqueville's observation that American democracy, the great leveler, enshrines mediocrity in public life and Lord Bryce's claim that in the American political system great men get nowhere...

...American Airlines offers Revolutionary Fares with Bicentennial Day and Night Excursions...

...the bloodthirsty bombings of Hanoi and Cambodia...

...Other things are planned-an odd mixture of silliness, greed, irony and excellence...

...We knew through him-his smile, his wit, his voice, his "unbounded determination,'' his hope, his definition of the presidency as a position of moral leadership-that the government-and thus the nation and ourselves-was good...

...If elected he would immediately "pardon" all defectors and draft dodgers...

...and it is hard to see how visiting national leaders or churchmen could not feel squeamish about associating with him or with his city...

...He knows we are profoundly embarrassed-though perhaps unconsciously-by our complicity in a whole series of crimes for which we share responsibility because of either our silence in the face of injustice, or our inability to grieve in real tragedy, or our outright support of unmoral positions-the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King...

...I am, in many ways, in the most American place in the world, the first gateway to the New World...

...Ironically, both sides in the violent busing dispute- white and black-see themselves as "victims of the same colonial oppression which beset Bostonians in the seven-teen-seventies and claim to be fighting for the same control of their lives...

...Until the national leaders can "rationalize" it further, we will have to settle for CBS Radio reporter Marvin L. Kalb's commentary on April 29, 1976, on the anniversary of the last American leaving Vietnam in disgrace: "Strategic hamlets, pacification, Phoenix program, search and destroy, incursion, Christmas bombing, peace with honor, the Paris accords...

...It is the story of a fading literary hero who, in much of the public mind, was the writer who most was America, trying to rekindle his creative powers by "going home again," by running the soil through his hands...

...He preaches about how we "firebombed villages" killing "every man, woman and child in the village to save it," and calls the war fundamentally "racist...

...When I was a little boy growing up in Trenton, New Jersey, I had four ways of getting some sense of myself as an American...

...The "historical" specials on Valley Forge, Truman, Walt Whitman, etc...

...and the only recent candidate to identify himself with Isaiah and appeal to the nation's sense of guilt over Vietnam was given the prophet's treatment as well...

...If Nixon had not taped himself, if the tapes' existence had not been accidentally revealed, if the other mysteries in his character had not made him forget, fear or fail to destroy them, he would still be President...

...Pedro Arrupe, S.J., will appear, and so, possibly, will the Pope-but probably not...

...Perhaps it's even more likely that they would be thought un-American...

...For, if the people themselves cannot or will not explicate the "state of the nation," directly they will do it in action, in how they respond to the candidates who claim to read their deepest yearnings and who now lay claim to their votes...

...Any anniversary is a decision to reflect, to go back to the beginnings and ask how faithful we have been to the ideals that first set us on our way...

...Watergate...

...So now we leave it to the media' commentators to interview grey-templed historians on educational TV and the editors of Saturday Review (December 13, 1975) to invite "world figures" to comment on America's world impact and its literature...

...French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing has published a Bicentennial message in Time, then flown here in his Concorde polluting our air and damaging our ears...

...Indeed, this inability to get a conceptual hook on who we are has spawned a special species of "road" literature in which journalists or novelists like Bill Moyers, Dan Wakefield and John Steinbeck and TV reporters like CBS' Charles Kuralt prowl the small towns and roadside diners of the land hoping to catch and bottle whiffs of the American Spirit...

...in Yankee Stadium before the Baltimore game...

...At least neither one was a mafia moll...

...A 23-year Englishman resident here suggests in this morning's New York Times (May 22) that we observe our Bicentennial on July 4th with 200 seconds of thoughtful silence...

...I think 111 spend July 4th on the Hudson River, not up here but in New York Harbor, watching hundreds of great sailing ships now on their way from all over the world sail up the River -aiming toward Hyde Park-up as far as the George Washington Bridge...

...Perhaps if any American does take 200 seconds of silence on July 4th, he should spend some of it reading Emerson's "Self-Reliance": "To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,- that is genius...

...The Founding Fathers were intellectuals, men of vision, political revo-lutionaries, radicals...

...From Boston, the birthplace of liberty now at war over implementation of a busing plan to break down school segregation, J. Anthony Lukas wrote (New York Times Magazine, May 18, 1975): "But Bostontans' stake in their tumultuous past has been reinforced by their turbulent present...

...As far back as the Kennedy administration Boston, Philadelphia and Washington each began to argue that it should be the focal point of the national celebration...

...A lieutenant named Lincoln, an attorney for a cadet so wickedly un-American as to weep under the cruelty of hazing and make up an excuse for his tears, is being shipped out for having publicly criticized the honor committee...

...The true Ford, as a summing up of America's adolescent preoccupation with toughness, shines through in the Mayaguez incident-proof, if any were needed, that America, for all its power, is still a young man in a balloon, scared that it may "fail," even in doing something foolish...

...In this analogy the nation is like the person with a collective memory, a homogeneity of character, an enduring identity and self-concept, and those human qualities like pride, humility, contrition and hope that give it power to be reborn...

...Perhaps he feels that only God's grace in its own time can bring a nonbeliever low enough so that this same grace can raise him up...

...Not surprisingly, the mob violence protesting forced busing in South Boston, the sight of police on horseback clattering through the narrow streets, the placards, banners and elegies have stirred a tribal recollection of another battle over men's rights...

...As a people, we are not-as some slick nostalgic Bicentennial promotion is making us appear-a single painting, a canvas by John Trumbull, John Singleton Copley, or Benjamin West...

...I don't know how to rationalize it further...

...I don't want to fail...

...Collectively Americans may be the least reflective-because least certain of their common identity-people in the world...