ONE NATION SUBJECT TO CHANGE
America at the turn of the twentieth century and just after is the focus of this collection of essays and nonfiction from a veteran journalist, essayist, critic and observer of American life and popular culture. Venturing from an insider’s perspective of The New York Times to his interviews with black police officers, Michael E. Ross explores a nation evolving dramatically, maybe now more than any other time in its history. Exploring television, blues, jazz, hip hop, Al Gore, Ralph Nader, Andrew Sullivan, Jayson Blair, the California recall election’s outcome, America’s gun fixation, the nation’s enduring racial disquiet, the use of language under “Bush II,” and his own reckoning with maturity, the author offers a fresh, irreverent, provocative look at a country caught up in wrenching – and redefining – transition.
Michael E. Ross was born in Washington, D.C. and has lived in Germany, Chicago, Colorado, northern California and New York City. He has filled out W-4 forms for a variety of jobs in the past: janitor, fast-food fry cook, stadium peanut vendor, copy editor, music-magazine writer, editor and writer at The New York Times, and Web site editor-producer. A graduate of the University of Colorado, with a bachelor’s degree in journalism, he has been a reporter, critic and editor at various newspapers, including The Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News; and an adjunct professor at the Columbia University School of Journalism. His reviews, fiction, essays and criticism have appeared in MSNBC.com, The New York Times, The Times Book Review, Essence, Wired, Emerge, Mother Jones, Entertainment Weekly, People, the San Jose Mercury News, Konch, Salon, the San Francisco Chronicle, Sidewalk, Quarterly Black Review, Black Issues Book Review and other publications. Author of the novel Flagpole Days (2003), he contributed to the anthologies MultiAmerica (1997), edited by Ishmael Reed; and Soul Food (2000), edited by Eric Copage. He is currently an editor and reporter for MSNBC.com, and holds down a mortgage in Seattle.
What makes this country a beacon among nations, what makes America fundamentally what it is, is the principle for which it stands, the idea, both tantalizing and terrifying, that every individual has a destiny and the right to largely be left to his or her own devices to fulfill it. That bedrock American principle is often confronted by the reliable evils of reality, but the principle endures. For all the problems with race and identity, the twin third rails of our contemporary experience, the Declaration of Independence remains the American charter, our philosophical genome, the DNA-book of the national ideal. Better than just a good idea, as a document expressing the value of human worth and aspiration, and making no exceptions in its narrative, at least, for color or national origin, it has no equal in history. That’s our national security.
What makes these times interesting for the United States is the confluence of natural migration patterns, ethnic aspirations, democratized technology and mass popular culture that are shaping the American future. It was proof of either the genius or the hubris of the Framers that the language of the Declaration of Independence was so all-inclusive. Either way, genius or hubris, we now live in the American era in which those principles, those high-flown ideals that make us U.S. are being put most fully, most dramatically to the test. It’s put up or shut up time for the United States, maybe more now than at any other time in its history. While many of the old stratifications persist, fighting like some pitiful cornered animal to stay alive, America at the dawn of the twenty-first century is, dragged kicking and screaming when necessary, beginning to live out the notion of the storied melting pot.
In matters of race, ethnicity, gender preference, and religious and political affiliation, a seismic shift is slowly underway in American life. And the foundational document symbolizing this shift may be nothing more visionary than a census form. The rising dominance and impact of the Hispanic population on the mosaic of American life; the increase in interracial marriages; the drive for equality among gay, lesbian and transgendered Americans; and the statistical dilemma of multiracial identification encountered by the Census Bureau in the runup to the 2000 election are indicators of the quiet drama of transformation taking place everywhere in America, family by family, household by household, away from cameras and position papers, hidden from pundits and pollsters and the slam-dunk pronouncements of commentators, taking place in the privacy of the human heart. How America responds to these evolutionary challenges to the cultural hegemonies of its history will define its future.