Remember When America Did Big Things?

Yeah, once upon a time we were kind of a big deal

Thanks to Stacey Eskelin for the inspiration

I’m old enough to remember when America was, to use the words of our current President, “a big f*****g deal.” We brought the wood- and the pain when the situation called for it. If something big needed to get done- well, get the Hell out of the way, ‘cuz America showed up to get it done. We did it right, we did it fast, and we did it up big. No one questioned our commitment, because if you did we’d kick your ass, too.

You didn’t see Costa Rica winning two world wars in the 20th century, did you? Did Iceland bring down the Soviet Union and with it the Cold War and the threat of international communism? Was Yemen the first country to win the race to put a man on the moon?

No, no, and HELL, no!! That was America…and boy, did we bring the wood. We had the money, the brainpower, and- most importantly, the willpower. We knew WHAT needed to be done. We knew HOW to do the job. And we had the resources to get it done. Best of all, once America showed up on-site, you knew no one was leaving until the last brick was in place, every “i” was dotted, and every “t” crossed. We made sure that whatever we arrived to do was done and dusted. Only then did we call it good and move on to the next crisis.

OK, so we were a bit arrogant and overbearing about it, but we’d just saved the world’s collective ass. TWICE if memory serves (three if you count the Korean War)…so, yeah, you’ll have to forgive us if we may have been a bit immodest. But, if there’s one thing we Americans know how to do, it’s engaging in a bit of chest-thumping. Warranted or not, it hardly makes a difference. We’re Americans, damn it, and before we depart the premises, EVERYONE will know it!!

We may not have invented something, but you can bet we made it better. AND we did it at scale. Not only that, but we excel at finding new, better, and more frighteningly efficient ways to kill our fellow human beings. Por ejemplo, an airman, sitting in an air-conditioned office at Nellis AFB in Las Vegas, can use video game-like technology to take out a target half a world away. A few clicks here, a toggle of a joystick there, and BOOM!!! Bad man dead. Do not pass “GO,” do not collect $200.

Nice work if you can get it, eh? America suffers no casualties except for the occasional loss of a multi-million dollar missile designed for this express purpose. It’s almost as if we invented a form of warfare that’s neat, clean, and tidy- because we did.

We’re Americans. We HATE it when our side of war is messy, bloody, and tragic.

Of course, things on the receiving end are seldom so neat, clean, OR tidy- especially if bad intelligence causes us to hit the wrong target and kill innocent civilians. Sometimes, “neat, clean, and tidy” warfare can still mean not killing the people we think to be in desperate need of being killed.

It was an American, after all, who invented the term “collateral damage”…as if that somehow sanitizes and excuses the tragic deaths of innocents whose only transgression was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

So, yeah, we saved the world multiple times over, and we’re not afraid to remind everyone outside of our borders of it- because we’re just that insecure about our place in the new world order. ‘Course, our riding to the riding on our trusty white steed was a while back; now we’ve been reduced to living on our laurels because the past few years haven’t exactly been pleasant or pretty.

Now it seems we’re limited by our significantly reduced vision, as personified by the entire Republican Party and Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Now, the notion of what America can accomplish is defined by “that’s too expensive” or “America doesn’t do big things anymore.”

Or- and this is the one I hate the most- “What if something goes wrong?”

DID AMERICA GIVE UP AFTER THE GERMANS BOMBED PEARL HARBOR???

Why DOESN’T America do big things anymore? Perhaps because Manchin and Sinema have decided to use their outsized influence to further a vision of America that believes we should no longer be nearly as involved in the world.

American optimism, that “can do” spirit that said America might not know how to do something, but we can sure as Hell figure it out, has receded into the background as our leaders have become frightened rabbits.

I thought that we were a sunny people. I thought that optimism was the fundamental nature of the United States of America, the whole point. We had an endless horizon that encouraged people to dream their biggest dreams. We were the hope when all other hope had run dry. We were, as Ronald Reagan loved to say, “a shining city upon a hill.” Look up — look skyward — to see us. Behold our glow.

Maybe I thought all of that because Reagan was president when I was finishing high school and starting college and paying close, mature attention to American politics for the first time. He told us that it was morning again in America. That simple, syrupy assurance was supposedly the key to his popularity, the bond between him and voters: He tapped into our stubborn confidence, captured our intrinsic faith.

I’m not so sure anymore.

America never was Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill,” but there was a time when we believed that we could hold our own with anyone. The “morning in America” line may have been propaganda and pure B.S., but it reminded millions of us that there was a time when America thought big and did big.

After four years of Donald Trump and “America First” Republicans, now millions of Americans would quite happily see America take a back seat to China, India, and Russia when it comes to engaging with the world.

Last weekend, NBC News released a poll that affirmed what other recent surveys also said: An overwhelming majority of Americans — 71 percent, according to NBC — believe that this country is on the wrong track. That’s a profound pessimism.

It’s also a durable one. Struck by that figure, I looked back. Most Americans were convinced that we were on the wrong track under Donald Trump, and most Americans had that same negative feeling under Barack Obama. Granted, we’re not talking about the same group of Americans, but we are talking about a negative mind-set — a timid feeling — that travels easily back and forth across partisan lines and grips enough people in the middle to be the prevailing sensibility no matter who controls Congress, no matter who’s in the White House. Anxiety rules. Worry reigns.

Republicans are generally quite happy to see America withdrawing from the world, but did you ever think you’d see the day when two Democratic Senators would betray not only their party but the very people who put them in office?

The world doesn’t look to America anymore for help with big things. Sure, COVID-19 is an obvious exception to that, but our response to the pandemic was more out of self-preservation than any desire to help the rest of the world. If COVID-19 hadn’t entered the U.S., the Trump Administration almost certainly would’ve told the international community to pound sand- “Not our problem.”

It’s sad to see what’s happening to our willingness to take on significant risks and sizeable challenges. That the infrastructure bill passed over the weekend is being touted as a big f*****g deal is disappointing. It should be the baseline for American aspirations. We should proactively be taking steps to maintain roads, bridges, the electricity grid, and other infrastructure projects. Those are basic maintenance tasks and should be assumed to be what we need to be doing consistently. We should be ensuring bridges don’t collapse, not celebrating that we finally passed a package that will allow us to fund programs to ensure our infrastructure is safe.

The operating assumption should be that our infrastructure is safe because it’s well-funded and maintained- and it’s going to stay that way. You can’t just build things; you also have to keep them from crumbling into the sea. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust” isn’t a good philosophy when infrastructure is the topic.

America used to give a damn. We did big things because we could and because they needed to be done. We also did big things because we knew that America was often the only country that could do them.

Now we don’t do those big things because Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema think it’s too expensive. (Say, didn’t both these folks used to be honest-to-God Democrats??)

And didn’t America used to be kind of a big deal?

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