Vicious Rants of an Angry Yellow Man

Jeff Daniels won the Emmy as the star of "Newsroom" with his speech about America not being the greatest nation anymore.  Some people would say this is heresy.  Some would say Daniels is correct.  I say this is not a true or false question.  In fact it is the wrong question.  The greatest nation label implies that a country is better than all others.  This, however, does not mean a country is actually GREAT.  Certainly it does not mean that a country is even good at everything.  I mean, I can be the best dancer in town but if everybody in town has two left feet then I may not be such a good dancer.  So when one says that America is not the greatest ANYMORE, it may or may not be a true statement but it is not all that meaningful.

The way I look at it, America was probably the greatest nation in the 1960s.  When I came to the U.S. the thing that struck me was how positive Americans think of their country.  Certainly Americans thought of their country as the greatest 50 years ago.  I would agree with them (I was not an American at that time).  Compare to other countries America was so much better, especially for someone who came from a British colony and whose ancestral home land is a communist country in deep poverty.

Today a lot more Americans seem to feel America is no longer at the top.  As Jeff Daniels pointed out, we are mediocre or worse in terms of education, life expectancy and infant mortality compared to other developed nations.  We no longer dominate in manufacturing.  We are frightened by terrorism.  Yet we kill tens of thousands of our own citizens each year.  We have a dysfunctional government that is deeply divided.  We have more people in prisons than any western country.  Daniels is correct with all these stats. 

So some countries do better than us in certain things.  It does not make any one of them greater than us.  We should try to improve on those areas that we are behind in.  But we have fallen behind not because we got worse but because other countries have improved faster.  Our life expectancy did not go down, for example, but it just has not gone up as fast as other countries.  Japan, for example, has improved a lot since the 60s.  It does many things better than us.  But I would not say that Japan is greater than us overall.  Same with China.  So the gap has closed but I think we are still at the top.  We just need to improve on many fronts.

So our world standing may not be as dominant as in the 60s.  But I think we are a better nation today.  Look at a show like "Mad Men" and see how people lived 50 years ago.  We smoke and drink less today and thus are much more healthy than before.  We live in bigger houses on average today and drive better cars.  We had two Kennedys assassinated along with MLK in less than one decade.  We were in a losing war in Vietnam with tens of thousands of Americans killed.  We had race riots in many cities.  Blacks could not drink out of the same fountains as whites. There was little diversity in the workplace.  Women were seldom seen in science or business.  So even if we were ranked the greatest 50 years ago because the rest of the world was more screwed up than us, it was meaningless.  I say we are better today and the world as a whole is better today.

So my fellow Americans:  Be as optimistic as the first generation of Americans I met.  A country that has gone from civil rights violations as being legal to electing a black president, a country that is no longer worried about a a nuclear attack from a communist adversary, a country that still produced way more Nobel prize winners than any other, and a country that immigrants still flock to; cannot be too bad.  Yes, we have a lot to improve on but I think we will meet the challenges.