Proud
I'm proud to be an American
Where at least I know I'm free.
-Lee Greenwood
The career of the great Lee Greenwood, along with his personal anthem "God Bless the USA," was revived in the effusion of patriotism that followed September 11.
I, too, am proud to be an American. But what does that really mean?
Well, "God Bless the USA" is a pretty good place to start. Tasteless yet flaccid, shameless yet brimming with hubris, the song is all we are. And yet we are so much more.
Tonya Harding is a great American, a paradigmatic American. Convicted on drunk driving charges, she says she's looking forward to her imprisonment. "I'm really excited," Harding said. "This is just a time for me to relax, go in and take care of my past and go on with my future."
According to the Associated Press, Harding spent her last hours of freedom doing laundry and watching her favorite soaps.
Tonya became a cause celebre when her boyfriend kneecapped her skating rival, Nancy Kerrigan during the US championships in 1994. You may recall her appearance at the Olympics that year, as the investigation proceeded. Kerrigan was dressed with breathtaking virginal simplicity. Harding was glittering with extreme sequinization. Harding was also falling and crying.
She's had her run-ins with the law since then, and when she was picked up after driving her car into a ditch, she was still on probation for assaulting a boyfriend with a hubcap. A hubcap is a great American weapon, ineffective but decorative. But what's really American is to live out all of these trials on television, fetching up on celebrity boxing.
This is the summer of Elvis, as we observe the 25th anniversary of the King's death. Elvis when he started out was a great, simple blues and rockabilly singer. By the time he finished up, unconscious in his bathroom with ten prescription drugs in his system, he had lived the American dream: a huge mansion, pink Cadillacs, sequined plastic outfits, Vegas, bloated music, bloated body, bloated dreams.
He embodied the spectacle of tasteless excess and undeserved riches that America herself has come to embody to the rest of the world.
Who was the greatest American? Please before you say Lincoln or Lee Greenwood or Ken Lay, consider Harvey Leach, who toured the world as, among other things, the world's shortest man. He was not a dwarf or a midget, but an extremely well-muscled and normal man from the waist up, with nothing below besides tiny feet. He performed as the world's first "human fly," clinging to walls and bouncing around cages with aplomb. Apparently he could run down stairs on his hands faster than any other person could do it on his feet.
He had a propensity for violence, and was many times in court for assault, which he accomplished by launching himself into the air with his arms and punching his adversary in the face while aloft. One witness described him in court as "a very malignant scurvy little dog."
A reviewer said of his performance that "it was very surprising, but not particularly edifying." According to Ricky Jay, the great historian of the absurd, Leach performed, among other things, as "the gnome fly," "Hervio Nano," "The King of the Bees," "The Sorcerer-Genius," "Bibbo the Patagonian Ape," "Le Papillon" (complete with metamorphosis from caterpillar to resplendent winged creature), "The Extraordinary Metempsychosian Actor," "Sapajou, Baboon to the Prince of Tartary," "the Queen Bee," "The Vampire Bat," "The Son of the Desert and the Human Changeling," "The Wild Man of the Prairies," and "The Demon Dwarf" among others.
His end was unfortunate. Appearing in London under the auspices of that great embodiment of the American entrpreneurial spirit P.T. Barnum, in his final manifestation as "WHAT IS IT?," the monkey-suited missing link between the orang utan and the human, Leach was greeted by an old friend, who insisted on giving him a masonic handshake.
Thus exposed, he withdrew in disgrace, and died soon thereafter in a garret of despair.
Surely Harvey Leach was the Tonya Harding of his era, the Elvis of our understanding. I'm proud to be an American.
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Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
