A Celebration of American-ness... Americanism... Americanhood?
Born down in a dead man's town,
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground.
Ya end up like a dog that's been beat too much,
'Til ya spend half your life tryin'a cover it up.
...Born in the USA! I was...
Born in the USA.
-Bruce Springsteen
Y'know, if American expats had our own national anthem, it would be Springsteen's Born in the USA.
Now that sounds like a pretty dumb statement at first. After all, when you get past the God-Gave-Rock-And-Roll-To-You-style guitar riffs and 'the Boss' with his defiant wooping at the end, the lyrics aren't exactly the most patriotic. In fact, to anyone who pays attention to the lyrics, the fact that it's used at 4th of July fireworks displays where the theme song from Team America is the ambient atmosphere, is an irony that crosses well into the realm of satire and borders on sacrilege.
No, the lyrics are far from celebratory. Each stanza centers around the hardships of American society, from lack of support for veterans, to poverty, to the way we send small town youths to die in war as punishment for minor offenses. It's a damning indictment against American society's dirty laundry, the aspects of our culture we don't want the world to know about, and want to pretend that we ourselves don't either. When you get right down to it, the flag-waving, fist-in-the-air pride with which the chorus is belted out sounds almost absurd, coming back-to-back as it does with the lamentations of the down-and-out.
And that, dear reader, is precisely the point. Or rather, precisely my point.
American expats are a peculiar lot. When we sit at a bar together, the conversation begins by swapping stories of just what it was that left us so fed up with life in America that we opted to try our hand somewhere less developed (and no offense world, but, most of the world is less developed than the US, and I'm speaking from experience here). And we commiserate with each other about how hard life was back in the States. And if some "fresh-off-the-plane" little Yankee Doodle type tries to deny it's that bad, there's always someone to ask "if life in America was as rosy as we all pretend it is, what the Hell are we all doing so far from it?"
After a drink or three, we start getting nostalgic, and that's when the conversation will switch gears to all the things we miss about home, and this is usually when we sound like homesick fools all weaving a tapestry of mom's-apple-pie Americana so sugary that it'd make a Hallmark card blush. But no matter which phase of the conversation we're on, mark this: do not, and I mean do not, let a table full of American expats hear you say anything negative about the country we came from.
The mindset among American expats appears to be that we'll bitch about our homeland from dusk 'til dawn, you see, but the minute anyone who isn't American starts to criticize America, oh now, 'them's fightin' words' as the saying goes.
Because as miserable as life is in America, very few Americans (myself excluded, I'm beginning to think) will deny they're damned proud to have been born here. Hence, once again, the song in question. The verses, bemoaning the seemingly hopeless lot in life of most Americans, sound like a group of expats sitting around, still sober, talking about what made us leave. The chorus, with its unyielding overtones of indomitable, 1776-worthy Yankee Pride, is more akin to that same group of expats when they've heard someone disparaging the country they're all complaining about. It's as if the song is saying "I know damned well all the problems America has, but don't let me hear you talking bad about her, even if we do."
It's probably not what Springsteen was going for when he wrote a bluesy anti-war song only to have record-producers twist his arm to transform it into a flag-waving rock anthem, but it's the truth.