The Ambiguous American

Few Old World countries have been extremely concerned with the search national identity. Americans have never been able to take themselves for granted in this comfortable fashion. They have been conscious – that they were a new nation, and one made out of the most varied materials, their language, their laws, their culture inherited from the Old World.

That their nation did have a character of its own, a special character and a special destiny.  The Founding Father were determined that the new nation should differ profoundly.  The American traits are heterogeneous and individualistic. And it would certainly be an error to suppose such traits as we may assign to American are in any sense inherent.

Perhaps the most common, and the most pervasive, is carelessness. The American is carelessness in his manners, his dress, his way of speaking and etc. He tried to be careless about larger think as well.he used up the soil burned down the forest.

The American is on the whole, openhanded, generous and hospitable. While it is true that a system of tax exemptions makes it easy for Americans, it is suggestive that American laws are designed to encourage giving.

For two centuries visitors from the Old World have paid tribute to American hospitality. Americans did not nurse enmity toward Britain in the 19th century, nor have they continued to hold enmity toward Germany or japan in the 20th.

Though they have won most of their wars, they have never imposed a vengeful peace upon the defeated. Southerners fancy that the North imposed an unfair peace upon them in 1865, but the fact is that when the war was over. Though our immigration policy was on the whole hospitable, we were something less than generous in our attitude toward the refugees from totalitarianism.

Much of American generosity springs from good fortune and abundance. The American dearly loves comfort and luxury, He pampers himself, his wife, and his children. He spend enough tobacco, liquors and cosmetics to pay off the national debt. The American does not like to walk. The American drives his children to school.

The American is obsessed with this pursuit. He is sure that providence and nature mean him to be happy and he regards any interface with the attainment of happiness as a violation of natural law. Advertisements proclaim this more blatantly in America than elsewhere. The achieved by the cigarette, the vacation in florida, the electric mixer, the new car, is happiness.

This expectation of happiness reveals a strong strain of sentimentality and even romanticism. American advertisements ooze sentiment : American movies and television purvey it relentlessly-along with a good deal of quite unsentimental sadism. Novels were sentimental in the 19th century, novels are less sentimental today. The stories in woman’s magazines today are very sentimental.

One of the more amiable of America traits is gregariousness.  Americans also like to do things together and take comfort in numbers, they don't want to walk alone, but join clubs so they can do these things in common.

The American tends to distrust the ma who lives to himself, who don't join men’s organizations. On one American trait almost all European critics are materialism. He is intensely conscious of the material world in which he lives.

The process of becoming American was in part one of identification with the natural environment. If the new nation was to preserve its independence in a hostile world and realize democratic potential. American more materialistic than Frenchman or German. It is reassuring to note that American power and wealth have commonly been made available to other peoples for generous purposes.

Ayuk Prihatin / 183211067

Source : Baumwoll, Dennis., & Saitz, Robert L.(1965). Advance Reading ang Writting: exercises in English as a second language. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.