Reaching for the Heights

The trailer for the movie, In the Heights, was released this week. Many people have been viewing it, sharing it, tweeting about it, and generally going bananas over it, miserable that they’ll have to wait until summer to see the movie. I remember having the same feeling when the soundtrack to Hamilton came out. In both cases, it didn’t take more than a single song to get people’s hearts racing. There is something in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s music that conveys the pure, exuberant joy of living in this country and belonging deeply to it. It’s not that he writes boppy dance tunes that make us mindlessly happy; it’s that he writes straight from—and to—our American hearts.

Because of where he grew up and when he grew up, and who is family was, and where he went to school, his music draws from Hip Hop and Rock and Broadway and Salsa and god-knows-what-other sources. He can do this, not because he is a scholar, but because he grew up the nexus of American musical and cultural streams. He took in everything, and he transformed it into something we had both never heard before and, at the same time, knew to be ours.

What other immigrant artists does he remind me of? George Gershwin and Aaron Copland, who did exactly the same thing in their own time, pulling in Jazz and Blues and Gospel and Classical and Folk and Music Hall and Klezmer, and creating music that had never existed before, but said “America” to much of the country during their lifetimes and ever after.

The purpose of the “melting pot” was not to boil everything down into an unappealing, gray mush, but to create a sizzling, spicy, amazing mélange—a thing both new and old—made up of many cultures and flavors and sounds, but all fitting together into something strong, compelling, powerful, and new—composed of its raw materials but transcending any of its component parts. That was, and is, our country at its best. When we meet everyone, and listen to everyone, and share each other’s stories, and taste each other’s foods, we end up creating new things that draw from the best of everyone and become something that belongs to all of us, and could only have been created by us. We create new things, and we become new things.

Do we have issues of cultural appropriation to deal with? Yes, we do. But there is a difference between stealing someone’s voice to use as your own, for your own benefit, and raising your voice alongside someone else’s and learning their songs. Cultural diffusion is not the same thing as cultural appropriation, and to blur the two and insist that It Must Stop is not only wrongheaded; it’s impossible. There is no such thing as cultural purity, any more than there is such a thing as racial purity. We are mutts, all of us, and however we define ourselves, that thing is the result of hundreds, if not thousands, of years of bumping up against, learning from, and borrowing from other people. I could argue all day that mutts are hardier and more valuable than purebreds, but in the end, it’s a ridiculous argument to have to make; among humans, there are no purebreds. The entire idea is nonsense.

But as we retreat from each other in fear and suspicion, we try to draw new/old lines around “our people” to define them in opposition to “those people,” and insist that everyone inside the magic circle is our family, our tribe. Retrograde nationalists, who didn’t used to be able to speak honestly in the public sphere, now feel safe in proclaiming that long before the United States was a constitutional republic, it was a LAND meant for a certain group of PEOPLE—and those people were of English and German or Dutch descent, full stop. Others may come, at the pleasure of the original settlers, but the land does not really belong to them. People say this, openly, in 2019. Even people not of the original “settler stock” say this. In no founding documents anywhere—at the federal level or the state level, or even in colonial charters, to the best of my knowledge—is peoplehood or citizenship or belonging defined by or limited to country of immediate origin. But they say these things, openly, in 2019. Irish and Italian and Greek and Russian and Polish and Korean and Chinese and Mexican and Dominican and Indonesian and Indian and African Americans (and on, and on, and on), beware: you are guests in this land, even if your family has been here for 100+ years.

Is it any wonder that members of minority groups respond to this kind of talk by drawing magic circles around their people and playing what the political right calls “identity politics?” The right loves to rail about identity politics destroying the fabric of America by focusing on small-group distinctions instead of large-group definitions, but they forget that this is reaction, not action. If African Americans take to the streets, chanting “Black Lives Matter,” instead of “All Lives Matter,” it’s because they’ve been told, relentlessly and violently and for generations, that they cannot consider themselves part of the “all.” All the marching, all the protests, all the activism, just to learn that large swaths of White America will never accept you as equal, regular, "normal" parts of the country. And when African Americans finally take White America at its word, we start posting nastily on Twitter about how THEY are refusing to act like part of US, and THAT is what is destroying our nation. What chutzpah…to use an expression from yet another minority group that’s being warned, after generations of relative peace and stability, that they don’t really belong here, and had better behave themselves. 

Take note of what these ethno-nationalists are saying: it does not matter what you believe, how you act, how you vote, or what creeds or principles you adhere to. If you belong to the wrong GROUP, you are not really an American...and you never will be. Alexander Hamilton's story is not and cannot be Lin-Manuel Miranda's, and to claim spiritual ownership of it is an affront to them. Barack Obama's presidency is an asterisk to them--a blip--and the current president's efforts to undo every accomplishment of that administration has nothing to do with political policy--it's about ethnic cleansing. Whether he says that or believes it, large numbers of his followers do, and it is explicitly why they follow him. That is what so-called conservatism has turned into. There are things they want to conserve, all right--we just need to be very mindful of what those things are.

And if we put up with it? Shame on us. If we participate in it in our own way, responding to other people's tribal retreats by circling our own wagons in smaller and smaller magic circles of "us," then shame on us even more.

Because...where will it lead? Will we have to change the Great Seal on our dollar bills?  Give up those the old, Latin phrases that no one bothers to teach anymore? Novus ordo seclorum? A new order of the ages? No. Sorry. The new world is just the old world, transplanted. We've chosen to resurrect all the old, comfortable hatreds. E pluribus unun? Out of many, one? No. Sorry. We've chosen to remain many. E Pluribus Pluribus. Get off my lawn.

And how will we redesign the Great Seal itself?  The fierce eagle, with thirteen arrows grasped—together—in a single talon, fighting a common fight, doesn’t feel right anymore. Neither does the giant pyramid, drawing Americans from all corners of the globe into a single point, with the all-seeing eye up top. Maybe instead of the pyramid, we can have a wall. A single, giant, slab—no dimension, no shading, no shape. Just a slab. And on the other side of the seal, perhaps, a giant middle finger extended—from everyone, to everyone, with the inspiring, Latin phrase: futue te ipsi.

No thank you. Not for me.

Listen, I like being a New Yorker. I like being a Jew. I like being all the distinct, different things that I am. But I also love being part of the crazy tapestry or bubbling melting pot or [insert your own metaphor here] that is America. This is my country. And I should be able to sing about it AND about my family, or my block. I am large; I contain multitudes. Yeah--I claim him as mine, too. 

Even in the middle of the fractious 1960s and 1970s, I grew up singing songs like this in school:

This is my country! Land of my birth!
This is my country! Grandest on earth!
I pledge thee my allegiance, America, the bold,
For this is my country to have and to hold.

Isn't there room in this vast, open country, to sing songs like that AND songs from our own communities? Can't we all contain multitudes?

In the Heights, I hang my flag up on display
We came to work and to live and we got a lot in common
It reminds me that I came from miles away

In the Heights
I’ve got today!

And today’s all we got, so we cannot stop

Today is all we’ve got...but we’ve got it together. Let’s not throw that away.