My wife is from France. In the four years we were on opposite sides of the ocean before we got married I had the good fortune to be able to visit the country a number of times. Much of that time I was working at Outback Steakhouse and always envisioned opening a unit in Paris. (I know, for most people that’s epicurean heresy, but consider the source… my favorite food is McDonalds and M&Ms…) Nonetheless, at Outback the fundamental idea was that we would prepare your food any way you wanted. You could have your salad dressing on the side, your Bloomin’ Onion cooked with flour, or you could have your steak extra well done. Whatever it was, we wanted you to be happy with your meal. When I mentioned the idea to my wife she said it would never fly because the idea of the customer being in charge of anything in France is largely unheard of, particularly as it relates to restaurants. Basically the rule is: Chef’s are trained to know what works with food so you basically get what they give you and you like it.
Not long after that I had another idea that equally befuddled her. Licensed apparel is a multi billion dollar business in the United States and around the world – think NY Yankee hats or Manchester United shirts. One of the biggest sectors of that industry here in the US is NCAA (college) licensed apparel. One day I suggested we think about going into the licensed apparel business and sell shirts, hats etc. for French colleges. She was puzzled. “Why would anyone want to buy a shirt with their college’s name on it?” I tried to explain the whole college rivalry, pride in your school deal to her and it just wasn’t clicking. She told me that such a business would likely not find a market in France because there is largely no such thing as school sports & spirit and French people would never understand the point. (The University of Paris tee shirts that are sold throughout the city are for tourists.) For the French, going to college is expected to be four years of focus and study with very little extracurricular activity of any sort, organized or otherwise. Simply put, it’s all work and very little fun and who wants to wear a shirt reminding them of that?
I thought about these two episodes recently when I saw a car with some reindeer antlers sticking up out of the door of a passing car. In a moment the subject of this column came to me: The beauty of America is the fact that anything and everything is possible here. When you peel back everything else, America is a place of possibilities. Americans by their very nature are a rebellious sort. From breaking with King George to Manifest Destiny to heading to the moon, America has always been a place where big things can and do happen. More importantly however, it’s also a place where everyday, seemingly inconsequential things can happen. What I mean by that is that it is not only the politician, the successful businessman or the wealthy heiress who can set out to pursue some grand design… it’s also the guy next door, the guy at the coffee shop or the guy you knew in 3rd grade who can do something that changes the world, or maybe just his little corner of it.
America is a place where people feel that if they can imagine it, they can make it come true. Although that doesn’t always lead to success, the aggregate impact of all of that creativity on the country is tremendous. Think about how many things that you know of that are so fundamentally unimportant from the perspective of surviving in this world, but impacted the lives of the people who invented them or used them. Silly Bandz. The Snuggie. College apparel. A dozen flavors of Coke. Personalized M&Ms. Car wrap advertising. Pet manicures. Cheesehead hats. QVC. Having it your way at Burger King. McMansions. The antlers are the perfect example. They’re utterly frivolous, but they let people express the fun side of Christmas and maybe make others smile as well. Not earth changing but certainly a net positive, particularly for whoever created and sells them.
The list goes on and on. And this is not an exercise in navel gazing. Just the opposite actually. It’s recognizing and appreciating the fact that America is a truly unique place and Americans are a unique people. Not because they any better or worse than anyone else, but because they have largely bought into the notion that in America anybody can have an idea and do something with it – although regrettably the system is increasingly suffocating the pervasiveness of that notion. Nonetheless, America has prospered – and much of the rest of the world has benefited – by Americans bounding forth from the darkness to invent things for which there was no demand, to do things that few might have thought possible or necessary and alas, to even stumble more often than not.
Many things that Americans come up with are indeed frivolous, but that’s really the beauty of the country. Just as failure is the foundation upon which success is built, a culture that tolerates and even extols the frivolous fertilizes the garden from which the consequential emerges. For example, while media giants have spent (and continue to spend) billions of dollars trying to figure out how to connect with Americans, something that started out as a way to meet and rate girls has actually accomplished it: Facebook. Yellow Page publishers have lost billions of dollars over the last five years because they can’t seem to figure out how to impact consumer behavior while a company built on the ashes of a website that helped people protest has managed to rapidly impact how and when millions of consumers spend their money: Groupon.
Whether it’s having your steak cooked exactly the way you want, sporting your schools’ mascot on the seat of your pants, or volunteering with Habitat for Humanity, America is more than anything a place where people feel like they are more than just cogs in a machine. They feel like they have the power to make their lives better and impact the world around them. Fundamentally, they are empowered to do things… frivolous or otherwise. That’s real freedom… the ability to decide what you want to make of your life and the opportunity to go out and do it, or even die trying. It’s not the destination that makes life worth living, it’s the journey. The journey in America may be cluttered with kitsch and failed ideas, but it is the dynamic energy fostered by freedom that has created so much of substance and so much abundance. As the year ends and politics takes a back seat to friends and family, we should remember and be thankful for that freedom which we so often take for granted
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Exceptional post, Vince.
What does your wife think of the differences between Franco and American philosophies?
Spot on, sir, spot on. Once you started that ball rolling, it only takes a few minutes of idle thinking to come with literally hundreds of ideas and activities that are, if not uniquely American, certainly are dominated by American activities and culture.
I think I’ll go have a Chicken Fried Steak (take THAT, France! – and it’s CREAM GRAVY, not a SAUCE), sit in my school logo covered chair and watch a college football bowl game or 10.
Go, America!
RatDog the Frivolous
You fired my mind, thanks, Vince.
One was a memory:
We went to a very upscale Italian eatery only to be served a very unevenly cooked ravioli.
Some of it was fine, but there were several uncooked pieces in the sauce.
We complained.
The waiter told the chef who came out, blazing in Italian about ”al dente” and ”stupid Americans.”
Next he took out platter into the kitchen.
when we got it back all the ravioli was ”nuked.”
Really overcooked.
And very bad.
Ok,
So on to the other thing:
We, in CA, have a million, billion government workers all looking over our shoulders.
But only over them IF we are on the grid.
A whole lot of folks are NOT on the grid.
We have illegal pharmacies selling lead-laden stomach aids straight from Mexico. These ”cures” cause mental retardation in youngsters. You can see it in their dull eyes.
But are they cleaned out by the government workers?
Nope, they concentrate on chain stores where conditions are good to sit down and make sure the cough medicine is behind a counter.
We have illegal fruit sellers on the streets.
They wait until the government workers all call it a day ~4:30PM M-F.
Then they bring out their germ-filled filthy fly-covered foods for sale.
And people buy them!
We have a huge illegal drug business.
Every now and again a drug mule dies from an exploded condom-filled with who-knows-what.
The body is thrown in the trash after being gutted for all the recoverable drugs.
It takes a death before the police do a thing.
Every home store supplies a tent and a toilet so illegal workers can take jobs without FICA, unemployment, and workers’ compensation, Social Security, unemployment benefits, and workers’ comp.
Our official unemployment is 12+%.
Our school children are at the nation’s bottom of the pile.
Our hospitals are overflowing with sick people who have not paid a dime into the system.
We have two types of people in CA, those who follow the rules and pay the taxes and those who live in a cash-only economy while sucking the rest of us dry.
I have noticed similar cultural differences. My husband is a British citizen.
He’s constantly amazed at what he sees as the the lack of rules in the USA (whereas I think there are too many).
One day he hit upon what makes the USA and USA so different. He said:
In the USA if there is no law saying you can’t do something, the working assumption is you can.
In the UK if there is no law saying you can do something, the working assumption is you can’t.
Many years ago I was in the Philippines and someone said to me he would love to be able to live in America. I asked him why.
“Because everything is possible there,” he answered.
He looked so sad when he said that. I tried a bit of consoling and asked him what he couldn’t do there that he could do in America. He said he wanted to fix his house. I said that there surely must be somewhere he could get a bit of timber. He said, “I can’t.” I made other suggestions to which all his replies were, “I can’t.”
“Don’t you see,” he said in a defeated tone, “here you can’t. In America, you can.”
I was always a proud American, but after hearing those words, there was a shift in that feeling, a burgeoning of the meaning of what it is to be an American.
When BO came out with his awful ‘Yes We Can’ slogan, I was really incensed. He usurped what Americans always had, the ability to do whatever, and shifted the meaning as if we were a defeated people. Now he’s using all his energy to actually defeat the American people. He is the biggest danger to Americans’ sovereignty. If he succeeds, we will be a people who ‘can’t’.
I think everyone should be required to visit at least two other countries before they can vote here in the US. Maybe they would appreciate the USA more. Those of us who had been in Iraq for several years were as thrilled as those Iraqis who held up their purple fingers after they voted for someone besides Saddam.
I had a 2-3 hour civics class with village leaders most every Sunday in late 2003 and 2004. I explained how a democratic government really worked. The leaders posed questions and I explained how they would resolve the issue. They were awed. These were people who were not allowed to sell vegetables across provincal lines. They needed to ask permission from some government official to get married.
The Iraqis believed that they were electing people who would tell them what to do. They didn’t understand the concept that the elected people actually worked for them. The police and the military actually worked for the government not the people. These intelligent men could not conceive of the idea that they may have a voice in running their country.
While things were better in Jordan and Kuwait, the people there had the same issues. Women who detest our country should live in the middle-east for a year or two. They would find out quickly what liberation really means.
Those people in the US who think they are poor, need to see what really poor people look like. I gave away bombed houses to homeless people in Iraq until the government needed to rebuild them. In most of these countries, there are the rich and the poor. There is a very wide difference between them. There is no hope for the poor to get to a nonexistent middle-class. They are poor and their children will be poor. This will continue for centuries unless the governments change.
The American Dream is to become successful and to provide a better living for your children. Many criticize the US because there are many who became rich while there are poor people. There are very few places in the world where a farm boy born into a family with less than $2000 annual family income in 1948 can succeed in reaching upper middle class or even become rich. All of us should get down on our knees and be thankful we were born here or were allowed to become US citizens.
Those people in the US who think they are poor, need to see what really poor people look like.
Randy, you are so right. Truly they do need to see this. Some years ago, I went to Ghana as part of a team delivering wheelchairs to people in need of them. A wheelchair at the time would cost an average Ghanian the equivalent of a year’s wages. They simply could not get them. Over the course of my visit, I saw dozens and dozens of disabled adults literally crawling on their hands and knees (across dirt streets lined with open trench “sewers”), never having had something that anyone in American can easily obtain: a basic wheelchair. I will never forget the adult man who said when we fitted him with a wheelchair, “Now I am a person.” He’d spent his whole life dragging himself on his hands and knees; my horses had better care and living quarters than he’d ever experienced.
When I told the locals of my daughter who is also physically disabled, they marveled that she attended a regular school, and that she was fully a part of our family and our community. That no restrictions were put on her by our neighbors or her school. A child such as my daughter would have been ostracized and a beggar in their country, if she were even able to leave the house.
Those who complain that America isn’t a great country and that people here don’t have enough opportunities nor enough resources need to get overseas and see genuine poverty and lack of resources. They need to get some real perspective.
@cubiclcecommando: She voted with her feet… Having come from a place where the government really does take care of you from cradle to grave… she choose here. I’m confident that if she ever came to her senses and decided to kick me to the curb, she would stay here. She appreciates what we have in America far more than most Americans I know.
During my lifetime, as circumstances brought me to a new place, I would often recognize the name of a body of water nearby. It came to me that I could fix the memory of a place by immersing a part of myself in the water nearby. Some of their names I can recall include:
The North Sea
The Chao Phraya river in Bangkok
The Perfume River at Hue
The South China Sea
The Red Sea (the most wonderful place in the world)
The Thames
The mighty Mississippi
The Colorado River
The Salton Sea
The Rio Grande
The Panama Canal
The Potomac
The Delaware River
The Canals of Amsterdam
The Persian Gulf (The Gulf of Arabia)
The Seine
I have yet to touch The Mediterranean Sea, The Nile, The Amazon, The Arctic Ocean and a ton of others. Considering my age and present life, these will probably never make my list. I do recall however, of all those I have touched, the only one that left my hands sticky was the Seine, in Paris.