America the beautiful

“This book, in many ways, is a story of America,” writes Tony Blair in the introduction to the American edition of his autobiography.

Blair’s book has met its share of controversy, the introduction in particular. Critics deride his remarks, accusing him of writing a “love letter” to America as a thinly disguised sales ploy, and lambasting him for writing a similar panegyric to France in the French publication of the book. But regardless of all the politics of “A Journey: My Political Life,” there’s something to be said about his personal identification with America. America has the ability to make your story its story, and its story your story.

But America plays a peculiar role in the Columbian experience. At Columbia, we operate on the true and valid premise that Columbia University is an American institution, a tacit assumption that influences what we study and how we study it. Still, there is a strange dearth of open discourse on what this means and what this implies, especially in a global context. Our stories are American stories, but we do not question what this means enough, and we do not celebrate it enough.

After all, under all our expressions of diversity at Columbia, there lies, quiet and under-appreciated, a common foundation upon which we construct our different identities—America. This is not a nationalistic boast or a homogenizing blanket statement. Even if New York hardly represents the rest of America, even if the diversity of our life experiences suggests a multiplicity of simultaneously existing “Americas,” even if some of us, like myself, are not American, have come to America from a foreign country, and plan to leave in the future—even if all of these things are true, they do not change the reality that we have chosen, at least for four years, to merge our stories with America’s. Regardless of where we are from, our autobiographies, too, are stories of America.

We must always bear this in mind in such a way that leads not to an elitist, chauvinistic attitude, but rather to a spirit of genuine gratitude for the privilege of being in America, whether temporarily or permanently. What is so extraordinary about America that keeps us here, or brings us here in the first place? And what are our responsibilities as privileged participants in American society?

Our responsibility is not, needless to say, a fawning, unquestioning servility to all ideas and things American. There are aspects of American culture that should be examined, and some that should, perhaps, be discarded altogether. As a university community, we have understood this need to question. But in our critical examination of American society, we cannot lose sight of the reason why we should scrutinize and criticize—a sense of love for the nation we share, and the knowledge that a stronger America means a stronger world. Willy-nilly, America leads the world. It is the focal point to which foreigners like me turn to get an education, to get a leg up in life. Allegiance to America, in this sense, is allegiance to the world.

Therefore, we must use the free voice America gives us, precisely because exercising that right serves to make the right and its consequences stronger. In doing so, we should not take for granted the privileges we enjoy, and we should remember their source. Columbia is a global university, but it is a global university because it benefits from America and from America’s greatest city.

This is not a culturally imperialistic, hegemonic argument. It is the contrary. Placing America and Americanism in a global context—as we do, for example, in the World Leaders Forum—underscores the greater responsibility that rests upon Americans, to use their privileged circumstances to contribute to the construction of a more harmonious, more integrated world. Columbians, as beneficiaries of one of the finest educational institutions in America, perhaps face an even greater responsibility. We may disagree on how to go about doing that, but we cannot disagree on the principle itself.

Perhaps we can make individual efforts to remember the singular advantages America affords us, and to consider more conscientiously what America means not only in our own American stories, but also in our new world order. “America is great for a reason,” Blair says in his introduction, “It is looked up to, despite all the criticism, for a reason.” He offers his own ideas for what that reason is. But what do we think?

Amin Ghadimi is a Columbia College junior majoring in East Asian Languages and Cultures. He is a former Spectator editorial page editor, a former senior editor of Columbia East Asia Review and served as secretary of the the Bahá’í Club of Columbia University. He is studying abroad at the Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies. The Way That Can Be Told runs alternate Tuesdays.