by Tom Shafer
April 24, 2022
As the pandemic is slowly coming to an end (again), and as I watch “conservative” politicians not-so-slowly dismantle what America stands for, I now realize that we should stop pretending to portray what we the United States aspire to be and simply brand ourselves as what we are: aMErica (uh·mee·ruh·kuh), not America.
If our Founding Fathers truly wanted us to live and govern under the collective “we,” they missed the perfect opportunity to trademark us with the vision of the Preamble to the Constitution:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
It’s right there with the first word “we.” Why not name us the United States of Awerica (uh·wee·ruh·kuh) instead?
Okay, so it doesn’t slide off the tongue quite as readily, but with practice, we would have been okay with it. If we can handle “Worcestershire” and “quinoa,” we can certainly handle “Awerica.”
Of course, every American child knows (?) that our country was named after Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, a man who visited the New World twice (1499 and 1502) and recognized that the “Americas” were not part of Asia but were instead their own separate continents. Then, when German cartographers Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann were creating a map of the world in 1507, one of them (historians point to Ringmann) used Vespucci’s first name (feminized because all countries were seen as feminine – and who am I to disagree). Other cartographers followed their lead, and well, the rest is history.
Some researchers have even suggested that because news travelled the world so slowly at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Ringmann may not have been aware that Columbus had actually beaten Vespucci to the Americas. Otherwise, our country may have been named Columbia or the slightly more awkward Columbusia. And given the infamous history of Columbus’s experience in the New World on the island of Hispaniola, today we might be watching our culture unravel even further under the weight of a renaming of the country! How much fun would that have been?
Oh, and by the way, neither Italian was first to “discover” the New World. The Natives already living here had discovered it at least 15,000 years prior (perhaps even 30,000 years), and the Vikings, led by Leif Eriksson, actually established a settlement (L’Anse aux Meadows) on the northern tip of Newfoundland 500 years before Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492. So really, we could just as easily be called Clovusia (after the Clovus people, perhaps the earliest to cross Beringia, the land bridge that once connected Asia to the Americas) or Vikingland or even Leifia.
But seriously, as we are witnessing in real time the erosion of our country and subsequent standing in the world (please read my thoughts in “Shine, Perishing Republic — and Geminids” under the For Your Consideration tab), those German cartographers got it right with the name America. The blame then falls to our Founding Fathers, who could have rebranded us aMErica with the signing of the Declaration of Independence, right there at the advent of the aMErican Revolution (see how it works!). Of course, in their defense, they were working very hard to keep our fledgling democracy on her feet – which was no easy task. Remember, after the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Benjamin Franklin was asked (likely by Elizabeth Willing Powel, a prominent society figure and wife of Philadelphia Mayor Samuel Powel), “Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?”
Franklin (now famously) responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
But back to my naïve notion of Awerica. I guess I had always thought about us (the collective U.S.) as part of a whole (think e pluribus Unum, Latin for “out of many, one,” which adorns every coin minted by the U.S. Treasury). But after the treasonous January 6, 2021, attack on our Capitol, it quickly became apparent that the splintering of our country was becoming a chasming instead, as traitors to the Constitution that day are still being viewed as patriots and heroes by thirty percent of Republicans. Even today, “conservatives” continue that assault on our Constitution with new rules and laws that are taking us closer to 1830 than 2030, now undermining the individual rights and civil liberties, long fought for, that have protected all of our citizens and enhanced their lives. Perhaps a rewording of that Latin definition is in order now: “one, out of many,” emphasizing the individual instead of the collective. The word Unum, meaning “one” is even capitalized. I should have noticed this long ago.
And actually, now might be a good time to revisit and reconsider the opening words to the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
I love these words, especially because these words represented then the beginning of a new era of thinking about how men should govern men, that power over life should reside with every man, woman, and child. Of course, back then the words only pertained to white men who would still wield power over women, children, and all people who were not white, but these baby steps would eventually evolve into longer strides as our little democratic experiment slowly embraced all who resided in America.
But as our erosion continues with alarming speed, this “self-evident” statement needs amending, and I think I have found the perfect replacement for it, from the perfectly ‘80s movie Wall Street. In the film, a young stockbroker, Bud Fox, full of ambition, is clawing his way up the corporate American ladder. He convinces (through a little insider trading info) the successful corporate raider Gordon Gekko to mentor him on the finer points of making money in the market (including illegalities), all to enhance his standing as a broker among his peers. Eventually, he does acquire the lifestyle he has been coveting (including all of the trappings), but he has also attracted the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission for some of his questionable dealings. In spite of some slight moral anguish, all seems to be going well, but when Gekko dissolves an airline company where Fox’s father serves as union president (the insider trading deal that first drew Gekko’s attention) – a dissolution that purges all employees and their pensions and triggers his father’s heart attack – Fox ultimately plots a scheme that takes Gekko – and himself – down.
But back to that reconsideration of the opening to the second paragraph of the Declaration. During a contentious Teldar Paper shareholding meeting, Gekko (who owns shares but desires controlling interest of the company) concludes a speech to shareholders with these words:
Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.
Okay, so we’ll have to rework some sections here, and leave out that Teldar Paper reference, but the essence for our new aMErica is here, especially the seven uses of the word “greed.” All we have to do is plagiarize it (which is perfectly aMErican) and move on.
Oh, and in case you think that I am expressing myself with a little too much hyperbole here, let me conclude with the part of that Franklin anecdote that no one ever hears. When Franklin responded to Elizabeth Powel’s question with “A republic, if you can keep it,” Powel purportedly inquired, “And why not keep it?”
Franklin cryptically responded, “Because the people, on tasting the dish, are always disposed to eat more of it than does them good.”
Here in aMErica, we have done just that.
