From The Great Gatsby: This is a valley of ashes - a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

What does it mean to be an American today? Ever? Who are we as a country and who are we as a global participant? I find myself often coming back to this question because I really want there to be an answer. I want someone to tell me exactly what Americana means with instructions on how to become it. But for some reason I'm fairly certain there is no answer, that we built this country on the principle that there should be no answer to the question. We mean whatever we want to mean. We were always marked as the land of the immigrant. We are the haven in the west where you go when you need to, where you go to improve your situation. We were a country in that we didn't allow borders. But that's changed. We aren't the holy land for immigrants anymore and now there is nothing but borders.

Our relationship to the land has been forgotten. We build strip malls over the grass where buffalo used to amass in millions. We've sent to solitary confinement the tribes who had most right to the land. The Native Americans have become prisoners in their own land while we ignore that very land. We are a country of consumer greed and ladder climbing. There is no uniting God and there is no uniting history. Politics has claimed dominance over our lives. We befriend people in our own party. We are a country split in half. We don't even have a uniting sport. When was the last time anyone could truly say and really mean it, that baseball is America's Favorite Pastime? Baseball is a microcosm of the American experience. We inject ourselves with all sorts of chemicals to get bigger for no other reason to knock the ball ever further out of the park.

I want to be proud of my country. But I can't be. I can be proud of some people, but there are just as many who I'd like to exported to Mars. We're apathetic in conversation unless it's about American Idol or a new pair of shoes. There is no American Dream anymore. It's always been a coin trick, a fantasy. We've thought it's been in our hands the whole time, but open it up, and there's nothing there. We are the ashmen Fitzgerald speaks of, we move through our land in a cloud of dust and try to solidify meaning when there was none to begin with. Or maybe there was. Maybe it is hidden beneath the layers of smoke and mirrors and dust and particles, maybe the land is still there if only we could work together in clearing away all the ash.