New Name, Same Game

(from Finite to Infinite, forever and always)

Hey good folks!

Just wanted to let you all know we’re tweaking the headline here to Altered States of America to better reflect our mind-bending moment and this nation’s 250th Birthday.

So stay tuned for quirky coverage of all the topics you’re never supposed to talk about at cocktail parties—God, Sex, Drugs, Death (and Politics).

But hopefully, from a fresh perspective with an academic’s tool kit and a stranger in a strange land’s curious eye.

Halfway between Tom Wolfe and Oscar Wilde—that’s roughly the landing zone we’re aiming for.

#notgayjustbritish

And each week you should feel a little bit smarter and a whole lot lighter for having spent ten minutes here.

***

For me, being raised English and South African, and then getting dropped into school in the States, I was often gobsmacked and bewildered by the strange customs of the natives.

From pink bubble gum, to dill pickles, to peanut butter and jellies, and Saturday morning Looney Tunes, the whole thing felt so alien to me, even as tried to learn the ropes.

“Two countries, Wilde quipped, “separated by a common language.”

That feeling of deep strangeness, of fascinating otherness has never really left me.

Somehow I ended up in grad school studying with Vine Deloria Jr. (Yale lawyer and Lakota elder who wrote Custer Died for Your Sins) and MacArthur Genius Patty Nelson Limerick who’s one of the clearer voices on the American West.

From that foundation, I went West, looking for the “real” America—from Grateful Dead shows and Rainbow gatherings to extreme sports meccas like Telluride and Hood River, to Burning Man and Silicon Valley.

Like Alexis De Toqueville—a Frenchman looking at 19th century America with a sympathetic outsider’s eye—I’ve done my best to make sense of this fascinating landscape and nation.

Sometimes seeing things sooner or more clearly for it.

And other times totally failing to make heads or tails of it!

As Pulitzer winner Wallace Stegner put it (who taught everyone from Ed “Monkeywrench Gang” Abbey to Larry “Lonesome Dove” McMurtry to Ken “Cuckoo’s Nest/Acid Test” Kesey at Stanford’s writing program:

the task in America is to create “a society to match the scenery.”

So I spent decades roaming, climbing, skiing, surfing, biking that unmatchable scenery, looking for the society (or sub-cultures) that could do all that freedom and beauty justice.

A few years back I wrote all of this down as a love letter to that search–in a book called Stealing Fire. It traced this crazy ecstatic creative lineage across thousands of years, ending up here, in America. (Guess it struck a nerve as it ended up translated into a dozen languages and almost half a million copies worldwide)

But you know, the more time I spend here, the more protective I feel about it all.

Not the strip malls and Applebees and American Idols of it all: something else.

Something far less shiny, but no less precious.

It’s my increasingly strong belief that The American Experiment is perhaps the rarest and most important innovation in human organization we’ve seen in the last 500 years.

Not because of chest thumping USA chanting frat boys. (or Homers)

But because of the genius promise of creating a new game—one where rulers and classes, castes and creeds might take a back seat to more universal principles of common humanity, dignity and liberty.

Did we get there? Not yet. The paroxysms of the Civil War, the Depression, the 60s (and the 2020’s) remind us constantly of all the places we fall short.

But America did attempt something that no one before or after has pulled off: to take the saint’s and mystic’s solitary insight that we are all one, that we are all children of our creator, imbued with shared rights and responsibilities to make a more perfect union…to take that impossible ideal and try to put it into gear, into governance and into culture.

Fucked it up mightily along the way, but at our worst, we’ve reminded ourselves of our best: that finite games of winners and losers, kings and commoners, should take a back seat to an infinite game of brothers and sisters, followers and leaders.

So that’s what we’re gonna keep exploring in these pages: how might we remember the better angels of our nature, and double down on protecting the most revolutionary idea ever: that everyone everywhere should be entitled to a fair shot at the good life, regardless of race, color or creed.

Now that’s a flag I could wave!

But as Nobel winner Sinclair Lewis warned:

So we should note which flag we’re actually flying—the patriotism one or the nationalism one?

Patriotism is about the ideals of the Infinite Game, where the point isn’t to win, it’s to expand and extend the game as far as possible. Nationalism is about blood and soil and winning at the expense and exclusion of the Others.

One’s global and invites the world to play with us. The other’s tribal and insists the world pay tribute to us.

Here at the sesquicentennial mark, it’s a jump ball which way we go from here. Cage match or kumbaya.

But it feels more important than ever to have this conversation in today’s digital equivalent of the town square (Substack I guess?).

So I’ll leave you with original Dharma Bum Pulitzer poet, Zen mountain man Gary Snyder’s exhortation on this country

That short-haired joy and roughness—

America—your stupidity.

I could almost love you again.

We left—onto the freeway shoulders—

under the tough old stars—

In the shadow of bluffs

I came back to myself,

To the real work, to

“What is to be done.”

America, I could almost love you again!

A republic, if we can keep it.

***

See you next week and feel free to share with anyone you reckon would dig it.

Jamie