Making America Great – Part One, Make Your Locality Great!

The other day, my primary care physician suggested I get a PSA test to establish a baseline.  She advised me to abstain from sexual activity for a few days.  “What’s a few days?” I asked, the pitch of my voice rising.  “Two days?  Three?  A week?  A month!”  After intervening sedation, I realized that this experience supplied a great example of the importance of defining one’s terms.

Another example can be found by examining the catchphrase Make America Great Again or MAGA.  Without question, it’s become a polarizing slogan.  But if we go by Lindsay Kolowich’s (@lkolow) post What Makes a Slogan Successful? it’s probably not one of the best.  While it is catchy, and it stands out, it’s not functional.  It doesn’t define its terms.  It requires consumers to supply their own definition of “great” and to conjure their own vision of past American glory.

While we’re on America, the slogan doesn’t even state which part it’s talking about.  Operationally, it doesn’t include most of America—Canada, Mexico, Central and South America being excluded—so it should probably be Make US Great Again (MUGA or MUSGA).  Think about parallels.  If Making Your Food Great Again was a slogan for a restaurant, you wouldn’t know if you were in for a night of champagne and caviar or a plate of weenies and beans.

So, let’s look at some potential definitions.

First, let’s just admit we’re talking MUSGA and not MAGA.  MAGA smacks of globalism, and you have to turn in your red hat for even thinking about that.  America = [United States of] America period.

What about “great?” and “again?”  Well, I would argue USA greatness revolves around the freedom of citizens to act as independent agents, to take an idea and run with it, to be the masters of their own domains. 

Big institutions, like the federal government and mega-corporations and monopolies, have their own ideas about who is to be the master.  They masquerade as the guy next store.  They want to appear as friends to personal initiative, independent thought and innovation, but their sentiments are like the barbecue sauce that’s been in the fridge door for a few years.  It looks good and smells inviting, but it’s actually an invitation to two-days of dependence on your nearest commode.  You may be going fast, but you’re not getting anywhere.

John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, in their book The Fourth Revolution, argue for leaner Government.  Tim Wu, in his book The Curse of Bigness, is a proponent for the social and political advantages of smaller businesses—businesses that don’t dominate society and are not too big to fail.  I haven’t yet broken the spine on The Economists’ Hour by Binyamin Applebaum, which is the next book in my stack, but I think its content will be in family with the stories told by Micklethwait, Wooldridge and Wu.  

In my opinion, their messages are ‘human-sized things tend to be better for people in general.’  I’ll go more into what I mean by “better” in subsequent posts.  If you can’t wait, check out the books I've named.  Their authors not only define “better” and “great,” they also define “again” in their telling of fascinating tales that are explicit about past days of greatness and approaches necessary for achieving amazing things today.

Ultimately, if you want to find the person who can achieve MUSGA, go into your bathroom and take a good look at yourself in the mirror.  Then, accept the challenge with the intensity that the Avengers took on Thanos.  Get smart.  The books above can provide a starting point, even if you end up disagreeing with them.  Then, if you’re not already, get involved in your community and local government.  Make Your Locality Amazing!  It's the best place to start.