The Empire Has No Name
However, regardless of how attached the emperor becomes to the comfortable suit of nakedness, sooner or later, someone will tell him the truth.
A name resembles clothing in some ways because it is something you wear.
The world’s only reigning superpower, some would say the greatest empire of all time, has no name. Regardless of how attached that nation has become to its descriptive term, as demonstrated by the song “America the Beautiful” for example, this is the simple truth.
A name is something people use in part to wield control over a person, animal, object, concept. It identifies, objectifies, locates. In a way, the thing named becomes available for manipulation through its name.
“The United States of America” is not a name. It’s a descriptive term with an approximate location.
“The term “united states” is used throughout the world by many countries because many countries are made up of states that have united. But in the case of all other countries, when using the term “united states”, reference is then made to the country, such as “the united states of Indonesia” meaning “the united states which together make up the country of Indonesia”. The “of” has a completely different meaning from the “of” in “United States of America” where it means “the united states which are located in America.”
And, if “United States” had been intended as a proper noun by that country’s founding fathers, then it would not be necessary to add “of America”. “Of America” means that of all the states that have united into a country, this particular one is located in America.
So, the “of America” part of the designation means the “United States” part is not intended as a proper noun.
Over the past two centuries or so, the entire world, or almost, has used the term “Americans” to refer to the inhabitants of that country, you know, the one squished in between Mexico and Canada. In doing so, they’ve been more or less unaware that they are using the term by default because the country has no name. “America” is the name of the western hemisphere comprising North and South America, it is not, never has been, the name of a country.
The entire world that is, except for other Americans, such as me. As a Canadian, I was never really able to put a finger on the reason for the niggling feeling that something wasn’t right whenever I, or anyone else used the term “American” when speaking of someone from the US.
I felt oddly gratified to learn that South Americans refer to “Americans” as “United Statesians” in Spanish. The term, however, just doesn’t fly in English. Besides, it’s no more accurate than “Americans”.
To my mind, there is no question that a thing of this magnitude happened by oversight or accident, as if the founding fathers of that great country had not thought it through properly, any more than the symbolism on the American one dollar bill happened by accident.
Copyright �© 2006 Paul Freynet
