I was born in America. Raised in America. I live and work in America. And yet if you ask me what it means to be American, I will stare at you blank-faced, while my brain makes the quiet whirring sound of a vacuum cleaner sucking air. You might say that to be American is to know freedom, or to be terrified of gun violence, or to appreciate the loud caw of a bald eagle. As I’ve pondered what makes us us, I’ve come to believe that the best way to understand who we all are is to look at our stuff. It is through the objects we make and use and revere that the contours of our culture become clear. In 2010, the British Museum and the BBC published “A History of the World in 100 Objects,” a book the size of a small doorstop that plotted the story of human history through a set of artifacts from the museum’s collection. The book’s list begins with the mummy of Hornedjitef and ends with a solar-powered lantern, which signaled a certain amount of optimism for the future. Using the book as inspiration, I pulled together a collection of 25 objects that are distinctly American, in a bid to understand my own country, and by proxy, this moment in history. My list in Times Opinion begins with a Costco chicken, entombed in a plastic shell. And it ends with the inflatable tube man, a humanoid windsock used to sell cars who, when not dancing, lies crumpled on the ground. Who we are as a nation can be uncovered by digging into the piles of stuff that surround us. You just have to take a look.
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