Nasus Americanus
MR. SHANDY, father of the immortal Tristram, is one of the first on record to consider seriously the influence of noses upon human destiny. His observations were limited in scope and so his conclusions were faulty in spots. It is too bad that he was unable to visit this continent, for I am sure that the world would have learned something not to be found in the books today.
America is historically a remaker of peoples, and her laboratory is between the eyes. Here not only does the nose make the man, but collective noses make the national soul.
As a matter of record, the American Indian conversed in deep breathless grunts. His war cry was a high, nasal howl. His eyes were brooding and sunken beneath heavy supra-orbital ridges. His stoicism has been attributed to dignity, to the encroachment of the whites, to stupidity — all of these symptomatic only. His patient expression strikes a chord of sympathy in the breast of every white American. The European is apt to see in the Indian’s face only meanness. Why? The North American Indian has all the appearance of a sufferer from sinus headaches!
These United States were settled by noses and accents of every conceivable sort. The Wessex men of New England pulled ‘loabster poats’ while the South Saxon Virginian spaded his ‘gyahden.’ Upstate New Yorkers growled in German gutturals, Georgian Scots burred their words in resonant baritone, Pepysian Londoners turned i’s into e’s and a’s into ar’s along the muddy streets of Philadelphia.
Yet the first American characteristic noted by visiting Europeans was a universal nasality of speech. We were inaccurately noted as the nation that talks through its nose. ‘Inaccurately,’ I repeat. We are a nation set apart because we are unable to do just that thing. We cannot talk through our noses. Only by grace of surgery can many of us even breathe through them.
Conglomerate as were our racial origins, by the time the migration of pioneers to the Middle West began, a type distinctly American had come into being — the second, third, or fourth generation on this continent. These men, and the women who shared their perils, were alert, long-suffering, laconic, and irascible. Their eyes were sheathed and brooding, their fingers nervous on the trigger. Their bravery in venturing into the trackless wilderness is as unquestioned as is the nasal twang of their speech; but it was a bravery sharpened and intensified by nervousness. Although they showed little or no fear of actual redskins or catamounts, they seemed to live in a perpetual apprehension of the unseen — a chronic, inflammable, bad-tempered dread that raised them to recklessness. In their own phrase, they would fight a rattlesnake and give it the first two bites. Their religion was a sour self-denial through the week, a roaring, hysterical ecstasy on Sunday.
Popular works on family subjects tell us that our lives are allowed to begin through fright. On entering the world we do not know how to start the business of independent breathing, and we feel stifled. Terrified, we howl aloud, gulping at the air with open mouth. The trick is learned — we are breathing. To close the nose and mouth of the most placid baby will at once provoke a yell of rage, for that first fright is never forgotten. The infant whose breathing is impeded is frightened and knows it. The adult who is not getting a full supply of oxygen is also afraid, but normally he does not know it. Here is the first explanation of American ‘nervousness.’
This furnishes the only sane explanation of the fact that our pioneer forefathers took their religion in such uproarious fashion. The Azorean Portuguese is also capable of religious ecstasy; but it makes him smile dreamily and quiets his cheerfully chattering tongue. The true American, under stress of emotion, finds his breath tearing through his throat — not his nose — in sobbing gasps. Soon he is reduced to moaning and writhing, not primarily from the ecstasy itself, but from the way in which the ecstasy shuts off his supply of air. Any sudden change in temperature or humidity, any quick and violent emotion, makes the true American an unpredictable quantity. It overtaxes his already inadequate air supply and sets him nasally bawling for oxygen.
We are almost daily ’ lambasted ’ by viewers-with-alarm as vastly sunk from the high estate of our forefathers. Scholarly articles are written about our racial fear of trivial things, from the shyness with which we buy a gaudy necktie to the burning of the Salem witches, or, more recently, our jehad against the Bolsheviki. I maintain that these very phenomena are proof that we have not degenerated. If we had to, we could again penetrate virgin forests efficiently as soon as we got used to doing without a daily shave. Confronted with a visible enemy, we do no more running away than any other novice in battle, we quail no more than our European ancestors are known to have quailed. Once instructed in the art of war, we show no lack of courage, endurance, and resource. Our games are notoriously rough and violent.
But the difference is in the things we do not see. It is in the nervous state of mind which multiplies and strengthens the unseen menace of which we have hints, but no real information. In short, while peasants all over Europe breathe oxygen through ample nostrils, we gulp scorched gasoline through tortuous and obstructed labyrinths, and are thus ready at a moment’s notice for a sudden alarm which will cause us to reproduce in adult fashion the convulsive gasp with which we started our course through this vale of tears and sniffles. Turbinates may be whittled, septa reduced, tonsils dropped in the bucket, teeth X-rayed, glasses fitted, but our noses remain 100 per cent American. We still have sinus headaches, and we still ‘pronaounce’ our words.
The great game of deep thinkers and ponderous writers to-day is ‘Interpreting America.’ This process is usually
(а) describing some one American thing as big with potential disaster,
(b) assigning as the cause of danger some obliquity latent in the American soul, and (c) announcing an infallible cure which the writer has mined from the diamondiferous clay of his own consciousness.
You are wasting your time, my masters! We are flesh of your flesh. It matters not a jot whence you come or what has been your cultural background; I can find you literally thousands of your brothers among 100 per cent Americans. These Americans have and know all that you declare; but they have something more. They have American noses saddled on the faces and brains of every nation contributing its quota to the melting pot. These noses permit a mutual understanding of which your effete peoples are incapable. The tie that binds us closest is our ability to prescribe sympathetically for the rhinitis or coryza of friend or foe.
Were I yearning for fame I would not write songs. To paraphrase the wellknown sigh, ‘I care not who makes the laws of my country, let me but alleviate its noses!’ Could I accomplish that feat all history would be my debtor; and world-shaking figures like Hannibal or Napoleon would pale into insignificance.