Over the prolonged founding of the United States, we were bereft of the baggage of the past. In this lay our great promise.
Over the prolonged founding of the United States, we were bereft of the baggage of the past. In this lay our possible madness, but so strangely decent and often gentle and kindly form of madness.
The newer, perhaps newest, opinions of historians is that the colonies which would one day form the United States were settled in the main by men and women looking for a job, to put it a bit tersely. They were British people of some education or serious vocational training and with little hope of any good employment if they remained in the British Isles where population was growing even faster than the opportunities generated by the early (or even pre-period) of the Industrial Revolution. Those people dreamed of a decent pay for either entrepreneurial efforts or for honest labor for another, and those people were willing to work hard and smart to reach their dreams. A decent pay but also respect, a chance to form a household, perhaps for an existing family or for a new family formed in the New World.
A very modest dream for most. Few held even the dream of substantial but not spectacular wealth such as that achieved by Benjamin Franklin or, God willing, the flashier wealth achieved by the trader (and smuggler) John Hancock. We had our boasters displayed so well, as I dimly recall, in the characters of Davy Crockett and Mike Fink. We had our boosters and hucksters who played so important a role in developing the American West, building shacks with false-fronts planted in almost arbitrary spots in Kansas to entice settlers and to trick the railroads into adding a station. We had our slave-traders and opium-dealers (the second category including Russell & Co with its operations officer, Warren Delano—grandfather to FDR). We’ve had our political scoundrels, including some who benefited from the conveniently timed demise of political opponents. We’ve had professional politicians who never made huge salaries given their needs to entertain and be seen in the best of clothes in the best of places; those same politicians seemed to have saved so many thousands of dollars out of their spare pennies so that they had tens of millions by retirement from the White House or Senate. The same stuff we sneer at when it happens in some Latin American banana republic or some African country manufactured to the needs of Western natural resource companies. Same old, same old.
And, yet, as someone who lived in a small town in a part of New England that knew few blue-bloods, I remember a basic decency that was a bit like those sit-coms on TV—but a bit more real and less plastic. It was perhaps inspiration for DisneyWorld and for Westworld, but still part of God’s world. Hannah Arendt might have been right in her claim that, like the German middle-class of the 1930s and 1940s who built and ran the chemical factories and made the trains to Auschwitz run on time, Americans are better described as nice than as moral, generous and well-behaved in good circumstances and possessing little in the way of the moral courage which is needed in tough circumstances. We go along, even with leaders we’ve begun to suspect of being bad in morality or competence.
We weren’t exceptional, though our citizens who had never been overseas but in US Army uniforms did read National Geographic Magazine and sometimes popular history books or middle-brow novels which seem to have great intellectual depth compared to most of what’s published nowadays. We didn’t need graphic depictions of bodies being ripped apart by bullets—an empathetic man or woman, boy or girl, could read Kenneth Roberts’ Arundel and understand the sufferings of the New Englanders and Virginia riflemen as they made their way up to Quebec under the command of Benedict Arnold and Daniel Morgan. The war novels of James Jones and Norman Mailer told what an intelligent reader needed to appreciate the physical and psychological horrors of more modern forms of war.
And some of those less-traveled Americans, most of whom had never eaten in Thai or Lebanese restaurants, could identify a good number of countries on the globe. They knew the American states and cities and river systems. Many had some serious knowledge of the two World Wars and maybe the Civil War and Revolutionary War. Some even could name some of the American Indian tribes which had lived nearby and could talk of the horrors committed by red-man and white-man alike. If biased a bit by current standards toward isolation, they could often justify their stance by some knowledge of and a gut-level feeling for the complexities of the world.
And those Americans were reasonably hardworking and pretty well-balanced in time they spent on other parts of their lives—family and church and maybe military reserve or guard unit. The children were also a bit better balanced. It was important to know the standings of the major league sports teams and of the power hitters in the Major League home-run derby and the goal-scorers in the NHL; it was important to run inside and catch the score for those early Super-Bowls; it was most important to spend Saturday afternoon playing pick-up baseball or tag football. It was good to spend Sunday afternoons at family picnics or church picnics or at the lake for those lucky enough to have an uncle with a cabin and a boat.
It was a country where people tended to get complacent about job skills and about the school system—we were on top and would never have to worry about competing with factories on Taiwan or about finding our children in university classrooms competing against Bulgarians who’d already had two or three years of (American) college-level physics in their high schools. Wasn’t even on the horizon, though in 1973, when I was trying to figure out why I was floundering so badly in my freshman year of college, I could walk through science and engineering buildings and see a high percentage of Asian graduate students.
Over the prolonged founding of the United States, we were bereft of the baggage of the past. In this lay our great promise.
Over the prolonged founding of the United States, we were bereft of the baggage of the past. In this lay our possible madness, but so strangely decent and often gentle and kindly form of madness.
In past writings, I’ve noted the claims of Ortega y Gasset that the West entered a serious process of cultural decay in the 19th century because large numbers of peoples and people were freed from parochial lives and their leaders failed to raise them to a state appropriate for a cosmopolitan people. Instead, those leaders sank down into the vulgar masses to enjoy, in the modern setting, movies making the Three Stooges seem sophisticated and television shows teaching ideas which would have been considered morally perverse in Greenwich Village back in the 1950s. Clergymen and teachers, politicians and novelists, musicians and painters, prepared the way for the low standards of mass entertainment and mass education. Remember—under such circumstances, standards will be low if larger markets are to be created even if the various peoples have rich and deep cultures. In recent years, the music industry has produced interesting and good quality collaborations between, say, African and Celtic musicians. Earlier such collaborations, sometimes unconscious and over generations, had produced some interesting and even some good-quality results, but mostly profitable ephemera, in rock-and-roll and country genres. Too often, what resulted from efforts to appeal to teenagers, white and black, urban and rural, Northern and Southern and Western, was sheer junk celebrating emotional and cognitive immaturity, as well as celebrating various moral and political ideas disapproved by most parents, though many of those parents were the ones who turned the television set to the programs which were the most questionable. And now such low, trashy standards prevail throughout American society.
We were a people of interesting innocence, streaked with that corruption which led morally conservative men and women to watch Norman Lear’s fare along with their children. That innocence, cynical and likable at the same time, left us generally vulnerable to that cultural Marxist march through our institutions of education and entertainment, of journalism and political activities, of serious culture and religion. So it was that Lear and other pseudo-sophisticates, ignorant and untalented men and women with snooty attitudes, were able to complete that American process of passing from barbarism to decadence without going through a stage of civilization in between.
We didn’t mature out of that innocence which sheltered us while building much, and tolerating crimes by our most ambitious against Amerindians and Africans—as they practiced for what they’ve started doing to all of us. We, as a people and a country, became the image of Dorian Gray—self-serving degeneracy gilded with a thin layer of likable innocence.
Ah, but we can at least cast a substantial part of the blame on some others.
Because of the moral irresponsibility of European leaders in the first half of the 20th century, we Americans were thrust into a role of world leadership for which we were far from ready even if we’d been able to handle the morally degenerate exploiters arising in our midst. We’ve performed as badly in the international realm as could have been feared, failing to even learn from experience, even those post-9/11 kinetic activities resulting in the death of thousands of American soldiers and the psychological or physical maiming of tens of thousands of others and the deaths of probably better than a million people in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and Syria and the tribal lands of Pakistan. And to no purpose. We are no safer inside the United States, not that we were ever in so much danger as the residents of most other countries, and we’ve destroyed other countries while killing those million people in Southwestern Asia.
Only time will tell if we Americans have destroyed our capacity to be either a good or a great country, let alone both at once. For now, we’re best described as a juvenile delinquent of a country.