Fifty Things I Like About the United States

What an eccentric list, Joseph – disturbing, even, like a Rorschach inkblot test! I’m with you at the start, but you have a soft spot for the slaveholders’ rebellion? The fanatical, ruthless Stonewall Jackson included?

I’m partial to Kentucky bourbon too, like the greatest general of the Civil War, Ulysses Grant. Both the whiskey and the general would make my list.

The only hint of that one great, original and unique American art form, jazz, is…Glenn Miller? No Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis – the greats I loved even as an English teen.

And the Founders and Founding documents like the Declaration of Independence that Ed West in the Telegraph (UK) just called England’s greatest gift to the world? At http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/edwest/100169065/happy-birthday-to-the-united-states-of-america-the-greatest-gift-england-gave-the-world/

No Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Thomas Merton, St. Katherine Drexel? – they’d all make my list. I’m sure I could come up with some actors and musicians of the last 40 years too to lighten things up – not sure whom though. Marlon Brando, Meryl Streep?

Paul, I agree that the list is eclectic, odd even. I knew my mention of Jackson (Stonewall not Alan!) would be controversial. The tragedy of the War between the States is that both sides had the moral high ground on one of the two key issues. Nobody can defend slavery, of course, but nobody should defend the invasion of one country, against the will of the vast majority of its people, by another. Slavery is wrong but subsidiarity is right. The present usurpation of power by the Federal Government should make all of us pine for reinvigorated government by the individual saints.

Joseph, This is not the best place to debate the Slaveholders’ Rebellion, so I will just say that the slaveholders had no moral high ground, though they saw themselves as defending property rights. They were not “another country” but in rebellion against the United States of which they were citizens, in defense of a deeply evil institution.

I guess this is not the place to debate subsidiarity either…but you brought it up and I can’t resist. A principle to which I am deeply committed, it involves protecting the space (of family and civil society or associations) between individual and state, recognizing that problems are best resolved by the people closest to them. It does not imply a right to secede, in any interpretation I’ve seen.

Defending the property rights of slaveholders in the American context involved suppression by the state of the capacity of slaves to sustain families, form associations or participate in governance at any level. It was the intrusion of the state into people’s lives at its most extreme and violent.

The overreaching of the state that bothers both of us today has more in common with the law and practice of the slaveholding states than of the United States against which they rebelled.

As a fellow-non-American – one who has not yet even visited the United States! – I feel obliged to augment Joseph’s gratitude to American with my own.

I have immediate cause. About the only TV which I watch here in Canberra is the Fox History Channel and the associated channels concerned with historical, scientific and industrial fact. Above all I rarely miss a program on the wars of the Twentieth Century (and, incidentally, on the American Civil War as well).

This led me to remark to my wife a few days ago on how disastrous the twentieth-century would have been for the entire world had it not been for America. It was only because of America that Germany lost either the First or the Second World Wars – in the latter it would have won even on the Eastern Front, had there been no U.S. supplies to Russia. It was only because of fear of America that Stalin after the Second World War did not occupy the whole of Continental Europe plus the British Isles; and only because of America that Communism did not prevail in all of South-East Asia and all Korea. It was the example of American-led Western prosperity and relative freedom which was the fundamental cause of the collapse of Communism in Europe, and its discreet withering in China.

When in the early 90s Milosevic, Mladic, Karadzic & Co. were invading Croatia and Bosnia, and murdering on a semi-genocidal scale, the European nations and NATO would have done nothing but continue smugly tut-tutting had it not been for the United States, which insisted on decisive armed intervention. Had it not been for the United States, Sadam would still be in power in Bagdad; the Taliban would still rule Afghanistan; and Muslim fundamentalist terrorists would have wreaked vastly more havoc than they have, and still be wreaking it.

Yet it has been only because of deep and vital roots of metaphysical belief and idealism in American culture that any of this good could have happened – a major well-spring of which has been Evangelical Protestantism. Indeed, given the catastrophic collapse of Catholicism world-wide since the Vatican Council, both as a community of believers and as a cultural force, it is likely that the United States would be as oppressive a totalitarian secularist thug-state as Canada had it not been that the Evangelical Protestant culture is far stronger there than in Canada, where the only real Christian cultural strength used to be in now-corrupt Catholicism. (Of course, if Obama & Co. get their way the U.S. will soon be another Canada, as some of its states already seem to be.)

You can tell I’m older than Joseph because the figures of American popular culture for whom I’m most grateful are mostly from a decade before his choices, although there’s an overlap. I think of the Weavers, Guy Mitchell, Jo Stafford, Doris Day, Harry Belafonte, and the diversely talented Connie Francis, to mention only a few whose songs have always gladdened. (Like Joseph, when it comes to songs I’m happy to have simple tastes.)

A productive theme for academic theses and thoughtful popular writing well into the future would be, How would the Twentieth Century have been for the world without America?