I like visiting Harry’s Place every day, just to see if Alan A. is going to get in a fistfight. The last couple days there’s been some vigorous threads over Anti-Americanism. The debate/fuss is over my head, mainly because I don’t think either Americanism or Anti-Americanism really exist.
America is a big place with a lot of trees. The people who live here are special because we say so. We believe that if the people who don’t live here thought and acted more like us they’d be happier.
We have the nicest home in town. We drive the most expensive car, wear the finest clothes, eat the best food. The local sheriff arrests the people we want arrested and tears up the traffic tickets of those we favor. Our quilt wins first prize at the county fair every year. We are monumentally generous: if a neighbor loses their furniture to smoke damage in a house fire, we will replace it; and we will instruct them how to arrange it as well as drop by unannounced to ensure they haven’t tinkered with the floor plan. We expect their gratitude, especially when it’s time to vote for best quilt at the county fair. This is not Americanism; it is having your place, knowing it, and keeping it. It’s the way people are.
Our neighbors respect us. They admire and resent our house, car, clothes, and well-stocked pantry. They are grateful for the new furniture, but thought the carefully crafted thankyou note would suffice. They wouldn’t mind seeing first prize for best quilt occasionally going to someone else. This isn’t Anti-Americanism; it’s having your place, knowing it, and not loving it twenty-four hours a day. It’s the way people are.
You know, despite the impression that I seem to have built up around here, I'm actually regarded by my peers as a model of placidity - sometimes to the point of torpor.
Posted by: Alan Allport at February 5, 2005 02:04 PMIt's always the quiet ones you have to watch out for, you know.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at February 5, 2005 02:25 PMA lot of people think that about me, too. I mean, people who know me in person. I've never been sure whether they are mistaken or I am.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at February 5, 2005 04:16 PMHey Alan A: been reading your comments on Harry's Place, too. HP's one of my daily blog reads; so is Norm's blog.
Bobby: I found your blog from a posted comment on Harry's Place by Martha Bridgam. I've bookmarked y'alls blogs to my daily reads. Yeah, I'm from Vermont, but lived in Texas for 23 years. It's a kinda nice culture shock to move from a super trog state to one of the most liberal in the nation. I did live for a year in London, back in 1999; hence the interest in HP's rants and raves.
Anyway, I think Dubya would class me as and "older worker," cuz I'm 56. Keep on truckin'.
Cheers.
Posted by: Jay at February 5, 2005 06:39 PMNice to meet you Jay; keep on readin' and commentatin'.
Posted by: Alan Allport at February 6, 2005 05:09 AMFunny business where a post will go. Well, to underscore the fact of Alan A's non-belligerency, I'll quote from his latest comment in the anti-French/anti-American scuffle at HP's:
Too many people seem to regard slights against their own nationality as a commonplace atrocity ("A citizen of X can't walk down the streets of Y these days without being tarred and feathered and beaten and thrown into the canal and drowned"), whereas corresponding remarks that they make about others are (of course) a combination of dry wit and commonplace fact. Ultimately, the evil of anti-Americanism and anti-Frenchism/ Europeanism is not that it hurts other peoples' feelings, but that it damages the possibility of a reasoned world view. It is an injury that one does to oneself, although that is rarely appreciated by the people who commit it.
Inspired, I'm guessing, by Orwell's [probably] over-quoted As I Please of August 4, '44:
The truly evil thing is to act in such a way that peaceful life becomes impossible. War damages the fabric of civilization not by the destruction it causes...nor even by the slaughter of human beings, but by stimulating hatred and dishonesty. By shooting at your enemy you are not in the deepest sense wronging him. But by hating him, by inventing lies about him and bringing children up to believe them...you are striking not at one perishable generation, but at humanity itself.
Posted by: Bobby Farouk at February 6, 2005 06:56 AMMy favorite HP comment by Alan contained the following sentence:
But if Schaeffer is looking for some missing ingredient X that will suddenly return America's relationship with its military to a prelapsarian equipoise of his own imagination, then he simply misunderstands the nature of democratic armies.
To this day, a Google search for "prelapsarian equipoise" only returns that result.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at February 11, 2005 01:41 PMBe sure and record it as a Googlewhack, then.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at February 14, 2005 03:10 PM