Why does he do that?

A few thoughts on President Obama's executive leadership style, from yours truly.

I'm hardly the first to think of Obama as "community organizer in chief." The essay linked above is original work, but Lee Cary had a similar insight last year, and Huffington Post blogger Nancy Cohen used the same label (although Cary and I think differently about it than she does).

I guess it really is Monday!

UPDATE: James Taranto's Best of the Web Today column for December 1 has several thoughts that dovetail nicely with the argument I made in American Spectator Online.

Martin Niemoller was right

And Albert Mohler was smart to follow Niemoller's insight as one of the original signers of the recent Manhattan Declaration.

Sadly, there are Christians who plead "conscience" in refusing to stand up for the sanctity of human life, the dignity of marriage, and the rights of conscience and religious liberty.

What they call conscience looks to me like hardness of heart, so I'm glad Mohler didn't make the same argument.

UPDATE: NRO has more about the Manhattan Declaration.

A movie recommendation

"The Blind Side" is more than a feel-good movie based on a true story. With a director who takes his time, an excellent cast throughout, and Sandra Bullock leading the charge, it's an affecting and warm-hearted portrait of the modern American South.

Just because

An account of the first Thanksgiving

From the History channel web page:

The most detailed description of the "First Thanksgiving" comes from Edward Winslow from A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, in 1621:

"Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, among other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed upon our governor, and upon the captain, and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty."

A Modern American Thanksgiving

Scott Simon writes a heartwarming essay for the Wall Street Journal, "How to Say Thanksgiving in Mandarin"

A snippet:

When my parents—a Jewish man and an Irish woman—married in the 1950s, they were warned, as transracial adoption families often are, that their children would face bigotry and hostility. But today, our 6-year-old niece Juliette, a California blond, slips her arm around the shoulders of our daughters and says, "We're cousins for life, right?"

Our Chinese children sit at the Passover table and scrounge for Easter eggs. They wear "South Side Irish" green scarves around their necks on St. Patrick's Day. It's all in the family.

My wife came home one day from our daughters' Chinese culture class to announce there would be no class next week. "Because of the Jewish holidays," she explained, straight-faced. Only in America. Our girls speak French, like their mother. My wife and I join our girls to sing "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" in Mandarin. We've learned that families mixed by marriage or adoption don't shrink or starve a heritage. They nourish it with newcomers.

Midnight at the "Oasis"

Robin of Berkeley on the wilding of Sarah Palin.

Save the Medieval Warm Period

Jonathan Overpeck and scientists of his ilk are embarrassed by that medieval warm period, because it undercuts the preferred (and, for Al Gore and his Church of Warmery, lucrative) narrative about how industrialization is to blame for fluctuations in planetary temperature.

But the cat's out of the bag, the damaging emails are making their rounds, and the polar bears are using ice floes as diving platforms. As James Taranto and others have said, "what's this about 'settled science'?"

UPDATE: James Taranto has more.

Russ with the book review

Fair and balanced.

Russ doesn't write for the Washington Post, the New York Times, or any wire service. But that's a point in his favor. Remember the old slogan about how we should "question authority"?

UPDATE: John Mark Reynolds pans the Palin book. The Reynolds critique is good and possibly even devastating, but I am more sanguine about Palin than he is. Unlike Dan Riehl, for example, Reynolds doesn't think the book gives us a look at Sarah Palin's governing philosophy, assuming that she has one (I think she does have one, but has not spent much time articulating it).

Many people have noted that Sarah Palin is a lot like George W. Bush in relying more on her instincts than on her intellect when faced with anything that requires a decision. That's a potentially hazardous shortcoming that she shares even with politicians who think differently, up to and including President Barack "split the difference" Obama.

But if you read the Reynolds piece, you'll find that his main gripe is that Sarah Palin and her co-author, Lynn Vincent just aren't as good with words as Ronald Reagan was, or as Bill Ayers is.

We didn't need a 400-page memoir to find that out, right? The Democrat who once characterized Reagan as "an amiable dunce" (to knowing applause from the Left) lost any credibility he ever had as a judge of intellectwhen Reagan's handwritten notes about various political questions were released.

And let's not forget that Sarah Palin annoys all the right people.

Electric guitar, Hammond B-3 organ, and depression

It's a great Hank Williams song. My favorite version is by the Notting Hillbillies, but that's because Mark Knopfler was in the Notting Hillbillies. He plays here with Tom Jones on the vocal, and that pairing works wonderfully, too.

Papist snake handling Jeebus phreak?

Oh, she makes me laugh. I take that description as a badge of honor.

As for "knee deep in guilt by association" -- it's a fair point.

Defending logic and improving word choice

Hey, Andrew Sullivan: Even if your dubious premise about the value of sniping at Sarah Palin's memoir is correct, it would be a "civic responsibility," not a "civil responsibility." You and your flunkies aren't the least bit "civil" when declaiming (17 times in one day!) about all things Palin. And you'd best avoid getting into a war of words with people who can craft sparkling throwaway phrases like "This isn't a Freudian slip-- this is the whole damn Freudian marina." Duck the haymaker from Ace, and you'd still have to face Cassandra and Dan, both of them also black belts in wordsmithery.

Geoffrey Dunn: Your essay on "The First Ten Lies from Going Rogue" says Palin is lying about having lived "an American life" because she's spent most of her time in Alaska (!) So because another writer once observed that there are many unique things about the 49th state, suddenly people who live there are not American? Just what have you been smoking?

Dunn, again: You say Palin "lies" by describing John McCain's staffers as having had "a jaded aura." That's an entirely defensible opinion, not a lie. If they "bent over backwards to protect her" (as you say but Palin does not), it has no bearing on whether they were jaded. They might well have been jaded, working as they were for an irascible senator who often sounds jaded himself (anybody remember the McCain-Feingold bill or the way McCain was flummoxed by economic implosion?).

Maureen Dowd: "Bass-ackwards" is not "a Palin coinage;" it's just an expression you haven't heard before. And I don't believe you ever worried that Palin's book would make you feel even a smidgen less American. Guess what? Her book is not about you.

Matt Maher: I know you mean to inspire by writing Christian "praise music," but in spite of what you sing in "Love Has Come," God is not going to lead us beyond "earthen" tears, because we're not ceramics. The word you wanted was "earthly."

President Obama: The way you switch from "I" in positive usage to "We" in negative usage has drawn notice.

They're asking questions, too

James Pethokoukis at Reuters looks at the economic questions that the Chinese are asking President Obama while he travels there:

"[Chinese] Government officials are using his Asian trip as an opportunity to ask the White House questions. Detailed questions.

Boilerplate assurances that America won’t default on its debt or inflate the shortfall away are apparently not cutting it. Nor should they, when one owns nearly $2 trillion in assets denominated in the currency of a country about to double its national debt over the next decade.

Nothing happening in Washington today should give Beijing any comfort or confidence about what may happen tomorrow. Healthcare reform was originally promoted as a way to “bend the curve” on escalating entitlement costs, the major part of which is financing Medicare and Medicaid. That is looking more and more like an overpromised deliverable.

For instance, a new study from the U.S. government’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services finds that the healthcare reform bill recently passed in the House of Representatives would increase healthcare spending to 21.3 percent of GDP by 2019 compared with 20.8 percent under current law."

Darleen Click and some other bloggers have economic context for this. The specter of fraud looms ever larger.

If you like the musical "Big River" and you're thinking Huck Finn's no-account "Pap" had a point in that song about the "Dadgum gub'mint (you sorry so-and-sos!)," then you're thinkin' what I'm thinkin'.

Thinking past centrifugal bumble-puppy

Mark Steyn:

“Diversity” is one of those words designed to absolve you of the need to think. Likewise, a belief in “multiculturalism” doesn’t require you to know anything at all about other cultures, just to feel generally warm and fluffy about them. Heading out from my hotel room the other day, I caught a glimpse of that 7-Eleven video showing Major Hasan wearing “Muslim” garb to buy a coffee on the morning of his murderous rampage. And it wasn’t until I was in the taxi cab that something odd struck me: He was an American of Arab descent. But he was wearing Pakistani dress — that’s to say, a “Punjabi suit,” as they call it in Britain, or the shalwar kameez, to give it its South Asian name. For all the hundreds of talking heads droning on about “diversity” across the TV networks, it was only Tarek Fatah, writing in the Ottawa Citizen, who pointed out that no Arab males wear this get-up — with one exception: Those Arab men who got the jihad fever and went to Afghanistan to sign on with the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In other words, Major Hasan’s outfit symbolized the embrace of an explicit political identity entirely unconnected with his ethnic heritage.

Mr. Fatah would seem to be a genuine “multiculturalist”: That’s to say, he’s attuned to often very subtle “diversities” between cultures. Whereas the professional multiculturalist sees the 7-Eleven video and coos, “Aw, look. He’s wearing . . . well, something exotic and colorful, let’s not get hung up on details. Celebrate diversity, right? Can we get him in the front row for the group shot? We may be eligible for a grant.”

UPDATE: Christopher Hitchens appears to agree with Mark Steyn.

The short form of a good argument

Law professor Ann Althouse: "By her own words, Sarah Palin is dumb."

Althouse thinks there's evidence for that in Palin's recounting of the setup for her embarrassing interview with Katie Couric, because in her book, Palin says she felt pushed into talking with Couric rather than some other network newsperson, and because the interview was wrongly billed by one McCain aide as a chance for two working mothers to empathize with each other.

Althouse is miffed because by her lights, Palin was too subservient to her running mate's staff, and that subservience somehow proves she was out of her depth or one shot short of a double espresso

(What's funny is that Palin is also accused of being ungrateful to the McCain campaign-- so which is it? Palin the ignorant lickspittle or Palin the uppity candidate who refused the place she was given? Do dumb people confound platoons of hostile fact-checkers while getting sizable advances for their memoirs? Why does snark aimed at Sarah Palin seem to richochet off her wrists as though Lynda Carter had loaned her the Wonder Woman bracelets? And just who thinks the McCain campaign was run by political geniuses?).

Fortunately, the people who commented on that Althouse post made points that their law professor hostess should have.

Not content to comment on the Althouse blog, Ace then weighed in with a common-sense rebuttal: "I think [Althouse's] Sisters Gotta Do It For Themselves analysis overlooks a major point: "Sarah Palin...acted as a subordinate to John McCain because she really was a subordinate to John McCain."

That makes sense to me. And Ace has some trenchant reader commentary from his readers, also. He and his peeps are a lot more fun than the earnest but curiously misguided Althouse.

A sporting interlude

The many reasons why the NBA has no business retiring Michael Jordan's number.

Another blown assignment

The left side of the blogosphere is wondering why the right side of the blogosphere made such a big deal out of the deep bow that President Obama gave the emperor of Japan.

In an echo of what the White House itself said afterward, some lefty bloggers say that President Obama was simply observing protocol. The problem with that explanation is that it paints the heads of state who shook the emperor's hand as buffoons. If Obama got it right, then the rest of them got it wrong.

We should also remember that protocol is a two-way street: There is protocol for greeting the emperor of Japan, but there is also protocol that governs what the president of the United States should and should not do. As one wag noted, "not even the CEO of Mitsubishi would bow that low."

Some lefty bloggers say never mind protocol, because President Obama was being culturally sensitive. Except that, as Thomas Lifson and some others have pointed out, a culturally sensitive person would not try to combine a bow with a handshake: it's one or the other.

Perhaps President Obama thought that his Hawaiian upbringing was enough to make him seem cosmopolitan on a state trip to Asia.

Does no competent person brief the president before ceremonial occasions?

The meaning of life

"This is the meaning of life: getting a face, becoming real, becoming yourself-- but in ways and toward an end not even dreamed of by the pop psychologists who say these things so casually. Yes, life is a process of becoming yourself -- but this is done by suffering, not by sinning; by saying No as well as saying Yes; by climbing against the gravity of the selfish self, not by the direct paths of 'self-realization' and 'self-actualization.' The meaning of life is war. And our enemies are not less but more real and formidable than flesh and blood. Unless we defeat them, we will die a death infinitely more hopeless and horrible than any battlefield gore [good thing Jesus has already defeated them -- ed.]. It is not easy to get a face. Job is no exception, but the rule; the trouble God had to bring him through is ours, too, in one way or another. However, Job's way is unusually visible, extraordinarily externalized. Not all of us lose our children, our health, our possessions, and our confidence in one day. But all of us must learn to lose everything but God, for all of us will die, and you cannot take anything with you but God."

-- Peter Kreeft, Three Philosophies of Life (c. 1989, Ignatius Press)

Weekend inspiration

Amy Henry of World Magazine writes a "catch and release" essay that is more poignant than you might expect, and Mom at "Shoved to Them" reflects on the first Mass served by her eldest son.

There's also this from Andrew Murray's book, Abide in Christ:

"Faith is confessed helplessness casting itself upon God's promise, and claiming its fulfillment; faith is the putting ourselves quietly into God's hands for Him to do His work."

The Anchoress (of course) has good stuff up about grace and prayer.

Meanwhile, in California

I don't have that much of a megaphone, but I'm going to give a shout-out to the ever-vigilant Debbie Schlussel, who has details of a crime that I haven't yet seen acknowledged elsewhere. This is the kind of thing we should get all wee-weed up about (if I may borrow that curious phrase).

Unrelated except for its Golden State dateline and its cautionary tale of media malpractice: The Los Angeles Times misquotes and mischaracterizes how American Catholic bishops feel about Pelosicare.

Veterans' Day reading

The photo of Sergeant Kimberly Munley chatting yesterday with the Secretary of Defense came from this CNN story. Munley is not herself a veteran, but I don't think anyone who is would begrudge her placement here. Her comrade in arms the other day, Sergeant Mark Todd, also deserves kudos.

If you're not reading Michael Yon's dispatches, you're missing a chance to learn from the best war reporter working today.

Elsewhere in the blogosphere, Cassandra profiles Lt. Col. Juanita Warman while writing about those who serve.

As usual with Cassandra's work, the essay is elegantly written, and worth reading both for the opportunity to meet Colonel Warman and for the chance to follow the thought of Cassandra herself.

I also liked this unrelated but classy expression of gratitude.

UPDATE: This series of short videos showing dogs greeting returning veterans doesn't count as reading, but it's worth watching.

Tax-exempt status as a political football

Of course it's come to this. And the sad thing (one of several, actually) is that the Stupak Amendment carried Pelosicare over the finish line in the House but will probably be gutted or ignored by the Senate, where pro-lifers have an even tougher time than in the House.

(Representative Cao, the lone Republican who voted for Pelosicare, is an honorable man, but all he got from the president in return for his crucial vote was a promise not to forget Louisiana. That's it -- Basically, "I promise to pay attention." Of course, many of us would say the president should have been paying attention already. It's not like he doesn't know who Lousiana Governor Bobby Jindal is, or something).

Gabriel Malor's insight in the first linked post is worth re-posting here:

This insidious line of thought is characteristic of Democrats, who are so twisted that they believe whatever the government forbears to take by force of law is a "subsidy" the recipient should be thankful for. It is therefore something the Democrats wield against organizations like the Catholic Church which do not demonstrate sufficient deference to the all-powerful Government.

Note that the comments on Gabriel's linked post are also educational (often hilariously dark) in a sober and sometimes scatological kind of way.

Faith and gravity

I would not ordinarily connect those two things either. But Reluctant Scribe did, to very good effect (as friend Bookworm noticed). Then Julie went and quoted from Kevin Knight and his astronaut analogy, which also fits.

Fort Hood and willful blindness

Gerard at American Digest brought this tweet to my attention, and it strikes home as much for its perceptive analysis as for its pith.

Jim Treacher is right about the preferred narrative now being advanced by the usual suspects, including Tim "Haditha" McGirk and Dr. Phil "how's that workin' out for ya?" McGraw.

Robert Stacy McCain calls this "the elite search for non-meaning at Fort Hood." It must be the new pastime at the Department of Homeland Security.

That's a fools' game that Frank Gaffney and Ralph Peters will not play. Jeffrey Goldberg has related thoughts, and David Warrren is also worth reading: "Getting at Islamist cells, to say nothing of lone, self-appointed jihadis within our society, means getting over the false sentimentality that turns a terrorist incident into an "incomprehensible tragedy" when it is not incomprehensible, and not a theatrical event."

Meanwhile, the axiom that "by their fruit you shall know them" still holds true, which might be why the gimlet-eyed Dorothy Rabinowitz has no time for people who want to paint the killings as an act of mercy (yes, there are such people). Even David Brooks is astonished at the lengths to which some progressives will go to deny the obvious.

Here's a rhetorical question: If there was ever any doubt that "political correctness" (i.e., squeamish cowardice mixed with a toxic misunderstanding of diversity) kills, then why is it that even generals speak anonymously about the Fort Hood case?

UPDATE: See also Pamela Geller, who writes persuasively that "it's not political correctness, it's shariah law."

Iconography

Remembering the fall (spontaneous dismantling, really) of the Berlin Wall, twenty years ago today.

What's funny in a sad way is that -- to judge by their wildly popular home and search engine web page -- the Google people are still celebrating the 4oth anniversary of Sesame Street. The Children's Television Workshop must have paid them off, because I don't think I've ever seen the Google home page carry the same theme for an entire week before.

They started with Big Bird's feet, then moved onto Cookie Monster. We also got Ernie and Burt. I was okay with all that, although it seemed like overkill even then (Did Grover get a cameo, too? I always liked that skinny monster because unlike that saccharine little nincompoop Elmo, Grover was capable of sarcasm and exasperation, amply demonstrated in the "waiter" skits where he played the perfect foil to an impossibly fussy customer).

Google also gave us Oscar the Grouch (strictly B team), and -- today -- The Count (also B team).

They've commemorated silly or politically correct stuff before, but this obsession with Sesame Street makes Wikipedia look respectable.

Hey, I like Jim Henson and Frank Oz. I enjoyed their early muppet work as a kid (and what they couldn't do on Sesame Street, they eventually did very well on The Muppet Show). But those Silicon Valley geniuses who seem hellbent on reprising every Sesame Street character they can think of (arrested development, anyone?) really need a dose of perspective.

Would it be too much to suggest that the fall of the Berlin Wall trumps felt and googly eyes, at least for most people? Or to put this another way, since when does "reset button" diplomacy include snubbing German chancellor Angela Merkel, and all those for whom the fall of the wall means something?

I choose to remember.

UPDATE: The best line from Drew M. over at Ace's place: The Berlin Wall didn't fall "because Mikhail Gorbachev was a neat guy who was channeling his inner Jefferson." Sadly, that might be news to Hillary Clinton.

Sung last week in church but still appropriate

Words by William Irons. Music by Beethoven. It's "Sing With All the Saints in Glory"

Life eternal! heaven rejoices; Jesus lives, who once was dead.
Join we now the deathless voices; child of God, lift up your head!
Patriarchs from the distant ages, saints all longing for their heaven,
Prophets, psalmists, seers, and sages, all await the glory given.

Advice from a violin teacher

"Sometimes you have to play through the ugly to get to where you want to be."

-- Lyda C., while coaching a student for her friend and fellow violin teacher Mary

Politics, anger, and prayers

Orrin Judd (in an aside) and S.E. Cupp (in an essay) both assessed President Obama recently.

Unfortunately, their unflattering judgments accord with the [dithering/paralysis/ineptitude/narcisssism] that Clarice Feldman and others (including, however reluctantly, Washington Post editors) have noticed.

As long as I'm thinking uncharitably about a commander-in-chief who obviously needs both prayers and clues, let me also say to the Web elves who write rotating headlines at the Microsoft Network homepage that I really don't care whether the Fort Hood shooter was "mortified" at the prospect of impending deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan, because even if other soldiers kidded him about his religious faith, he is not the victim.

Like Drew M. writes over at Ace of Spades, "he had no problem going to war. He did so [yesterday]. Just on the other side." (Hot Air has context that Chris Matthews missed)

I'll pray for the shooter because I have to. But I'll pray for the people he killed and wounded because I want to. And it's good to see that heroism hasn't left us.

UPDATE: Before posting this, I wondered about the wisdom of conflating my reaction to coverage of the shootings at Fort Hood with criticism of President Obama that had been written before those shootings. My self-consciously progressive friends are not big fans of this blog, but I imagine that they, as well as progressives whom I don't know, might object to this as an instance of lazy blogging or guilt by association. Beyond that, I'm no fan of contributing to the misguided notion that anything that happens on our president's watch is automatically All About Him. I understand that the deranged actions of an Army major had as much to do with President Obama as Hurricane Katrina had to do with President Bush. The presidency just isn't all that, no matter who occupies the Oval Office.

But I'm in no mood for lectures on fairness from Obama supporters, because although President Obama is right to say that "the entire nation is grieving right now," other things he said in the same Rose Garden statement prove that he doesn't know diddly about when to shut up, or how to empathize with grief-stricken, angry, and emotionally numbed citizens.

"I would caution against jumping to conclusions," he chided. Ye gods. Talk about tone deaf! We all know what that condescending bit of advice means (about which more from Mark Steyn here).

But who elected Obama schoolmarm-in-chief, and made the rest of us ten years old?

Americans don't need lectures from the bully pulpit right now. Our president has inserted himself into a news story that he had no business trying to appropriate for his own ends, however high-minded.

UPDATE TWO: I have a few significant disagreements with radio host Michael Savage and do not often catch his show. But he opened tonight with a poignant bagpipe tune and then a deeply felt version of "Taps." He also blasted "the money changers in the temple of democracy" (meaning Congress) for not having suspended all business today in honor of the Fort Hood dead. I think his musical choices were classy, and his righteous anger fully justified.

What does it mean to be an American?

The question in this post title -- what does it mean to be an American? -- is something I seem to have sidled up to in a pair of recent essays for American Spectator Online. I guess a trip to Disneyland and an argument with a celebrity who offers his own snapshot of our national character can't help but raise questions about We the People of these United States, and what ties us together.

These are questions that I last thought about when Joe Carter hosted on online symposium about the roots of Americanism in 2005 (I argued at the time that it was wrong to overstate the influence of Puritanism on the American founding, because it was necessary but not sufficient, and more derivative than Puritans would admit).

Revisionist historians have parlayed dinner-table conversations about “God, Gold, and Guns” into respectable careers, but I do not think that kind of shorthand about American motivation helps anybody outside of academia find a common thread that links Theodore Roosevelt, Mia Hamm, and Chuck Yeager with Sitting Bull, Tom Petty, and Oprah Winfrey.

What Might Be American

Maybe the prime modern criterion for defining Americanism is willingness to defend the Constitution, both because of what it is as a founding document and because of what it does to enshrine the individual and collective freedoms we hold dear. That was my first thought, but it's not good enough, because in spite of the "modern" caveat and its implicit concession that the definition of "American" can change, we should remember that however they thought of themselves, our national mythology claims such men as Jefferson Davis, Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse for America. When Josey Wales met Ten Bears, the Confederate and the Comanche spoke to each other as warriors, but also, I'd say, as Americans. Any attempt to highlight the essentials of our national character must include both of them.

In the early autumn of 2001, after the attacks of September 11 had thrown questions of identity into high relief, Romanian newspaper editor Cornel Nistorescu wrote movingly of "the heavy artillery of the American soul," describing it as a shared love for freedom that we all cleave to even more fiercely than we cling to our land, our money, or what he called our "galloping history."

Friend Bookworm has been pondering the American soul at greater depth. Like Nistorescu, Bookworm writes that the essence of America is liberty. Unlike him, she also explores the related idea that political power flows from the bottom up, rather than from the top down. This is by design rather than by ideology, although I suppose you could argue that ideology informs the handiwork of the founders.

Given an emphasis on liberty and an aversion to manipulation under any guise as pillars of our national character, it’s no surprise that Bookworm’s current essay for American Thinker is a field guide to the hazards of electing someone unschooled in those preferences to the presidency. More importantly, her essay is an eloquent synthesis of the American character as refracted through the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

My own thoughts about Americanism are influenced by favorite books. Gifted writers like Mark Twain, Richard Bradford, Tom Wolfe, Edward Abbey, Tony Horwitz, John Steinbeck, Louis L’Amour, and John Kennedy Toole have all written about this country, often by looking at representative cross-sections of her people.

Apart from loudly insisting on freedom and the inherent worth of any individual (janitor or general), are there other things that Americans do or have more of than other people?

My apologies to hot dogs, apple pie, and the Coca-Cola company, but foods and drinks don't make the grade. Baseball counts, but it’s just a game, so we can’t pin much on it in this conversation. Likewise, the link between private property and “the pursuit of happiness” is too seldom talked about (John Stossel was accused of bias for trying to talk about it), but you don’t have to be rich to be American, so prosperity doesn’t matter enough to be a defining national characteristic.

Enduring faith in progress might be one of our defining national traits, even if it’s sometimes wrongheaded, or just a remnant of that spirit that sent people on perilous journeys to and through the New World back in the day.

We’ve never labored under mandatory five-year plans, so it’s not surprising that the average American is probably less jaded than the average European hostage to Marxist ideology. The progress we believe in can be technological or social or wholly imaginary, but as advertisers have long known, we do like the sound of “new and improved,” more than some other cultures (For a glimpse of “old school” power politics, read Machiavelli, or David Burge’s hilarious and profane channeling of Julius Caesar).

What Is NOT American

On the negative side of the ledger, formal class distinctions and allegiance to abstractions have to be listed as things that are un-American.

Certainly slavery as a “formal class distinction” inflamed early arguments over who could be elected to the House of Representatives, but it was even then recognized as a blot on the American character, rather than an expression of it. Anyone who doubts that need only study the Civil War, the Gettysburg Address, and the records of the Constitutional Convention to see that while the founders deferred a final judgment on slavery to future generations, they knew better than to give it a ringing endorsement that would have been at odds with their own principles. Similarly, formal sanction for snobbery requires a House of Lords. While the U.S. Senate likes to think of itself as "the world's greatest deliberative body," it does not -- cannot -- pretend to lordship, even though some long-serving senators seem to wish it did or could.

Freedom might seem to be an exception to that idea that we don’t warm to abstractions, but it’s not, at least in this country. We don’t think of freedom as an abstraction, because we’ve codified exactly what it means in the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments to the Constitution.

I had not thought it would be controversial to imply that the American dream preceded the American founding, but the most interesting criticism of my recent attempt at amateur sociology via Disneyland came from a reader who suggested that “there is no more pernicious notion than the idea that America is a ‘proposition nation,’ an idea instead of a particular place and people.” He went on to say that the idea of freedom cannot be America’s defining characteristic, because it is simply part of this country’s “overall cultural milieu.” That’s a wonderful argument that affirms the wisdom of Woody Guthrie singing “this land is your land; this land is my land.” Ultimately, however, it fails to persuade: If King George had been less high-handed with his colonies, they might not have coalesced against British tyranny, or fought for a “new birth of freedom,” with some patriots justifying their actions as part of a tradition going back to the Magna Carta, and others enthused by the prospect of throwing a wayward mother country over the side, with no thought yet of the Spanish and French settlements on the same continent that answered to mother countries of their own.

In the symposium that Joe Carter hosted five years ago, I called abortion “un-American” because it is antithetical to individual life that we at least pretend to exalt everywhere else.

It is also possible to flag atheism as un-American, not because you have to believe in God to be a good American, but because all the early talk about the rights of free people was ultimately anchored in notions of an omnipotent Creator who made “natural law.” The founders were educated men, and while they were not necessarily pious or churchgoing, even the most irascible deists and bigots among them recognized human dignity. People who study the history of ideas trace the acceptance of that idea back to medieval times and the often-prickly meeting of minds between Classical, Jewish, and Catholic thought. In other words, Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome were the big three, then Wittenburg and Geneva joined the party. Colonial thinkers in Philadelphia owed their forebears in those other cities a tremendous intellectual debt, and even those who railed against “popery” and “Romish superstition” knew it.

Closing Thoughts

Freedom and optimism seem indispensable to the American character. Hand-wringing of any kind is not (Former president Jimmy Carter’s famous “malaise” speech was un-American, and Ronald Reagan called him on that. Senator Olympia Snowe's rationale for supporting Obamacare was also un-American, but so far only alert bloggers have noticed).

I’ve said that atheism, abortion, snobbery, and allegiance to abstraction are un-American. Those negative assertions are bound to be more controversial than the positive ones, but they round out the picture. Although it is true to say that this essay and a few dollars will get you a flavored latte, trying to get a fix on the American character seems a perennially useful exercise, and more interesting than yammering about who is “extremist” and who is not (Quin Hilyer doesn't yammer, but he's fed up with the yammering, too: "The single biggest myth in American politics is that advocacy of limited government is a fringe position.")

I hope it does not sound as though I see whatever makes the American character unique among national characters as the sum of every good thing. If it were that, then America wouldn’t be home to the diverse collection of people it has, as deeply flawed as those anywhere else. Beacon of hope we may still be, but we are not the New Jerusalem, and the Christian patriots who seem to think we could be scare me.

I also do not mean to say that anyone who believes in the virtues of freedom and optimism is necessarily American. People of all nationalities may be sympathetic to American ideals; my argument is only that there are American ideals, shaped by but separate from the complexities of the American landscape.

One area where the default American character (not to say any particular American) falls short is in support for the family. Emphasis on individualism and self-reliance can crowd communitarian virtues out of the picture if we let it. We would do better to remember what mainstream Christianity does, that “as long as the natural family is recognized as prior to the creation of the state, then we may still argue that it possesses its own legitimate sphere of authority, and indeed that the state is in some sense beholden to, and subordinate to, and the artificial construct of families, and not the other way around.” That was Anthony Esolen paraphrasing Canadian political philosopher Doug Farrow, and both men make a good point.

Paradigm shift

John Steele Gordon on what happens when your view of the world hasn't changed since Dorothy traipsed down the yellow brick road with a Cowardly Lion and a Tin Man.

Michelle Malkin on what the off-year election results mean.

Methinks both writers have found a common thread.

UPDATE: Ann Coulter's analysis of the election results is more entertaining than her usual schtick. And Krauthammer put a bow on the whole thing.

Cultural commentary onscreen?

A Boy Scout meeting trumped TV watching last night (and we don't watch much TV around here anyway), but I find it interesting that a critic in Chicago reads the new "aliens among us" TV series "V" as a slap at Obamamania.

Meanwhile, Roland Emmerich's epic disaster film "2012" is verry interesting on a cultural level:

"The trailer for 2012 plays like a highlight reel of civilization falling apart all over the world, but it's religion that gets the brunt of Emmerich's digital pounding: A Buddhist temple gets hit by a tidal wave. The Sistine Chapel crumbles to pieces as a split tears right down the middle of Michelangeo's painting of God touching Adam's finger. St. Peter's Basilica rolls over onto a crowd of devoted worshipers. Rio de Janeiro's iconic Christ the Reedemer statue falls to earth as its wracked by shockwaves. The White House is even crushed by, of all things, an aircraft carrier. But eagle eyed fans of watching organized religion get its disaster porn comeuppance will have noticed that there are no Islamic landmarks on the CGI chopping block."

Books I read in October

Prayers for the Assassin, by Robert Ferrigno (recommended)

Back to the Moon, by Homer Hickam (not as good as his nonfiction)

The Shoes of the Fisherman, by Morris West (highly recommended)

And news like this breaks on All Souls Day?

Coincidence? I think not!

Achtung, Baby

My argument with Bono is now playing at American Spectator Online.