Myth America

 Started reading this collection of essays, subtitled: "Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past" David Bell leads off with "exceptionalism".  He mentions the Winthrop sermon, but not the Biblical verse to which he referred. (Mathew 5:14 "You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden.") 

I didn't know of the connection to Marxism, though Seymour Martin Lipsetl's use of the concept to explain why the US didn't have socialism was big in the early 60's when I was studying history.

Bell notes Reagan's use of "shining city on a hill" and Gingrich's pushing of the concept as a political weapon against the left, and Obama's formulation that all nations are exceptional. And he notes Daniel Bell's 1975 essay "End of Exceptionalism".

Personally I'm not ready to concede the term to the right.  America is exceptionally  important; on that all sides can agree. Whether we point to a glorious ascension or a past stained by misdeeds, America can't be ignored. The vehemence of the arguments over our past and future testify to exceptional importance.

Police Killed in Line of Duty

 Turns out there's a wikipedia page for US police killed in line of duty. Quite a contrast with a page for UK police killed.

For anyone too lazy to click, US killings of police run about 50 or above, the UK runs about 1 a year.

The context is the culture: US view police as maintaining order against crime in the midst of an armed populace, meaning a focus on conflict and violence, while the UK has a different history. In short, there's not an arms race in the UK, there is in US.

Afghanistan and US

 Just finished Elliot Ackerman's "Act Five, America's End in Afghanistan". I liked it very much. While the title might imply it's all about the exit from Afghanistan, it's not, not entirely. The construction is different: the thread which drives the narrative is a series of attempts at coordinating through calls with friends and strangers the permissions and logistics of getting Afghans who worked for America and their families onto the planes after the fall of Kabul.  The desperation of the efforts contrasts with his description of the vacation trip with wife and children. 

Another thread is composed of episodes from his tours in Afghanistan (serving first as a Marine officer with the 1-8 (regiment), then as an officer working with paramilitaries (Afghan troop and US special forces), and finally as a CIA paralmilitary officer doing the same. A third thread covers episodes from his life outside of Afghanistan. These threads provide context for his calls.  He weaves his threads together into a nice tapestry, colored with thoughts on America's two wars (he served five tours in Iraq and Afghanistan).

He's critical of all the administrations--Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden for their decision, but most of all critical of Americans for the growing separation between society and the military, and the growing inolvement of the military in partisan politics.  It was published in this summer, when we still feared the outcome of the 2022 elections, which went better, more quietly, than we thought then.  

The American Experiment 111 Years Later

 TR has a famous quote about the "man in the arena" but the whole speech which includes it is interesting.  He's speaking as ex-President to the Sorbonne, and appeals to what France and US share: being a republic and democracy, an experiment in government.  The year is 1911 and the world is governed by monarchies. The excerpt:

Today I shall speak to you on the subject of individual citizenship, the one subject of vital importance to you, my hearers, and to me and my countrymen, because you and we are great citizens of great democratic republics. A democratic republic such as ours—an effort to realize in its full sense government by, of, and for the people—represents the most gigantic of all possible social experiments, the one fraught with great responsibilities alike for good and evil. The success of republics like yours and like ours means the glory, and our failure the despair, of mankind; and for you and for us the question of the quality of the individual citizen is supreme. Under other forms of government, under the rule of one man or very few men, the quality of the leaders is all-important. If, under such governments, the quality of the rulers is high enough, then the nations for generations lead a brilliant career, and add substantially to the sum of world achievement, no matter how low the quality of the average citizen; because the average citizen is an almost negligible quantity in working out the final results of that type of national greatness. But with you and us the case is different. With you here, and with us in my own home, in the long run, success or failure will be conditioned upon the way in which the average man, the average woman, does his or her duty, first in the ordinary, every-day affairs of life, and next in those great occasional cries which call for heroic virtues. The average citizen must be a good citizen if our republics are to succeed. The stream will not permanently rise higher than the main source; and the main source of national power and national greatness is found in the average citizenship of the nation. Therefore it behooves us to do our best to see that the standard of the average citizen is kept high; and the average cannot be kept high unless the standard of the leaders is very much higher. [emphasis added]

I guess WWI marked the change--the German, Russian, Italian, Austria-Hungary monarchies vanished and the US became more eminent in the world.   

The United States of Excess

 This is a 2015 small book by Robert Paarlberg, subtitled "Gluttony and the Dark Side of American Exceptionalism.". Its thesis is that the US stands out for its obesity and its per capita greenhouse gas emissions, both of which are based in America's:

• material and demographic conditions
• political structure
• culture.

I found it interesting, specifically:

• the importance of geography in American politics in contrast to European countries--our politicians do "earmarks", bring home the bacon for their constituents while EU pols are more bound to a party platform.
• the distinction between "mitigation" and "adaptation" as applied to climate change and obesity.  Mitigation means changing the causes of the problems; adaptation means dealing with the results.  He argues that the US will go for adaptation in both instances.  

Iowa Farmers Are Old--So It's Always Been

 A quote from  Chris Jones, an Iowa environmental engineer (doing a demographic analysis of Iowa farmers,

Of these white folks, 80% are male and the average age is almost as old as I am: 58.9 years

He's fighting Iowa CAFO's polluting water, with facts and complaints. A good cause, but I picked out this factoid to comment on. 

I remember in Infoshare Sherman County, Kansas was one of the trial counties for providing on-line access for farmers to some of the data USDA agencies had for them.  Mike Sherman, then the CED, had some data on the average age of his farmers--somewhere in the 50's IIRC. A problem then, a small part of the problem, was the older farmers generally weren't into computers, so what we were trying to do had no appeal.  

But to my title--I suspect if we had data going back to the Revolution on the age distribution of farmers we'd find they were consistently older than most working Americans.  Why? Because since the Revolution the proportion of US workers engaged in agriculture has been declining, sometimes fast, sometimes slowly. That means some farm children left the farm for the city, while their parents stayed on the farm, thereby skewing the age distribution. 

That Demon Rum, Updated

 My mother was death on drinking.  She would be pleased by this post.

It's strange how things have changed.  I clearly remember Mr. Youngstrom, our science teacher for one year in HS (unless he was a substitute--the school had problems keeping science teachers) being very emotional when telling the class never to smoke marijuana.  I think the reason was it was a gateway to hard drugs, but it could have been because it was evil in and of itself.

60+ years later Virginia has legalized marijuana, and there's a push for decriminalizing hard drugs.  It seems libertarian philosophy has conquered much of American life. 

1619 Project and the Birth of the Nation

 Bret Stephens writes about the 1619 Project  Actually, he focuses on only a few sentences of it, but the sentences have become controversial.  In a nutshell, the original writeup in the Times said two things: the Revolution was fought to preserve slavery and the nation was born with the arrival of slaves in 1619.  The writeup has been changed and softened since its original publication.  IMHO the Revolution was well underway in the hearts and minds of Americans well before 1775 and had little to do with slavery.  It's true that slaveowners were alarmed by British attempts to woe slaves to support the Loyalist cause, but that was late in the process.  If the preservation of slavery in the face of the Somerset decision in the UK had been a major factor, one would have expected the British sugar colonies in the Caribbean to have joined the 13 colonies because they were even more dependent on slavery than were the mainland colonies.

The question I really want to consider is: what constitutes the "birth" of a country, a nation?  How do we know? Was Canada born with the French in the the 17th century or when the British conquered it in the 18th century, or with the 1867 Act?  When was the UK born, and did it die with the loss of Eire, or will it die if Scotland secedes?  

Was France born with the First Republic, or the Second, Third, Fourth or Fifth?  Was Germany born before Bismarck?