Cultural Pathology - Steve Den Beste of the blog USS Clueless is an excellent writer who's not afraid to delve deeply into the philosophical underpinnings of his stories.
A few days ago, he wrote about the story of J.C. Adams, a septuagenarian Atlanta shopkeeper who can only walk with the aid of a walker - but who killed an armed robber and wounded another when they tried to hold up his store. It's an inspirational story, if you believe in:
He won't be prosecuted, and Americans everywhere are cheering for this old bastard. Part of why he won't be prosecuted is that there's no chance whatever that a jury in Georgia would convict him of anything. (I doubt they'd deliberate more than half an hour.)This truly does spotlight one of many key differences between our society and Europe.Our overseas friends would do well to contemplate this example. What's remarkable about Adams is that he isn't remarkable. There are millions of Americans who would do exactly the same thing in the same circumstances. We don't give up what's ours just because someone else demands it, whether at gunpoint, or via crashed jetliners, or through diplomatic denunciations and accusations of unilateralism.
Whether it's small (a couple hundred dollars in a cash register) or big (thousand of dead in a terrorist attack) or mammoth (yielding our civil rights through acceptance of treaties), what we care about is worth fighting for, or else it isn't worth anything at all.
The sad thing is that there are people in Europe who are in jail now because they did what Adams did.
Europeans apparently took enough umbrage for Den Beste to follow up. It's a very long piece, and worth reading completely.
But this was the part that grabbed me:
...a cultural decision about whether citizens should be men or mice will also manifest in foreign policy. The US didn't choose this war. We were attacked first. But now that we have been attacked, we're going to do what's necessary to make sure it doesn't happen again any more times than is absolutely unavoidable. We didn't decide that there would be a war; that was decided by those who made the plans for the attacks in NYC and Washington. Our only choice is where it will be fought, and how, and who will do the fighting.Years ago, it was interesting to read Art Spiegelman's "Maus" series of comic books, translating the story of the Holocaust into comic format, with mice representing Polish Jews and cats representing the Germans. And although I have known since junior high that Europeans have a different attitude toward authority than ours, Maus put it in first person; the mice always trusted authority to eventually get sane, or eventually save them. It's an extension of the attitude most Europeans bring to the debate on liberty versus authority; the way they instantly obey police; the way they trooped into the European Union; the way they assume the police will be there when they need them; the way they seem to implicitly believe the UN will come up with a solution to...whatever, even though that would be a first.Europe wants us to act as a passive and fearful citizen of the world, and to wait for the world's policemen to save us. They want us to absorb our damage and not fight back, and we aren't doing so. America is self-reliant. As individuals and as a group we won't stand passively and let others attack us. We'll defend ourselves; we won't sit and hope someone else takes care of it.
Adams represents the finest strain of America in his act yesterday, and I'm deeply proud of him. For all I know he may well be vile in other ways, but at the deepest level he demonstrated a nobility I'm glad to see. I feel not the slightest twinge of shame in saying that. Yesterday I said this:
Our overseas friends would do well to contemplate this example. What's remarkable about Adams is that he isn't remarkable. There are millions of Americans who would do exactly the same thing in the same circumstances. We don't give up what's ours just because someone else demands it, whether at gunpoint, or via crashed jetliners, or through diplomatic denunciations and accusations of unilateralism.
I want to emphasize this. If you don't understand why Americans are willing to act like this, and why we're proud to act like this, and why we are not going to stop acting like this, then you'll never understand anything we do and your international rhetoric will continue to be ineffective. This taps into the deepest strain of our character.
You're not going to get anywhere by treating this as cultural pathology. We think it's healthy, and quite frankly we've got good reason to believe that. You had better learn about this, and accept it as an essential part of the American character, and deal with it in your diplomacy. The only thing you're going to accomplish by trying to shame us about this is to alienate us, because we're not going to change.
Which has been the actual result since September of 2001, as the politicians and chattering heads of Europe have indeed been attempting to make us ashamed of this attitude. Americans are not interested in hearing "Let the attackers beat you up and kill you; sit passively and let the police take care of it." We're also not interested in hearing "Let the terrorists kill you; sit passively and let the UN take care of it." The only thing this has done is to increasingly convince us that Europe's chatterers are effete cowards.
Everything which is truly important is worth fighting to defend.
Makes one despair of ever getting any sort of "united accord" with them.
Posted by Mitch at January 12, 2003 11:09 AM