SIMPLE PEOPLE, SIMPLE MESSAGE

Why Americans love George (Spengler, 9/14/04, Asia Times)

Political tourists who wish to understand the United States should seek out a medium-sized city somewhere in the country's interior, the sort of place no tourist ever would visit, and attend its Fourth of July festivities. There they will encounter a passion for country unknown on the other side of the Atlantic, and unimaginable in the Southern Hemisphere. Government, in the experience of the peoples of the world, has been an instrument by which the wealthy and powerful oppressed the weak. The passionate patriotism of ordinary Americans springs from their conviction that the American state is the shield of common folk.

To Europeans, patriotism implies a near-racialist nationalism of the sort that sent hordes of soldiers to butcher their fellows during the two World Wars of the last century. American patriotism belongs to a different species. Governments, in the experience of most of the peoples of the world, exist to help the rich and powerful oppress the weak and helpless. Whenever the representatives of the weak have taken power, they turned into oppressors. Europeans never have loved their governments; love of country means love of one's race and culture, the narcissistic self-worship of tribalism.

The United States, by contrast, is populated by the descendants of individuals who decided to cease to be Europeans (or whatever) so that no one would be able to push them around. That is why Americans own guns. By some accounts the number of guns in circulation exceeds the number of Americans. Americans do not use their guns, contrary to popular myth. If the violent behavior of certain minority groups is excluded, Americans commit the same proportion of violent crimes as do Europeans. But an armed population will accept only so much abuse. Gun control, by the same token, is a liberal obsession (the Drudge Report observed that Kerry sponsored legislation that would have banned the make of shotgun that he accepted as a gift from trade-union supporters in Pennsylvania).

Among such people, the president's simple message resonates mightily. Two World Wars taught Europeans that there is no good or evil, only the insidious jealousies of contending peoples. God therefore is on no one's side, and the alternative to mutual butchery is negotiated compromise. Senator Kerry and the US coastal elite believe the same thing, namely that enlightened specialists can interrupt the tragic destiny of peoples and save the world from itself. That is an alien intrusion upon the American world view, which began, almost biblically, by separating good and evil. [...]

Once attacked, Americans want to fight back. George W Bush may have attacked the wrong country (which I do not believe), and he may have mistaken the US mission after the initial fighting was over (which I do believe), but Americans are quite willing to forgive him. They understand that it is hard to track down and destroy a shadowy enemy, and do not mind much if the United States has to trounce a few countries before finding the right ones.

There was a brief period a few months ago where Democrats convinced themselves that because John Kerry was nominally Catholic they could contest with George W.. Bush for the religious vote. What they ignored is that the secularized political ideology of Democrats, like that of Europeans, leaves them incapable of tapping into the religious narrativeupon which America was Founded and by which it still generally proceeds. Mr. Kerry's fame, after all, derives from accusing his own country and his fellow soldiers of being worse than the communist North Vietnamese because of the occassional unfortunate incident during a war to preserve the freedom of strangers. He and his party demonstrated the same confusion with regard to Abu Ghraib and the failure to find WMD--as if such details could delegitimize the liberation of 25 million people. You have to misunderstand good and evil pretty spectacularly in order to convince yourself that America is a force for the latter.

MORE:
Crime rate in 2003 holds steady at a 30-year low (AP, 9/13/04)

The nation's crime rate last year held steady at the lowest levels since the government began surveying crime victims in 1973, the Justice Department reported Sunday.

The study was the latest data for a decade-long trend in which violent crime as measured by victim surveys has fallen by 55 percent and property crime by 49 percent. That included a 14 percent drop in violent crime from 2000-2001 to 2002-2003.

''The rates are the lowest experienced in the last 30 years,'' Justice Department statistician Shannan Catalona said in the report. ``Crime rates have stabilized.'' [...]

James Lynch, professor at American University's Department of Justice, Law and Society, said the reason that crime is down so broadly is difficult to pinpoint.

Two recent possibilities, he said, are a prison population at a record 2.1 million and the terrorism fight's deterrent effect on routine street crime.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 13, 2004 9:11 AM