I will end tonight on an appropriate note of melancholy. I have turned, over the past year, as I saw, first sensed, then saw, this gathering storm, I have turned to what others have written of America, Gordon Wood, particularly in the remote past, particularly foreigners, Dickens, Tocqueville and particularly in that particular to Tweedsmuir. For over thirty years I have turned repeatedly to Tweedsmuir for spiritual solace. In the past fortnight I have read with more care than previously his short chapter, only thirteen pages long, "My America."
Only the closest of readers of this site or those who have read Pilgrim's Way know the peculiar manner in which the book is written. Tweedsmuir had a rigid ethos: He would not write about his living contemporaries and so, no Churchill, no Roosevelt, and he would speak ill of the dead only in elliptical terms.
He was also a master diplomat and that too comes through in his writing. You have to read Tweedsmuir closely to detect any of his doubts, his true feelings, as they are couched in the slightest damning by faint praise. And so with that readers guide, the first sentence:
The title of this chapter exactly defines its contents.
The last sentence in the first paragraph:
If you cannot indict a nation, no more can you label it like a museum piece.
First sentence, second paragraph:
Half the misunderstandings between Britain and america are due to the fact that neither will regard the other as what it is--in an important sense of the word--a foreign country. Each thinks of the other as a part of itself which has somehow gone off the lines. An Englishman...in America can be uncommonly ill at ease.
He was the governor general of Canada at the time, which was 1940. Britain was already at war, America and FDR and Lindberg, and Kennedy, would not intervene to save the mother country.
On a higher level, when it comes to assessing spiritual values, [the Englishman] often shows the same mixture of surprise and disappointment. America has lapsed from the family tradition. The American critic can be not less intolerant...His expositions of England are often like sermons preached in a Home for Fallen Women...she has fallen,...her defects are a discredit to her relations,...she has let down her kin, and suffered the old home to fall into disrepute. This fretfulness can only be cured, I think, by a frank recognition of the real foreignness of the two peoples. No doubt they had a common ancestor, but he is of little avail against the passage of time and the estranging seas.
It, perhaps, requires less close reading to detect Tweedsmuir's opinion than I at first thought.
I first discovered America through books. Those seemed to belong...to an indefinable land of romance...I came strongly under the spell of New England...Perhaps its [culture] was especially fitted to attract youth, for it was not to difficult or too recondite [read: it was puerile].
...
I...became a student of the American Civil War...attracted...no doubt [by] the romance of it. [In Stonewall Jackson] I had found the kind of man that I could whole-heartedly admire.
...
...I acquired a new [ as opposed to the old lack of admiration] admiration for Abraham Lincoln
...
I am as much alive as anyone to the weak and ugly things in American life: areas, both urban and rural, where the human economy has gone rotten; the melting-pot which does not always melt; the eternal coloured problem; a constitutional machine which I cannot think adequately represents the efficient good sense of the American people; a brand of journalism which fatigues with its ruthless snappiness and uses a speech that it is incapable of expressing any serious thought or emotion; the imbecile patter of high-pressure salesmanship; an academic jargon, used chiefly by psychologists and sociologists, which is hideous and almost meaningless.
Une momento, por favor:
Gracias.
Only the closest of readers of this site or those who have read Pilgrim's Way know the peculiar manner in which the book is written. Tweedsmuir had a rigid ethos: He would not write about his living contemporaries and so, no Churchill, no Roosevelt, and he would speak ill of the dead only in elliptical terms.
He was also a master diplomat and that too comes through in his writing. You have to read Tweedsmuir closely to detect any of his doubts, his true feelings, as they are couched in the slightest damning by faint praise. And so with that readers guide, the first sentence:
The title of this chapter exactly defines its contents.
The last sentence in the first paragraph:
If you cannot indict a nation, no more can you label it like a museum piece.
First sentence, second paragraph:
Half the misunderstandings between Britain and america are due to the fact that neither will regard the other as what it is--in an important sense of the word--a foreign country. Each thinks of the other as a part of itself which has somehow gone off the lines. An Englishman...in America can be uncommonly ill at ease.
He was the governor general of Canada at the time, which was 1940. Britain was already at war, America and FDR and Lindberg, and Kennedy, would not intervene to save the mother country.
On a higher level, when it comes to assessing spiritual values, [the Englishman] often shows the same mixture of surprise and disappointment. America has lapsed from the family tradition. The American critic can be not less intolerant...His expositions of England are often like sermons preached in a Home for Fallen Women...she has fallen,...her defects are a discredit to her relations,...she has let down her kin, and suffered the old home to fall into disrepute. This fretfulness can only be cured, I think, by a frank recognition of the real foreignness of the two peoples. No doubt they had a common ancestor, but he is of little avail against the passage of time and the estranging seas.
It, perhaps, requires less close reading to detect Tweedsmuir's opinion than I at first thought.
I first discovered America through books. Those seemed to belong...to an indefinable land of romance...I came strongly under the spell of New England...Perhaps its [culture] was especially fitted to attract youth, for it was not to difficult or too recondite [read: it was puerile].
...
I...became a student of the American Civil War...attracted...no doubt [by] the romance of it. [In Stonewall Jackson] I had found the kind of man that I could whole-heartedly admire.
...
...I acquired a new [ as opposed to the old lack of admiration] admiration for Abraham Lincoln
...
I am as much alive as anyone to the weak and ugly things in American life: areas, both urban and rural, where the human economy has gone rotten; the melting-pot which does not always melt; the eternal coloured problem; a constitutional machine which I cannot think adequately represents the efficient good sense of the American people; a brand of journalism which fatigues with its ruthless snappiness and uses a speech that it is incapable of expressing any serious thought or emotion; the imbecile patter of high-pressure salesmanship; an academic jargon, used chiefly by psychologists and sociologists, which is hideous and almost meaningless.
Une momento, por favor:
The United States...has much,, I believe, to give to the world...America...is the chief exponent of a cred which I believe on the whole ["I'd rather be in Philadelphia," if the alternative is death.] to be the bet in this imperfect world...Democracy...is primarily a spiritual testament...There was a time [then again, if "there was a time," there was a time when not.] when I fervently admired Alexander Hamilton and could not away with Jefferson; the latter only began to interest me, I think, after I had seen the University of Virginia...But I deprecate partisanship in those ultimate matters. The democratic testament derives from Hamilton as well as from Jefferson.
[The democratic testament] has two main characteristics. The first is that the ordinary man believes in himself and in his ability, along with his fellows, to govern his country. [Tweedsmuir does not believe that! I am convinced.] It is when a people loses is self-confidence that it surrenders its soul to a dictator or an oligarch. [Trump supporters are pussies, afraid of their own shadows.] In Mr. Walter Lippmann's tremendous metaphor, it welcomes manacles to prevent its hands shaking. [And that, too, is true of the cowardly, cowering Trump supporters, some of whom have called the strong man to beg and weep for his protection. A violent reaction will send them scurrying for the safe haven of Mexico.] The second is the belief, which is fundamental also in Christianity, of the worth of every human soul...
...
For forty years I have regarded America not only with a student's interest in a fascinating problem, but with the affection of one to whom she has become almost a second motherland. [Bullshit to that last]...But I am not blind to the grave problems which confront her.
The next sentence is tremendous:
Democracy, after all, is a negative thing.
Huh?! Tell me you ever thought "Democracy, after all, is a negative thing"!
It provides a fair field for the Good Life, but it is not in itself the Good life. In these days when lovers of freedom may have to fight for their cause, the hope [Just a hope, not an expectation] is that the ideal of the Good Life, in which alone freedom has any meaning, will acquire a stronger potency.
Tweedsmuir ends his short chapter thusly:
Her major prophet is still Whitman. "Everything comes out of the dirt--everything; everything comes out of the people, everyday people, the people as you find them and leave them; people, people, just people!"
Dirt, dirt, dirt. Crap, crap, crap.
It is only out of the dirt that things grow.
Night, night, Nightmerica.
