Good Enough To Be American?

by pessimist

In researching the post following, I ran across this discussion. The prose is a bit thick, but within are several thoughts worth pondering.

Are Americans good enough to be Americans?

Dear Spengler,

After reading your continual (ad nauseam) diatribes on the subject of Western civilization, parlanced by Old World rhetoric, one could only assume that you personally feel threatened by the growing irrelevance of the passe European thought process in this modern world to which you have subscribed.

To suggest that the United States is somehow a bastard child in the grand scope of world history based on its youth, and not worthy of any praise for its behavior, would appear somehow to be an embrace of fearful ignorance in its finest moment.

If history is the yardstick by which you measure countenance and relativity, then to what honor do we owe an allegiance to the mistakes of the past from the more refined civilizations that preceded us?

To suggest that current events can somehow be explained and therefore corrected based on history is nothing more than the erotic dreams of leftover scholars grasping on to the one last thread of life remaining before them.

That thread seems to surround the historical longing for order based on simplistic predictability and misinformation based on superstition. Chaos and
reaction are the precursor to refinement, achievement and advancement in the thought process no matter how foreign.

In that respect, I believe, the United States is truly the correction brought forth in the order of things to instill the necessary change. All civilizations, and all history started somewhere. It seems by your belief that it can only continue successfully out of the books and thought processes of long forgotten empires. Not so.

Jim Van
United States

Dear Jim,

My issue is not with America but with the Americans.

Distinct from its population, America is a political design, a new Jerusalem in the eye of its founders, a City on the Hill. It is perhaps the best design humanity has brought forth in its troubled history. All the other roads led to nihilism, sadly including the great project of universal Christian Empire going back to St Augustine.

The civilizations of the past got what they deserved. (Why Europe chooses extinction, April 8, 2003). How China and India may develop is beyond our capacity to see, but I believe that in their best aspects these
great countries will adopt much from America.

Whether the present inhabitants of the United States are good enough to be Americans is an open question. You are in the first phase of a civilizational
war with peoples and countries for whom no veil separates past and present. You must beat them or win them over. To do this you must know their history, by which they mean their poetry. Yet America cannot even find sufficient translators to read urgent dispatches (Why America is losing the intelligence war, Nov 11, 2003).

You want to feel good about yourselves, but circumstances will not afford you this luxury. Nothing in your history qualifies you for the role you now play on the world stage.

No one likes to change, but change you will; either you will learn what you must in order to win, or radical Islam will beat you.

Spengler

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