As a young boy in England, I was aware of widespread anti-American prejudice. By the end of the Second World War, Britain had so clearly been supplanted by the United States as the leading global power that it was no longer plausible to pretend otherwise. When people are disillusioned, they tend to be bitter, and British bitterness was still raw in the 1960s. I recall much talk about American brashness, loud voices, and louder clothes.
But I didn’t share this distaste, perhaps because I was too young either to know what Britain had once been and had lost, or to take any interest in news and current affairs, so I was largely unaware of modern Americans. My idea of this country was shaped instead by Saturday morning children’s cinema which, costing just sixpence a week per child, could afford to show only rather old movies. They were usually westerns, often starring John Wayne, Gary Cooper, and others of that epoch.
So I thought America was peopled by handsome, tough, self-reliant, laconic men of action, and by pretty, resourceful, doughty women equal to the rigors of the frontier. This was highly appealing. “What a country!” I thought.
Lest you scoff that my understanding of America was always a fiction, I should say that I’m well aware that Hollywood produced fiction, as it still does. But the stories a country tells about itself reveal something true. The myths of America, like the myths of the ancient world, show what it once valued and admired. Silver screen heroes (with most of the rough edges polished away) embodied optimism, resolution, and success. They were the product of a happy country.
Is it a happy country now?
Some years later, in about 1970, after I’d grown out of those western movies, my father commented how much more he had come to like Americans. They no longer seemed to have that swagger which was so unappealing to his stiff upper lip. He noted a new modesty, which doubtless was a good thing in some ways. But it also betokened something dark and corrosive — a new self-doubt that germinated and spread amid the anxieties and social fissures opened up by the Vietnam War.
I thought of all this again recently when skipping from channel to channel on my car radio. What I heard was this: “…to ensure quality care for indigenous women … (skip) … the regulations have been gutted, and how can the American people trust this agency in this administration to safeguard … (skip) … poor credit and racism …” And so I switched off.
These are the lachrymose effusions of a national culture steeped in hyper-egalitarian grievances over race, class, and gender, nurtured and nourished in classrooms and on campuses, then carried out into the media and other workplaces to weaken and depress the national spirit. By God, they are dreary! In his clumsy, brutish, ignorant, and often self-defeating way, President Trump wants to revive the optimistic, success-seeking spirit that once defined this country. It is because so many Americans yearn for such a revival that, for all his faults, he might win re-election.
