A fine piece of American economic patriotism, and a meditation upon being American

Sadly, I did not catch the Superbowl this past weekend; I was in Cleveland watching the Cavaliers win a very close game of hoops over the Mavericks (given my Stuart inclinations, three guesses to the person who can guess which team I was rooting for, and the first two don’t count), and got back too late to catch the game or the Halftime show. However, I did catch one of their advertisements this past week:


A highly refreshing, highly moving piece of American economic patriotism, brought to you by (what Chrysler probably rightly hoped was) a credible voice for the American public, Mr Clinton Eastwood, Jr. Though Clint is a man with whose public vision and image I very often differ, here it seemed to me he struck precisely the right note here – the way for the United States to step back into economic health will be through its industry and the brotherhood amongst its people. This message, not necessarily a political one, is needed in its own right, but two more very good reasons to enjoy and appreciate it are that Karl Rove and FOX News hate it because it supposedly celebrates the marriage of big government with big business (when, of course, it does nothing of the sort – except at the very end when Chrysler reminds the viewer that they were the ones making the ad). Very interesting accusation coming from a multinational news conglomerate based in Australia which has married itself with numerous governments wherever convenient, featuring a strategist who held a prominent position in a government which did more to expand the influence and prestige of private defence contractors, and put our homes under official surveillance and our young men and women abroad fighting and dying in wars of a highly dubious nature for the sake of our ‘security’.

But the video, I think, does show two very important sides to the American character. That we are an enterprising, individualistic and hard-working people is generally well-known for it being trumpeted at home and abroad by various officials, news media and politicians as proof of our nation’s exceptional qualities; that we have a tendency to band together in cause of our own accord is something a bit less well-known, though acute observers like Alexis de Tocqueville have observed it from time to time. But neither quality is intrinsic to us or to our ‘culture’, insofar as we have one. Rather, we borrowed these traits from the English, from the Scots, from the Germans, from the Haudenosaunee, from the Algonquians and absolutely from the citizens of the nations of the interior of the African West who were kidnaped, sold and shipped to these shores by early English and Dutch capitalists and their coastal partners-in-crime. Indeed, it is only because many of these people remembered (or tried to remember across the yawning cultural abyss of the traumatic Middle Passage) and clung to the traditions in which they had been raised that these admirable traits have survived. I am very proud to count myself American in this sense.

The ‘official’ American culture is sadly more of an anti-culture, however, rooted in either the neglect or the rejection of these traditions, wrongly seen as limiting. The lawyers and intellectuals who founded this country insisted that we were not a monarchy and that we were not a religious state (in spite of borrowing wholesale a number of institutions birthed by the Church and midwifed by the monarchy), but that we would tolerate and facilitate the usurpation of political and economic power by plutocrats and economic elites (most of whom, in those early years, being slaveowners). Later, another country (drawing upon this very same anti-culture) would be founded on the contradictory principles that chattel slavery, one of the pinnacles of human wickedness, depravity and exploitation, was actually a good thing, and that discussion of the Good was meaningless because deciding upon the Good was solely a matter of individual ‘liberty’ (by which they meant, naturally, only the individual ‘liberty’ of the slaveholders holding the reins of power). Since then, we have had good periods and bad ones with regard to common cause. Sadly, the idea today that the government should not have a moral voice but should function only according to what is most ‘efficient’ once again shows that we have not yet moved sufficiently away from this anti-culture.

It is often sadly forgotten that this was not the sole prevailing opinion of how a state ought to be run. Conservative, monarchical Frenchmen and Englishmen, not all of them by any stretch of the imagination elites, fled northward in the wake of this cultural revolution in order to found a second American nation based on the principles of ‘paix, ordre et bon gouvernement’ – ironically professing solidarity with both a mother country (Britain) which was in the midst of implementing by slow degrees the same Whiggish cultural revolution and another mother country (France) which would try to implement it all at once, through force and terror. Canada has at each step of its development as a country attempted to cultivate both an independent, active civil society and an ‘official’ norm of civic republicanism in its government institutions (informed by the Catholicism of the Quebecois loyalists of the ancien régime and by the Anglicanism, Quakerism and so forth of the United Empire Loyalists) to reflect that; resulting in an early abolitionist sentiment which found its bloodless expression in law seventy years earlier than ours did. I find myself, as I have found myself from a very young age, drawn primarily to the Canadian model of government and vision of what it means to be American – partially for aesthetic and partially for moral reasons.

Hope for the continued health of our own society, though, is likely to be found in and through the expressions of communitarianism and common enterprise given voice (rather ironically, in my humble opinion) in this Chrysler advertisement. The potential is there, certainly, for a politic which is informed by a common interest, which better serves the economic, political and religious needs of ordinary Americans than the template we currently have.

‘It’s halftime in America’, indeed. If we can finish the first half in an expression of solidarity, I am greatly looking forward to the next two hundred years!