Near and far

Had some back and forth dialog with Mary's cousin Lee on Facebook. He's a born-again Christian, a Republican, he voted for Trump. He is also a good guy, reasonable to talk to, clearly very devoted to his family, who are also pleasant to meet, and was a consummate host for our family when we visited with them in Haines, Alaska a couple of summers ago, and again when Mary went back that September to take pictures using her big girl camera.* 

I'm glad Lee and I can have calm dialogue about things. It helps of course that we're both white males, so nothing really threatens us, whine as some might. But I'm not entirely clear in my mind as to why I should necessarily prefer affiliation and alignment with Lee as opposed, say, to being on the same page with someone like Sarah, the young English girl I innocently kissed in the summer of 1981 near Manchester who now has a beautiful cheese farm in Galicia, Spain. Or people I know from Moscow who suffer under Putin. Or the people around the world who host Noraly so graciously as she rides through their towns on Itchy Boots.

America is ultimately held together by nothing so much as a set of ideas, and our notions of what those ideas are have diverged a lot internally. Meanwhile, I agree with a lot of people who live elsewhere on things more than I agree with Lee.

As to America's greatness, so much of our idea of our notional greatness goes back to WWII, which we perceive ourselves as having "won" with our derring do and bravery. It must be so. We've seen so many movies about it.

Sarah Paine of the US Naval War College scoffs at this notion. For the Nazis, she points out, Russia was the primary adversary and also the primary theater in which military engagement happened. And Germans died. Something like 20-27 million Soviet citizens died in WWII, compared to maybe 420,000 Americans. Had the Nazis not been tied up in Russia, Paine notes, we'd have never progressed from Normandy towards Berlin. If, indeed, we had even made it onshore. So in many ways the origin myth of American greatness, the winning of the war, is grossly exaggerated.

Pondering all this.

* Natalie, Graham and I might have ripped her limb from limb had she tried to take those pictures while we were there. As a sign of our love.