American Elegy

Having lived in Austria for seven years, I have perhaps a keener appreciation of my native land than ever before, much as I have come to love the lands of the Habsburg monarchy. Another presidential election looms ever closer, with perhaps the bitterest atmosphere of any in my 63 years of experience. Whatever the result, it shall undoubtedly continue the process of national division and outright hatred that has become the hallmark of our life as a country. I shall not be on hand for it, but I shall be watching from my foreign home.

This bitterness is a tremendous pain to me because, to be honest, I love the United States of America. Not the idea of them—the “last, best hope of Mankind,” the “Shining City on the Hill,” and all the rest of it, for all that I was raised with that. I love the messy, incongruous reality of them. I love the flag—the “Star Spangled Banner,” “Old Glory,” the “Stars and Stripes”—not as a symbol of some abstract “liberty,” but as the emblem of the land I love, for which and under which thousands of brave men and women have died, and which my grandfather, great uncles, father, brother, and myself (albeit briefly, during peacetime) served.

That I love and revere Old Europe cannot be gainsaid. From thence to America came my religion, culture, languages, and most of my DNA. I am proud to be a European, albeit a colonial. But I am just as proud at least to have been born an American. My love for this country of ours started in my childhood, with my birthplace of New York City, and the legend-haunted valley of the Hudson. It extended rather quickly to my father’s native New England, and visits to Valley Forge and Gettysburg acquainted me with New Jersey and Pennsylvania. My lifelong affection for the works of Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was begun with those early explorations with my family.

When I was a child, we moved to Hollywood, California; I grew to love the above authors as much to assuage my homesickness as anything else. But, in time, I came to appreciate California’s Missions and attendant Spanish antiquities, and the glamour of Old Hollywood—or at least what remained of it. Certainly, watching Zorro helped speed that process! The weirdness of the Age of Aquarius was a bit off-putting, but it taught me to see the beauty of the past underneath the ugliness of the present—a skill which has proved invaluable to maintaining my sanity. As time has gone on, even the counterculture, for all of its contributions to our present mess, has acquired a certain nostalgic patina in my memory.

My first college was New Mexico Military Institute, in Roswell. Alien visitations aside, for all that I was a lukewarm student (although I certainly learned to write there, thanks to the late lamented professor Charl Van Horn), it allowed me to explore the Southwest. Its Spanish heritage—akin to our own in California—and the Indian Pueblos fascinated me, as did its amazing countryside and natural features from the Grand Canyon to the Painted Desert. Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Tucson, and El Paso all endeared themselves to me for different reasons.

In the years that followed, I explored Coastal California all the way to the Oregon line and fell in love with Big Sur and the Monterey Peninsula. I travelled in the South and became enamored of the Virginia and Maryland Tidewater; the Lowcountry of the Carolinas and Georgia; St. Augustine, Palm Beach, and the Florida Keys; the Gulf Coast from Pensacola to Houston; and all of Southern Louisiana. Portland and Seattle and the countryside between thrilled, as did the Mountain States. 

The last area of the country I really got to know was the Midwest, in many ways the most American part of the nation; I say this because, unlike the rest of the States, it was settled by Americans. Of course, there were also many foreign immigrants, whose checkerboard settlements are still a feature of the countryside. The impressive architecture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as expressed in both city and countryside may be seen in churches, courthouses, city halls, libraries, and war memorials throughout the region. Of course, the country’s natural treasures from Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Crater Lake to the Appalachians also formed part of my itinerary.

St. Thomas Aquinas teaches us that we cannot love something unless we know it; so, having seen all 50 of our United States is why I can honestly say I love them all. But there is more to it than that. Literature is an important means of getting to know a people. And, as earlier noted, I was attracted to the founding fathers of our national literature when quite young. But we have had so many more since then: Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Jack London, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, and on and on. Everyone shall have their own list, but as a people, we Americans have produced some very fine works, indeed.

I would take that ride into music as well. Stephen Foster was certainly our first great composer. But building on our imported folk roots, we have had many since, and the Great American Songbook is called that for a reason. Broadway and Hollywood musicals, jazz, the Big Bands, doo-wop, and early Rock and Roll were our unique products. Indeed, when it has come to popular entertainment, these United States have always been in the first rank, with successive “Golden Ages” of radio, television, illustration, Broadway, Hollywood, comic books, science fiction, pulp magazines, advertising, and so on.

American genius has also been put to more practical pursuits, and our science and industry have historically been second to none. From the interstate highway system and the moon landing to the polio vaccine and the intercontinental railroad, we have invented and built as we have expanded. Indeed, our built heritage from coast to coast is extremely impressive. The American version of the Arts and Crafts Movement, Colonial and other Revivals, the City Beautiful Movement, the landscape architecture pioneered by Frederick Law Olmsted, and so many other such phenomena helped create some of the incredibly beautiful building and urban and rural landscapes we enjoy today.

Frankly, even some of our less savory historical events have nevertheless left wonderful tangible effects. I am too much aware of the politics attendant upon the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt ever to approve of either wholeheartedly. Yet to the degree the former engaged the uniquely American talent of its time, it has left us an amazing legacy. The WPA and PWA not only created some truly wonderful art and architecture across the country, the former’s Federal Writer’s Project Guidebook series captured the United States of its time expertly in beautifully written prose.

One could go on and on in praise of the United States’ reality. But there is another, unfortunate side to the coin. I often tell foreigners, “If you want to love my country, go visit the States, and take a long road trip. You will be convinced that we are the most wonderful nation and people on earth. If you want to hate us, study the history of our foreign policy.” Truly, there has always been a big disconnect between the country’s leadership on the one hand and their subjects on the other—and our foreign policy is one tangible expression of it.

The American Revolution, our first civil war, was—if we are to believe the numbers proposed by John Adams—of an action imposed by the leaders of one third of the population upon the remaining two thirds. Our second civil war, usually called by that name, was the bloodiest conflict we have ever fought—and it was against each other. But while the Southern leadership favored secession and their Northern counterparts bloody repression of the same, a great many of the subjects of the first were Unionists, and of the second, Copperheads. 

One does not know how many Americans wanted to invade Canada in 1812 or Mexico in 1845, but there were, at the very least, large minorities opposed to both. In Latin America, our government always supported anti-Catholic factions against Catholic ones—from the 1820s on. Perhaps our most unjust war was that fought against Spain in 1898. Precipitated by an explosion on an American battleship that has since been determined to be an accident, it nevertheless precipitated our conquest of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, followed the next year by our annexation of Hawaii and half of Samoa—neither of which had ever done us any harm. 

One passes over quickly the horrors released by our inept diplomatic strategies in 1918 and 1945, which caused endless horrors for so many in Europe and Asia—and in the first case, the white martyrdom of Blessed Karl of Austria. So, too, shall we not look at more recent developments, which shall be too well-known to our readers.

But where the good things this country has produced are a result of her native spirit, the evil are as well—the result of her being from the beginning a heretical nation. The Catholics of our country have rarely tried to convert her in any meaningful way. The result of our failure to bring her to Christ has been the succession of several more or less corrupt rulerships, and the frequent use of our country’s undeniable strengths for evil purposes. Thus, today our economic, political, and military power are placed at the service of exporting infanticide and perversion across the planet. It is against that background that the current division and the upcoming election are to be seen.

The country of my childhood—the land of the Elks, Rotary, Kiwanis, American Legion, Knights of Columbus, and Boy Scouts—is gone, “one with Nineveh and Tyre,” in Kipling’s pithy phrase. In that long-ago land, Democrats and Republicans, Capital and Labor, Farmers and Manufacturers—all wanted pretty much the same thing for our country, differing primarily on the means of achieving it. But now, the same space of land is occupied by two very different countries with radically opposed views of reality.

It falls to us Catholic Americans living today, in the face of national division, to regain our sense of mission, regardless of who wins or loses the election. Either way, our task shall be the same. To evangelize as we can, in order to one day bring about a renewed national unity, this time based upon truth rather than heresy. We must, in particular, pray to our American patroness, Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception. May she crown our efforts with success, so that all that is good in our country may be purified and brought to the service of God. It falls to us Catholic Americans living today, in the face of national division, to regain our sense of mission, regardless of who wins or loses the election.Tweet This

With these thoughts in our minds, regardless of who is elected president next month, let us raise our eyes above the White House to Heaven, wherein He who reigns over the Earth for all eternity dwells. As we worship Him, let us offer to Him our great country, that it may one day finally work for His approval—and perhaps gain it.