Simon Schama: Still has faith in America
“The most evil nation on earth!” At a dinner in Lahore earlier this year I was shocked at the casual anti-Americanism of the conversation. Sophisticated people who knew America and Americans well took it as second nature to excoriate the place. When I expressed surprise, I was told that America was polluting Pakistan’s culture, undermining its democracy and fomenting the Taliban by bombing Pashtun villages. Yes, I said, but could they not distinguish between the misdeeds of a particular president and the ideals that America still represented? Not any more, came the reply.
Simon Schama’s book is a brilliant antidote to anti-Americanism. Written, perhaps recklessly, in the hope that America might transform its world image by electing Barack Obama, it is a searchlight sweeping the horizon of American history. It picks out incidents, movements, ideas and, above all, people, warts and all. If, like much of Schama’s work, its ending seems uncertain, so is America’s. Here is an unashamed paean of praise for the world’s most successful nation.
Schama’s America is built on four abstract nouns — belligerence, fervour, ethnicity and plenty — each viewed as part history, part anecdote and part (less satisfactory) research for a television series. Each scene is brought alive by the author’s gift for narrative. We move easily from the frozen wastes of the Iowa caucuses, cradle of US democracy, to another cradle, the heights of Arlington, Virginia. Here one of Schama’s cascade of characters, the civil-war officer Montgomery Meigs, furiously buries dead Union soldiers in the garden of the Washington mansion belonging to his old West Point friend, Robert E Lee. Lee had become a Confederate and thus a traitor.
The great struggle between Hamilton and Jefferson, between a “caesarist” military republic and a volunteer democracy defending “an empire of liberty”, lives on for Schama in the conflict between the neo-conservatives and old army men such as General Ricardo Sanchez, “bristling with hostility” against his former bosses in the Pentagon. To his delight, there are still Meigses in the American army, still expressing a fierce independence on the subject of Bosnia and the Iraq war. They are still teaching courses at Georgetown University on “Why presidents go to war and why they don’t have to”.
Read entire article at Simon Jenkins in the Times (UK)
Simon Schama’s book is a brilliant antidote to anti-Americanism. Written, perhaps recklessly, in the hope that America might transform its world image by electing Barack Obama, it is a searchlight sweeping the horizon of American history. It picks out incidents, movements, ideas and, above all, people, warts and all. If, like much of Schama’s work, its ending seems uncertain, so is America’s. Here is an unashamed paean of praise for the world’s most successful nation.
Schama’s America is built on four abstract nouns — belligerence, fervour, ethnicity and plenty — each viewed as part history, part anecdote and part (less satisfactory) research for a television series. Each scene is brought alive by the author’s gift for narrative. We move easily from the frozen wastes of the Iowa caucuses, cradle of US democracy, to another cradle, the heights of Arlington, Virginia. Here one of Schama’s cascade of characters, the civil-war officer Montgomery Meigs, furiously buries dead Union soldiers in the garden of the Washington mansion belonging to his old West Point friend, Robert E Lee. Lee had become a Confederate and thus a traitor.
The great struggle between Hamilton and Jefferson, between a “caesarist” military republic and a volunteer democracy defending “an empire of liberty”, lives on for Schama in the conflict between the neo-conservatives and old army men such as General Ricardo Sanchez, “bristling with hostility” against his former bosses in the Pentagon. To his delight, there are still Meigses in the American army, still expressing a fierce independence on the subject of Bosnia and the Iraq war. They are still teaching courses at Georgetown University on “Why presidents go to war and why they don’t have to”.