Tag: america

Goodbye To All That

John Chapman2 Comments

America has never been an easy place to love. For many of us that relationship has been rife with co-dependencies because when you feel there is no there there, you quickly learn that for you there is no anywhere. You cling to it like a feral child that can’t bear to leave his mother’s dessicated corpse because there never was any life outside of her even after you were born. Life in the most diverse nation on earth is simply a force majeure. Identify with the hurricane if you can, though you may not like what the whirlwind has to say.

Continue reading “Goodbye To All That” →

Fear and Self-Loathing in America

John Chapman7 Comments

the following is a sample from my forthcoming American Sun article on the history and uses of humiliation.

“What did the Pilgrim Fathers come for, then, when they came so gruesomely over the black sea? Oh, it was in a black spirit. A black revulsion from Europe, from the old authority of Europe, from kings and bishops and popes. And more. When you look into it, more. They were black, masterful men, they wanted something else. No kings, no bishops maybe. Even no God Almighty. But also, no more of this new ‘humanity’ which followed the Renaissance. None of this new liberty which was to be so pretty in Europe. Something grimmer, by no means free-and-easy.” – DH Lawrence, “Studies in Classic American Literature”

Harvard was established to train Puritan clergy and it never stopped.

Humiliations runs deep in the American soul. America is not a land that one thinks of when they think of cultural cringe or the self-loathing that other nations, especially Anglo, have been all too eager to revel in. The Puritans occupy the American imagination, as they should for that American soul cannot be understood without understanding the Puritans, one of history’s great purity spiralers. Never has the purity spiral ascended so high and fallen so low than in their history.

Continue reading “Fear and Self-Loathing in America” →