Sarah Vowell totally made me cry in the bathtub tonight.

[esmesquall]

From a single chapter in The Wordy Shipmates:
FIRST she quotes Puritan John Winthrop's speech "Christian Charity":
"We must delight in each other, make each other’s conditions our own, rejoice together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.I am a

Comments

[roninspoon]

This is insightful and poignant, but it could really use more vagina jokes.

[esmesquall]

I think there are some in there. You should totally read this book, Ed. It would rock your world.

[roninspoon]

I have considered it.

[esmesquall]

STOP CONSIDERING AND GET THEE TO AN AMAZON

[kensey]

As a nation I think we never really got over Manifest Destiny -- because basically everything we wanted from 1814 on, we acquired. Even the Civil War was no more than a blip in American expansionism -- for 150 years we had free run of the Western Hemisphere. Then, while we were still basking in the afterglow of literally Saving the World in the 1940s, and fighting the Good Fight against the Godless Commies to save it again, we slammed into the boulder of reality that was Southeast Asia.

It gave us a bad case of psychological trauma and in a way I think the story of American politics since then is a story of the fight between cargo-cult thinkers trying to take us back to that warm, happy place by trying to making America feel that way again, and those attempting to get us past that need to always live in 1960 Mayberry so we can grow and mature as a nation.

[esmesquall]

The interesting thing about this book is that it traces the roots of manifest destiny (actually, American exceptionalism) back a little further than that -- the focus is exclusively on the Puritans, and Vowell's thesis is that our ideas about how they've shaped our culture are pretty much exactly ass-backward. I really, really recommend it.

[bjuarez]

I don't know anything about Puritan philosophizin', but they had some pretty kick-ass hats.

http://images.buycostumes.com/mgen/merchandiser/20095.jpg