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True Patriot Love, Redux
Sep. 21st, 2004 03:06 pmI was reading about Thomas Jefferson on wikipedia last night (along with a bunch of other US Presidents, several of whom I'd never heard of; have I mentioned that I like wikipedia?). There was a bit where it mentioned that he "was a great beliver in the uniqueness and the potential of the United States and is often classified a forefather of American Exceptionalism", which, when I followed the link, seemed to be essentially the same phenomenon as that which I was curious about when I wrote this entry - the idea that America is uniquely and inherently virtuous, acting as a sort of beacon of liberty for the rest of the world.
And I thought that the belief seemed a more intuitively sensible thing when it was his, because the nation was something that he had helped to shape and give birth to, and measurably the result of his own strivings to make the world a better place. He was filled to shining with its potential, and setting it in motion; so when he said that America was special, I parse him as meaning, "This task and this achievement were so very worth devoting my life to."
(The US was also probably actually unique in more progressive ways when he was alive, but that seems less important.)
Jefferson seems to be pretty good at getting me to imagine America as something akin to Windsor House this way. A while ago I read the Declaration of Independence for the first time, and it struck me what a neat document it was, stripped of its mythos; I had often heard it described as though it were an almost superhuman achievement, but looking at it, it looked familiarly like the result of a productive meeting of passionate people, and more interesting thereby.
And I thought that the belief seemed a more intuitively sensible thing when it was his, because the nation was something that he had helped to shape and give birth to, and measurably the result of his own strivings to make the world a better place. He was filled to shining with its potential, and setting it in motion; so when he said that America was special, I parse him as meaning, "This task and this achievement were so very worth devoting my life to."
(The US was also probably actually unique in more progressive ways when he was alive, but that seems less important.)
Jefferson seems to be pretty good at getting me to imagine America as something akin to Windsor House this way. A while ago I read the Declaration of Independence for the first time, and it struck me what a neat document it was, stripped of its mythos; I had often heard it described as though it were an almost superhuman achievement, but looking at it, it looked familiarly like the result of a productive meeting of passionate people, and more interesting thereby.
