Читать книгу Land of the Free - David A. Bedford - Страница 6

Foreword

On a dry, cloudless, and comfortable Sunday morning in Lubbock, Texas, I saw something at the church I had recently joined that shocked me. Between the Bible-study hour (also known as Sunday School) and the worship service, a well-respected member of the congregation was having a smoke on the sidewalk. Now, I had just arrived from Argentina, the country where I grew up, to attend college. Baptist churches in Argentina were likely to expel a member caught smoking. How was it that what was perfectly acceptable in Baptist churches in the US was anathema to the same churches in Argentina?

Then it struck me that Argentine Baptists drink wine with their meals, beer with pizza, a little liqueur, French style, for digestion and (why not?) a dash of cognac in their coffee. When my family was invited to eat at any of the pastors’ houses, we would be offered wine. My Baptist missionary parents always declined politely. As I started college, it became clear in an amusingly recurrent fashion that, if valued members of a West Texas church were seen openly consuming or even buying “liquor,” they would find themselves in the middle of a tsunami of gossip, taunting, and disapproval, if not worse.

Maybe it’s just me, but I felt compelled to make sense of this difference, as it was perfectly possible for both sets of churches to be wrong on what they condemned, whereas it was impossible for both of them to be right. Given my upbringing, I naturally turned to the Bible, to find that Jesus’ first miracle on record was to transform a large amount of water into wine so that the guests at a wedding party he was attending would not run out of the beverage and the hosts not be embarrassed. Parts of the Bible caution somberly against overindulging with wine and one incident even shows Noah being shamed because he got drunk, but nowhere does the Bible prohibit drinking wine. Moreover, passing the cup of wine and drinking from it is a central part of the Seder ceremony. In the first century, during the Seder of what was most likely (but not fully established) the year 30, Jesus passed around the cup of wine and proclaimed the establishment of a New Covenant. Among American Protestant congregations the ceremony is practiced as Communion or Lord’s Supper. So the Argentines are right in using wine so long as they show it sufficient respect.

What then, about smoking? The Bible has nothing to say about it, so I had to turn to what I knew about the effects of smoking other than the fact that second-hand cigarette smoke set me to coughing and always drove me from the room. Even back that far into the last century, it was clear that the tar in cigarettes made deposits in the lungs, causing emphysema, a horrible disease which kills in an agonizingly slow process of suffocation. It also can interact with the genes of certain people to become carcinogenic. The nicotine in cigarettes is addictive and increases blood pressure and heart rate. And I haven’t even touched on how cigarettes prey on one’s budget. For most people, then, smoking is nothing but bad news. Christian doctrine holds that we are to care for our bodies for a number of reasons. So in this particular case, the Argentine Baptists appeared to be vindicated, but they should have been wary of how alcohol use can get out of hand and they probably should not have expelled church members for smoking, but rather counsel people to give up tobacco. Where both communities had it wrong was to judge their fellow Baptists instead of looking to their own lives and endeavoring to live right.

At this point you may well ask what all this has to do with the history of the United States of America. You deserve an answer. For full disclosure I must tell you that I am an American by birth and by parentage, and proud to be so. My families have an unusually long history in the US. My mother’s maiden name is Watson, which is Scots-Irish, and her mother’s maiden name was Land (German). Both families came to the British colonies in North America at some point during the mid eighteenth century. The first ancestor in a direct line on my father’s side came from England (can there be any name more English than Bedford?) in 1701 or 1703. The record is not entirely clear. He married a descendant of a family who came over on the Mayflower. If that is not American enough for you, both of my father’s grandfathers married Native American women: a Choctaw in one case and a Cherokee in the other. I would assume those credentials should suffice. My father was born in Belen, New Mexico (yes, it was already a US state by then) and my mother in Lorenzo, Texas, just outside of Lubbock. My father’s family did tenant farming in west Texas and when his father died, the family moved to Clovis, just across the line in New Mexico. My mother grew up on tenant farms, in west Texas when she was little, and then in Roosevelt County, also in eastern New Mexico.

All this goes into the picture I constructed for myself about what the US was like while I was growing up in Argentina as a missionaries’ kid. We spoke English at home and lived an American family life, but outside the home, at school, church, social functions, and with friends, it was an Argentine life in the Spanish language. As a result I am fully bicultural and bilingual, a function of how I grew up, not of me or my abilities. I can see both American and Argentine culture from the inside and also as an outsider to them. This is called cultural relativity.

I first learned about US culture and history from my parents. Then on each of the two obligatory furloughs, which occurred before I turned eighteen, I went to public schools in Fort Worth, where I was born and where I live now, and learned more about US life and history. During both furloughs I also learned about aspects of US life that did not jibe with what I had been taught about it, either by my parents or my schools. But I am getting ahead of my story here. I did my last three years of high school in an American school in Buenos Aires in order to transition smoothly to college in the US. We studied American history in the 11th grade, where I learned still more about the country. When I moved here for college I had to socialize as an adult American, not an easy process, but a beneficial one. My bicultural condition drove me to think about the themes that characterize US life, where these themes came from, and where they may be leading. Through reflection, travel, and reading (both US history books and keeping up with events as they happened while I lived here) I have continued to learn to this day. My ongoing understanding of Argentina followed a similar process.

I would like to share with you what I have discovered. Walking through as much American history as we can in a single volume, I will organize the review of US history by cultural themes, that is, by the ways of acting and thinking that are easily observable but rarely noticed. These themes constitute assumptions that drive our ideology and actions and filter out certain concepts about ourselves while letting others through. By way of example, some of the themes are the family farm experience, which dominated until the mid-twentieth century, an uncritical assumption of American exceptionality, the place of sports, whom we consider persons of value, and so on. I will trace these themes through highlights of our shared American experience and in so doing hope to convince you that history is endlessly fascinating.

It should not be forgotten that all histories are personal. I admit up front that this is my take, this is how I try to make sense of the present by studying the past. The writer of any history chooses what is important, significant, and interesting and what is not, thus giving you his or her selective and personal vision. It could not possibly be any other way. The book you hold in your hand may be the first that organizes the history of the country around organically American cultural themes and values. Perhaps it will bring to light matters that have necessarily been overlooked before now. I invite you, not to agree with everything I say, but to follow along for the enjoyment of it.

My purpose in this book is not to be critical or judgmental, but rather to enlighten. Some topics I touch on are sensitive and negative, but that is because, like every other country, we have had episodes in our history which are at variance with our admirable principles contained in the Declaration of Independence and in the Bill of Rights. I also hope to highlight our strengths as a country which we can draw on to improve our future prospects. I am proud and happy to be an American, and equally glad I had the privilege of growing up in two cultures.

If you want to explore how our cultural assumptions shape what has happened to us as a country and as individuals, read on.