Everybody’s favorite quote from Alexis de Tocqueville is a fake. The author of Democracy in America actually did not say, “America is great because America is good,” in his peerless 1835 tome. You can see why these apocryphal words have been deployed so often in blissful ignorance by pompous dinner speakers from the penny- ante to the presidential. Who wouldn’t like to believe that America is great because America is good? Damn it, compared with everywhere else on earth it sure seems to be true. But Tocqueville was far too sophisticated a thinker to offer a bromide where more qualified praise laden with ambiguity would do. The truth is, America isn’t great because America is good. America is great because it’s America and screw you if you think otherwise. America is America, both good and bad. It’s a land that combined a radically brilliant political system where there had been none before with a continental mass so rich and expansive that just tapping its wealth was enough to produce the closest thing to paradise on earth the world had ever seen.
By John Podhoretz
When American popular culture takes up the subject of America, warts and all, it shows us a messy, crazy, friendly, lumbering blunderbuss of a place. America is the Jolly Green Giant. It’s cheerful, it’s rich, and it’s big. Case in point: the movie is literally called Giant . When I was a kid, I loved this gargantuan picture from director George Stevens, all three hours and 21 minutes of it. Movie geek that I was, one day in a boring math class I drew a poster I thought would sell the film perfectly (even though it had been released 20 years earlier). For Giant ’s protagonist, Bick Benedict, I came up with this tagline: “He was as big and dumb as America herself.”
GOD AND THE MOVIES LOVE THIS BIG, DUMB PLACE
American Consequences
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