Bigger Than

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

If America had a symbol, it would be bigger than.

Matthew Bowman (probably in one of those flashes of insight one has when baby is making one sleep-deprived) said on Facebook, that the rest of the world just sees Americans as extreme. Americans is where big things happen. Good or bad? Yes. but big. Much bigger than in the rest of the world. And it got my mind ticking.

He’s right. And wrong. I mean, it’s how the rest of the world sees us, and there’s a lot of things that feed into the myth. But it’s not true. It’s more that we’re more… real? than the rest of the world. We take things to their logical conclusions, little hampered by “but it’s never been done before.” We have severed our roots, but we’ve bound ourselves to other roots, to a document that is supposed to set our limits.

And yes, I know what you’re going to say. And yes, that’s the problem precisely. To the extent that America is bound to the Constitution America is bigger than but good. In gamer terms? Chaotic good. (No bear with me. I’ll explain.) But if we’re unbound? Good or bad? Mostly yes. Very fast. And very, very big.

What do I mean by bigger? Well, I remembered the other day that the Guiana’s People Temple massacre took place on my birthday. I remember waking up to the newspapers being full of it. But you know, I never associated it. I have pleasant memories from that birthday, because it was probably my biggest party. For some reason I had a lot of “friends” at the time. (Yes, note the quotes. They weren’t enemies, but they weren’t close friends either. Yet, for the first time in a long time, I had people who were very friendly acquaintances, ten or so, which made it the biggest group I ever had at a party. Ever.)

How could I wake up to descriptions of that horror and not identify it with the date? Easy. because at the time I had it firmly set in my head that in America huge things happened all the time, good and bad. I don’t think I believed, as a lot of people we fight with on line do, that in America people got up and shot fifteen people before breakfast, then shot their way into work, etc. But I did believe that in America crime was much, much higher. Particularly in the cities. When I stayed fifteen days in NYC upon landing (In an enclosed college campus — it was an orientation thing for our group) I heard sirens day and night, and I thought ‘Ahah.’ It wasn’t till much, much later that I realized the bulk of those sirens would be in hot pursuit of speeders, red light runners and just coming to the scene of accidents.

But it’s the image. You can be shivved in any random walk through the neighborhood, but on the other hand, someone can discover you and make you a Hollywood star, or give you a million dollars or something.

You can be a pauper or a king, but not anything in between.

Look, I know that’s not true. Most of us live lives of routine and politeness, and while I personally was once two minutes from an armed robbery (we’d just left the Kroger when the armed robbers went in. No seriously. Downtown Colorado Springs. Tiny neighborhood store) the only times I’ve been shot at, or been near someone who was shot was not in the US.

Part of this is of course that they get our news, but they imagine that our news instead of sensationalizing things mute them down. So they imagine it’s more like the movies, all the time. I have the hardest time explaining to mom that I don’t routinely get shot at on the way to the grocery store and don’t have to dodge a car chase on the regular, while going out for sewing notions or something. And she visited the US. (Granted tiny Manitou Springs. She probably thinks it’s the exception.)

But the other part of it is that to them (and to an extent to the history of the world) we’re unfathomable.

You guys, if you grew up here probably don’t get this. Heck, I didn’t fully get this until I was here and had more contact with Portuguese, from here to there, because I was broken and never paid any attention to what people expected of me. (Not paid any attention is the wrong way to put it. I didn’t “see it”. I still have that issue here, just less so because things tend to be more explicit. Except where they aren’t, and then I run into trouble.)

But there is a bound assumption that you’ll do something like what your ancestors have done. Jobs are acquired ONLY through connections (It’s getting that way here) so changing ‘class’ is really really hard (Not so much here because our connections frankly don’t care about “class” or if someone is in a manual or intellectual profession.)

Some jumping can occur through entering University, say, when you’re the first in your family, but it’s still hard. And beyond that, there is a powerful substratum of “this is how it’s always been done. Always.” and shock when people do things differently.

In America, even when that happens, it’s not what is expected. America as a culture is where we can do anything, or at least that’s the expectation.

And part of the expectation was us doing the impossible. Don’t ask me why, but we’re the only country who kicked out the king, put up a constitution and hasn’t FORMALLY reconstituted three or four times since. I mean, yes, the Constitution has been ignored and twisted every which way but lose, but we’ve not outright tossing it out and rewriting it every generation. Most of the countries who tried to follow in our footsteps (with various degrees of crazy shot it, like France which had all the crazy) have.

Instead, we have despite fraud and other things followed the peaceful revolution every four years, and except for the Civil war (which yes, was big, but also the result of pushing big issues under the rug) haven’t had a set-to in forever.

This is so weird that even the founding fathers didn’t expect it.

And it’s not genetics, because genetics have changed so much from the beginning. (BTW, that alarming statistic of most Americans or half Americans or whatever have a parent born abroad? I see those families every time I go grocery shopping. To an extent I are those families ;) . And it’s because American males are marrying abroad a lot, now that communication across the ocean is a trivial matter. And that’s because American culture is bigger than life, and women are attracted to the winning tribe. Also, from my kids’ friends, those with one parent from abroad are more American than George Washington and FAR more American than Alexander Hamilton.)

Anyway, I think the magic sauce is that all of us here are either immigrants or descended from those who were. (Shut up. There are no full blood Amerinds. Not a single one.) In a new place, it’s easier to break the unspoken ties of culture and stick to the Constitution. or try to.

This has cast us loose to make our own way. Sometimes we choose bloody stupid things — like Prohibition — but most of the time, it frees us from the errors of the past.

Which means, to the rest of the world, we appear unfathomable. And bigger. Just bigger.

This is why I say communism has to die here. No, it has never worked anywhere else, but stupid idiots don’t realize it’s against human nature itself, and think it could maybe work here. I mean we’ve done the impossible before.

They’re not wrong. Except about communism, which is a mind virus hooking into very old tribal sentiment. Part of the reason it had and still has such a hard time infecting here. But it it were a simple utopian philosophy? Yeah, we’ve done that before. (Most of them have failed, yes, but we sure tried them.)

It’s also why if any nation or culture can take us to the stars, we can. Because we do the impossible, the strange, what can’t be done.

We’re greater than. We’re humanity unleashed.

And this is why dooming based on other people’s histories will not be predictive.

We’re not the same. We’re qualitatively and quantitatively different.

This is not chest beating. It’s just a change in how things are done. Romans were just such a step. They were the first culture to more or less (less than more, but all the same) look beyond tribalism. We’re the next step in that, with classism also left in the dust, and innovation baked in.

We’re something quite new.

Which means the old pathways turn weird shapes here.

And yeah, that does mean we could end up worse than anyone else, sure thing.

Or you know, we could end up better.

It’s a risk we take, and we’re a risk taking people? Me? I choose to believe and work towards our ending up better.

Someone has to take humanity to the stars. And I say it should be us.

Because we’re greater than.

218 thoughts on “Bigger Than”

      1. Quebec isn’t the hat. It’s the pigeon shit dripping off the back of the hat.

        Come on. You may not like me but it’s funny and it’s true.

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  3. As one Brit put it. “America is huge.” In Europe you can drive through several countries in 45 minutes. We have states that can take you most of the day to get through. Despite the crowding in some cities, there is still a lot of elbow room in this country.

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    1. I live in Orlando.

      A number of years ago, I was in a local hotel and ran into a British family who were here on vacation. The father mentioned that they were “going to drive to Miami for lunch.”

      It was noon.

      “You mean dinner,” I said.

      “What?”

      “Miami is a four hour drive from here. Probably more, since you’ll be arriving right at rush hour. So you might get to eat by five or six.”

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      1. I think I’ve told this story before, but apologies if you’ve seen it before but it is topical.

        When I worked at the Airport Rent-A-Car Counter, I once had a family fly in from somewhere in Europe, I think France (it’s been nearly a decade). They wanted to rent a car to drive down to Disney World for a long weekend. They had arrived on Friday and were planning to return the car on Monday.

        We were in Pittsburgh. Which they had chosen because the flight and car rental rates were much more reasonable than Orlando or Miami or New York (ya think). Between myself, two managers, a bystander, and (later) a State Trooper, we could not convince them that they would have to drive for two days, pretty much non-stop, in order to make it to Disney World, and then they would have to turn around and head back to Pittsburgh the second they arrived at the park in order to make their return flight.

        They kept saying “But it is so close on the map!”

        Europeans truly do not understand just how massive this country really is.

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        1. Having spent a fair amount of time teaching Land Navigation (map and compass work, aka “orienteering”), I am occasionally amazed at just how wrong people can be interpreting a map.

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            1. Yikes. 😬 My parents live in the Bryce Canyon area and own a couple of vacation rentals, and I half expect one of their guests to end up like that someday.

              Tourists routinely tell horror stories of trusting the GPS when it turns them onto the Cottonwood Wash “shortcut,” and locals just shake their heads. And that one isn’t so bad; it’s a looong gravel road through 90 miles of nothing, is all, but the number of people who go into it with mostly empty gas tanks and trusting that it’ll magically turn into a highway with gas stations and convenience stores every 20 miles is pretty impressive. Towing services make bank on that during tourist season.

              The level of cluelessness of some people from the eastern half of THIS country, let alone Europe, as to the distances, ruggedness, and emptiness of most of the western US is astounding to those of us who grew up out in the sagebrush. (And they’d be puzzled by my dislike of cities, I suspect.)

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              1. Oregon has had a couple of instances like that via I-5 to the coast. Not everyone died. But someone did. One can take the forest roads between I-5 and the coast, but they are not short cuts at the best of times (despite mileage). In the winter they are suppose to be gated and locked. Anymore this is true even in the summer.

                One of the problems with online maps these days is mapping out travel routes because unless you know the area the system routes around viable routes. Try to route through Yellowstone or some of the other national parks. It is like there are no roads. Technically right now that is true. But come summer the roads are open. Makes it difficult to determine routes for the summer during the winter.

                We saw what GPS tried to pull around Brice during our trip last month, mid-February. We didn’t go very far down the wrong path, really just to turn around because we knew the GPS had routed us incorrectly. While we had an all wheel drive, we do not have a high centered 4×4. Nope. We know better. FYI. Brice has more snow this year than we’ve seen the last two times we’ve been through (2015 the last time).

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                1. Yeah, the Kim family was most noteworthy, proving (to fewer people than it should) that if you ignore multiple warnings, you will get bit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Kim

                  Prize quote from the Wiki story:

                  As they drove along the road, the Kims passed three prominent warning signs that state: “Bear Camp Road May Be Blocked By Snowdrifts”.[23] Kati later told police that they had noticed only one.

                  One wasn’t sufficient? Yikes!

                  OTOH, the Siskiyous and Kalimiopsis mountains tend to eat travelers on a regular basis. Doesn’t help that bad weather concentrates over those ranges.

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                  1. I wish I could say I was surprised, but… I spent four years working behind a counter. If I had a dollar for every time a customer told me “what sign?” (when the sign in question was right next to them) or “I didn’t know I was supposed to read that!” (when the sign in question was eighteen inches tall with seven-inch letters in bold text), I could have bought a very nice house.

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                    1. The amazing thing is she admitted they saw it, and still pressed on. Pete F’n Seeger did a song where the refrain is “the big fool said to push on”. (Similar context, though from a Stalinist…)

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                2. I developed a profound distrust of computer-based mapping programs around 2004 when I let a website (Mapquest, if memory serves) try to advise me how to get from where I lived to the Medford, OR Costco.

                  The route I already knew had me taking back roads (county highways) to OR-140 west of Klamath Falls, then to the Rogue Valley. Mapquest first had me travel to OR-140 east of K-Falls, then when it crossed US 97, to drive the 70 miles south to Weed, CA. Thence I-5 north to Medford. Okayyyyyyy. Turn a 100 mile trip into one that’s about 240. Right.

                  Hell, if it kept me on OR-140, it would only have been 120 miles…

                  The Honda has GPS. It wanted me to take the long route home, about 10 miles longer than normal. Nope. Do. Not. Trust.

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                  1. Nope. Do. Not. Trust.

                    We preploted routes on the small laptop in the hotel the night before. The phone Waze app didn’t choose that route. Hmmm. Not that it particularly was wrong. One spot it routed us through town, instead of around. Another spot routed us around town, not through. Hmmm. Guess which one we should have gone through for fuel. Yea. From now on will be noting the towns on the route we want so we can force the route. One of the routes we wanted, turned out road closed, because of the weather, so there is that. Also, usually there isn’t alternatives for Waze to mess up.

                    We run into the “what the heck” routes, here in town all the time. We know the general area, but not specific location. As in “Yes, we need Beltline East. I am not taking River Road to get there, dang it.” Then, “Yes, Beltline east, and I-5 south, but I’m taking Delta south to 126 east to I-5 south, dang it.” Last time it was to a restaurant. Knew it was across the street, somewhere from a regular spot. Again. “No, not taking Beltline west/south to W11th, taking, Irving to Prairie to hwy 99 south, to Roosevelt, to Seneca, to W11th, now where is the dang thing?” Would not be surprised if the GPS someday just spits out “okay, you know better, do it your way” in a pout. Need a “Which driveway/parking lot do I turn into off W11th?” option.

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                  2. I ran into a similar when driving to a state park in the mountains. The GPS “short route”, very much cutting hours off trip, turned out to be a twisty two lane mountain road. Speed limit was 45-55 on that spaghetti. Doubt I averaged 20mph.

                    Sign: “Truckers! Turn Back or Die!” which repeated several times. Since I was in a little sporty SUV, up I went.

                    Was…. stimulating.

                    Later, came home the “long” way on less spicy roads. Smoked my brakes and they were good ones and fairly fresh, front rotors warped. Bought upgrades. Specified “for driving in and around X”. “Aha. that is why your brakes are fried. Did you see the dont die signs?” LOL.

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                    1. There are three routes in/out of Yosemite from the north. GPS shows the shortest “fastest” route is the northern western one, up hwy 140. It isn’t. Especially if towing. Hwy 120 isn’t particularly fast either. Both two lane roads and there is no passing on either almost from the time leave the urban enclaves off the freeway.

                      Jackson Hole southern routes. Can come in through the river valleys or take the Teton Pass. Latter, do not recommend taking towing. Doable. Don’t. Beautiful drive. Just don’t tow over it.

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                    2. If you are going to the back country, US 395 up SR 140 is straight, though I didn’t have to drive it the one time we did that route. Pretty much straight up the mountain to Tuolumne Meadows.

                      CA 140 from the valley has the advantage of not getting any higher than the valley.

                      I used to use 120, and would take Old Priest’s Grade, the short cut that’s just above Dom Pedro reservoir. Not sure of the grade (absurd), and 25mph is an aspirational goal for the crazed, but it saves several miles of switchbacks. Do not attempt if <strike>you are sane</strike> pulling a trailer or a vehicle with spotty brakes and/or automatic transmission. (I’d use 1st gear downhill. Might use second uphill if I weren’t behind a loaded Diesel Rabbit. Could have walked faster…)

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                    3. 2010 we came in the NE entrance through Tioga Pass entrance to Tuoluomne Meadows. Relatively straight. Nice wide road. OTOH Steep (8% – 10% grade). Not going up speedily. Coming down even slower. Hubby wasn’t worried about our truck and RV trailer, as he used the low truck gears and the trailer breaks. That was the “summer” we bailed a night early. Due to ice and snow, early August. Roads would close overnight and wouldn’t open until as late as 2 PM in the afternoon. We had to leave by early AM to get home on schedule. Bail the night before was the only option.

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            1. One reason there are so many “rules of thumb” and fast number tricks in airborne navigation is you have to do stuff like that fairly expeditiously.

              There’s the mental-math-for-pilots type stuff, and then there’s the handy shortcuts the old pilots passed on using the steam-gauge instruments right there on the panel … which instruments are of course are now no longer in the panel, just screens full of pixels glowing quietly in the night.

              Get off my lawn.

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        2. An older friend had a similar story about when she was graduating from a university in Ohio. One of the foreign students in her graduating class had parents flying in from, IIRC, France. During their four days in the US, they planned to drive to NY to see the Statue of Liberty, then out to California to see the Golden Gate Bridge and Disneyland, stopping briefly at Yellowstone along the way, before returning to Ohio to fly home. Eventually, my friend was able to convince them of the utter impossibility of their plan. (I may have the stops slightly off, but they’re close enough to get the point across.) 

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          1. Even born and bred Americans may not have the best senses of scale or direction. We had a young gentleman (pre GPS/Cell Phones) who was at Tufts (or perhaps Northeastern? Its been a while) who was to come interview at Spitbrook Road in Nashua NH, We had explained Rt93 N to 495 S to Rt3 N and get off at exit 1 in New Hampshire and suggested he look on a map. We got a call from him about 15 minutes after the interview was to have started (2PM) that he had taken 93 to Rt 3 and had gotten to a large rotary and a bridge that crossed onto Cape Cod (Sagamore bridge) would he be to New Hampshire soon? He had traveled 93 SOUTH to Rt 3 SOUTH. We explained he would have to reschedule as even if he turned around and ther was NO traffic it was a 3 hr run give or take and he was about to partake in some of Boston metro;s heaviest traffic. We never did hear from him again perhaps he’s somewhere on the cape running a little coffee shop or something.

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            1. Wife and I used to go to Cedar Point every year around Mother’s Day, and often once or twice over the summer

              Haven’t been there in quite a few years now, maybe I’ll see if I can talk her into a weekend trip this year

              Best way to do it, if you can? Book a room at Breakers, so you’re right there next to the park and can walk in, failing that Breakers Express just at the end of the causeway

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          2. Cedar Point isn’t a bad option. You could have a lot of fun in four days in Ohio. To name just a few variant itineraries that cover various aspects, one could visit Cedar Point or King’s Island for amusement park fun, Hocking Hills State Park or Cayuhoga National Park for natural fun, and then for cultural fun do something like the Air Force Museum, Cincinnati Museum Center, or the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.

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        4. Excellent story, and I was very fortunate to have been stationed in Europe for about 3 1/2 years. W. Germany, Stuttgart, specifically, but we traveled and skied a lot. They have *seriously no idea* what “big” means here. For them? Maybe driving Italy from top to bottom. Us? Do Texas from Houston to El Paso. Then another 48 CONUS. AK is a story all by itself; you can get lost and die it’s so big. Hawai’i seems like another country to me, but it’s even big for islands.

          Anyhow, yep. America, F*** YEAH! Great inspiring post, Sarah.

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          1. “We’re flying into New York USA! Since we are in the USA already, we’re driving to Disney World for a weekend.”

            “Um. Do you now that is 1100 miles one way? 2200 miles round trip?”*

            It is one thing to fly into Orlando for Disney World, 3100 miles (no direct flights, not out of Eugene) and plan on driving 60 miles to Cape Canaveral, Kennedy Space Station, and back. 120 miles round trip, + the grounds bus tour (only way to get to the museum, and back, or was), touring the museum, checking out the “Rocket Gardens”, taking in the 3d movie, was not even a particularly long day. Only surprise for us, was the toll roads (’90s, we needed change, which we had). We don’t have toll roads in the west. National Park entry fees are as close as tolls gets here in the west. We are used to driving to Portland or Vancouver, for a family event, and back, in one day (280 miles round trip).

            ((*)) Let’s put that in perspective. It is 875-ish miles for us cutting across Oregon from Eugene, OR to either W. Yellowstone, or Jackson, Wy. That is a 14 hour drive, counting stops for rest stops and fuel (people and car). Half the drive is at average 65 MPH, the other half is at 85 MPH (across Idaho, I-80). Based on the tickets BIL got in the eastern seaboard. Pretty sure 85+ MPH average is not happening. Not even sure 65 MPH average is happening. Lets say 50 MPH average. That is a round trip of 44 hours, just driving. No stops for fuel. No rest stops. Flying? Faster. But still two days. (Someone on the east coast might be able to justify that is a bit much of an estimate. That’s fine. Limited experience on the east coast.)

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          2. I just checked. Milan to the Straits of Messina, about 800 miles. Houston to El Paso, eight to nine hundred.

            The statistic that sticks with me is that Lisbon to Moscow is shorter than NYC to LA.

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            1. I just did something similar, as far south in Italy as possible to as far north as possible, worked out to a 14.5hr drive covering ~1400km…

              Brownsville, TX to just the Texas side of the New Mexico border outside Clayton, NM…
              ~1400km and a 13.5hr drive.

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        5. Even some Americans don’t really understand the size. When I moved to Massachusetts from Texas a few decades back, I met a recent college graduate (Boston College) who had gone to Dallas for the Cotton Bowl, since BC was playing there and she knew a friend she could stay with. She got in to Dallas a day early, and proposed driving to the border so she could go shopping in Mexico. Her friend had to explain that it was a 6-8 hour drive each way and if they did it they’d miss the football game.

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          2. Unfortunately, I DO understand the size of the US. My mother moved from Florida to Utah, and we made several treks back to her homeland when I was young. It was pretty much a full week’s drive each way, so we planned for at least a month’s stay. We also went in other directions due to my oldest brother’s frequent moves with the military. I’ve not been through every state, but at least 40.

            I hate cars, and I’m pretty sure that stemmed from sharing the backseat of a Mercury Tracer with my brother and our luggage – no air conditioning – in the heat of summer. For a week.

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            1. We did a road trip vacation last year from Ohio to Arizona with our then-four-month-old daughter. For the round trip, it was was about 3900 miles and lasted just over two weeks. We tried to keep it under 400 miles per day, which left enough time to stop and do at least one activity a day even on travel days. 

              I am looking forward to a shorter distance trip out to the Rockies later this year. It is still going to take about 3 days each way with the baby along. Probably four in one direction, since my wife always insists on visiting her friend who moved out to KC – while that usually only adds two-three hours travel time to a trip out West, it will also add at least a half day of stopping time. 

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      2. See this all the time on the Yellowstone/Teton NP FB groups. Coming in to Salt Lake City to get rental car. Fine so far. Then going to tour Tetons, Yellowstone, Glacier. Drive over to North Cascade, Olympics, Rainer, St Helen, Oregon Coast, Crater Lake, and finish up back at Salt Lake City, and fly home. In a week, often less.

        Note, this is not just overseas tourists, but as often as not east coast tourists.

        Hard to get actual mileage through the parks because in March, google maps routes round Tetons and Yellowstone park roads. But:

        1. Salt Lake UT it is 4+ hours to Jackson WY, not all of it freeway.
        2. Missing driving through Tetons/Yellowstone, but figure 4 to 5 hours, or more, depending on wild animal jams. Does not count actually getting out of the car to see features.
        3. West Yellowstone to Glacier NP is 6+ hours, none of it freeway (we just drove it).
        4. Glacier to North Cascades 11+ hours.
        5. North Cascades to Olympic NP 4 hours, excluding Ferry wait
        6. Olympic to Rainer 3.5 hours
        7. Missing road miles because google maps avoids seasonal road closures. About 2 hours directly south into Helen Monument.
        8. St Helen to Astoria 2.5 hours (since going through Longview, avoiding Portland traffic).
        9. Astoria to Crescent City CA 8 hours
        10. Crescent City to Crater Lake 3 hours
        11. Crater Lake to Salt Lake 10.5 hours

        Is the above doable? Yes.

        Is it a drive we’d consider doing? Heck no. And we live here. I don’t like driving the 13+ (not counting meal/fuel stops) hours between Eugene and West Yellowstone, Montana or Jackson, WY. We split the drive, about Boise, or Twin Falls. Coming home is a different drive (still don’t like it, but haven’t gotten the other half to stop yet. Took 40 years to get him to break up the drive heading there.)

        Sister and BIL do these type of long drives all the time. But, they don’t drive 11+ hours. They get up drive 4 hours, stop for meal, drive 4 hours, stop for the night. Took them 2 days to get from Eugene to W. Yellowstone. Two days (spent time in Yellowstone) to get to Cody, WY. Don’t know how long it took them to get from there to upper New York State. They do not put timelines on their trips for any sections, let alone getting back home.

        There is a video on FB (tiktok, I think) that has an Australian noting that the perception of US citizens being ignorant travelers, is wrong. Noted that a high percentage of US citizens do not even have passports. Because US citizens do not need passports to travel 3000+ miles. Our country is that big.

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        1. I can echo the “east coasters” don’t know how big the West is. It’s fun to show off, show people around, because it’s so beautiful and different from what they’re used to. “That’s a ‘crick?”

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          1. Following a poster who had a bit of land problem with a Colorado small town. Been settled now. Town ended up paying $250,000 for .01 acres for adverse possession of her land. (Now landowner is suing $1.6 mil for non-disclosure against property sellers. Her legal fees and aggravation.) When I saw the video with the “creek” involved, blink. Bit bigger than I was expecting, even for the west. Was spring runoff and running high. Not talking valley Willamette or McKenzie size, but as wide as their upper reaches. Summer size is shallower, but not any narrower.

            Something that must be a bit different in Colorado than Oregon. In Oregon if a creek runs through your property, you can stop people from putting feet on the ground, including in the creek bottom itself. But if it is navigable at all, cannot stop them from using the water ways with boats, or other water crafts, including floating devices. That wasn’t the problem however. It was the beach access and use people wanted. But that put the owner at liability, for anything that happened (which TPTB made clear). She said “not a chance.” Things went south after that. Actual surprised the settlement wasn’t the cost of the land bought, but court and legal fees costs. Could have been but the only part that could be disclosed was the $250k land deal part. Still former owners and real estate broker, should have disclosed that the piece had been being accessed by the public (adverse possession). She said she’d have declined to put in an offer rather than deal with that headache and liability.

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        2. Back in…wow. Has it really been…? Anyway, about 30 years ago I took a vacation and rode a really big motorcycle 9,000 miles in 3 weeks. I stopped at Carlsbad Cavern and the Grand Canyon, then spent about 6 hours riding across west Texas. Bleah. 400+ miles of flat, hot, windy, dusty, empty nothing. There was a minor curve in the highway, and CURVE AHEAD signs for 5 miles leading up to it. I guess, it was the only curve in the county and they wanted to make sure people noticed?

          Crossing Missouri was indeed misery. The air was so thick I considered mounting a machete on the front fender to cut through it. Stopped at one of the multitude of fireworks stores because it was almost the 4th of July.

          After going to my cousin’s wedding I continued east, then south, and rode the Blue Ridge Parkway for about 200 miles until I decided it was just going to keep getting hotter. Headed north and west, saw Mount Rushmore and spent most of a day at Yellowstone. I woke up in the KOA outside Yellowstone west gate, decided it was time to go home, and rode to San Diego in 22 hours.

          That was enough traveling for a while.

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          1. Motorcycling can be kind of fun going up US 97 near Klamath Lake in August. Just remember that it’s Midge season and everything will have a nice coat of ex-Midges. Full face helmet shields are advised unless you follow Klaus Schwab. :) (Our white pickup was green in front the time we did it. I use a different route whenever I can, at least in August.)

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          2. My wife and I stayed in one of the KOA’s outside West Yellowstone, the nearer of the two, on our first big vacation together out West. Nice place, and just a short drive into West Yellowstone (few of whose stores sold sweat or pajama pants, and none that fit me well) and the National Park. The other one didn’t look half bad, either.

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            1. Yellowstone. Our preference in the past was Madison Campground in the park. No connections. But in the park right away. Now that we don’t have the RV, we try to stay at Yellowstone Lodge, not too far from the park west entrance.

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        3. From my ’20s to 10 years ago, I’d do an occasional round trip between the Midwest and the Left Coast. 6 of these were solo, while the first was 4 college buddies, driving more-or-less nonstop. (West bound. East had a delay until we could get a busted wheel bearing fixed. In Blythe, Cali, over New Year’s. Way too interesting.)

          Going east, I’d spend three nights at hotels, while westbound, I could do it in two nights if no side trips/camping were on the agenda. (Mesa Verde for one trip, and Great Sand Dunes Nat’l Monument.) This meant I’d be doing an average of 750 miles per day, with one time over 900 miles. Learned not to do that again.

          Those days are over; the people I’d visit have passed away, and the tourism bug has been satiated. Semiannual trips over the Cascades, with a couple of nights to relax sound good right now.

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          1. Yea. We drove from La Pine to San Diego, and back, in ’78 (honeymoon). Then from Longview to San Diego, in ’79 (because ’78 trip cut short). Eugene to San Diego in ’88. Straight through all 3 times. All 3 times I got sick. ’94 comes around and we are taking our 4 year to Disneyland. We flew. Trip from LA to San Diego, and back, in the car, was bad enough (met SIL with her two kids at Sea World). ’70’s I was still early 20’s. ’88, age 31. My ability to sit in a car, driving or not, for hours has not improved now that I’m in my late 60’s. Wasn’t sure the trip back from Phoenix since we came home faster than I’d figured on, wasn’t going to make me sick. That last day was not fun. (Sick now, but pretty sure that isn’t the fault.)

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    1. Years ago one of our local newspaper columnists mentioned a woman he knew whose name was Katrina and whose birthday was September 11….

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  6. I don’t think I believed, as a lot of people we fight with on line do, that in America people got up and shot fifteen people before breakfast, then shot their way into work, etc. 

    This part is funnier to me because am watching a show set in 2010s New York with more public shootouts per episode than any western I’ve ever run across. One of the producers was British born, and we think he’s to blame.

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    1. The towns of Old West were surprisingly free of gunplay. What shoot-em-ups did occur tended to be out-of-town ambushes, aka “Dry Gulching”. No witnesses, no lawmen, and often no recognizable bodies if the scavengers were plentiful. Townie lawmen in the early post-CW era tended to be veterans of the Late Unpleasantness, so quite willing and able to express displeasure with thugs by killing them, or organizing a posse to do so. Thus thugs often restricted their play to where the law did not.

      Hollyweird, of course, is a terrible historical reference. They were far more likely to film a penny dreadful novel than an actual documentary. And once we get to the B-Westerns….

      Happy Trails!

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      1. I know; I’m reading a history of Dodge City right now, and Bat Masterson’s policies of not permitting firearms on the “posh” side of town and subduing troublemakers by thumping them upside the head with the butt of his shotgun are well-documented. It was still weird seeing a show set in modern NYC with more gunplay per 45 minutes than, say, Sabata or Sartana.

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      2. Mining boomtowns could be an exception to the rule, from some of the histories I’ve read. But even they usually fell far short of what Hollyweird presents.

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        1. Yeah, there definitely were some rough and dangerous places; boomtowns and railheads where shootings, knifings, and beatings were commonplace. And there were a handful of range wars where things got pretty damn spicy. They were the exception, not the rule — but people peacefully farming and going to church on Sundays doesn’t sell books or movie tickets.

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          1. Most of the histories seem to focus on cattle drives bringing a group of cowboys to town, who would blow off steam for a week or so and then leave…. kind of like Spring Break.

            After that, things went back to quiet…. until the next one.

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  9. There are no full blood Amerinds. Not a single one.

    But Sarah! Why do people always talk about their Indian great-grandma, and not their Indian great grandfather? And yeah, a lot of folks on tribal roles look less Indian than you do, but-

    :Foxfier pulls out her Paiute branch of the family, where if it hadn’t been a guy with a Scottish last name you’d have no idea they had a white great grandfather:

    And don’t get me started on the folks where you can really tell they were on the French trapping route.

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    1. In the early ’90s my now-late grandparents visited us in Georgia from their Sequim, WA retirement, and Grandma was discussing her finds in Granddad’s genealogy, including a man who was half Indian: ”Half Choctaw. And half Cherokee,” and my sister and I (about 14 and 12) looked at each other and Did. Not. Giggle. Or not very much. Tim McGraw was big on the radio at the time.

      (FWIW, said ancestor was a second-gen halfbreed, with a white grandparent on each side. And no Chippewa maidens in sight.)

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    2. My family had a legend associated with a Cherokee princess (snort) who helped my third-great grandpa escape from the Andersonville prison camp, where she was employed as a laundress.

      Turns out, the story was partly true. She was actually Seneca, had escaped the Trail of Tears by adoption into a white family. The story about the Cherokee princess was some legend that got conflated with her story somewhere in three generations of telling the story. And she did smuggle my 3rd-great grandpa out of that prison camp using a laundry cart, after which he married her and they had like 10 children. Evidently the Seneca look super white. They mingled with those French trappers, like, a lot. Not too fond of the British after a particularly brutal massacre, apparently.

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      1. Good on them!

        I have no idea what my great great grandmother was, other than either half or full blooded Indian, but I do know she probably didn’t teleport from California to far back east, then return much more normally when her sons ended up their by some really weird coincidences and gosh just HAPPENS to first show up on paper after they’re there and need to give her a genealogy….

        (I foresee folks eventually applying Really Basic Identity Theft detection to the US census and laughing themselves sick. I know I did. :D )

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  10. Trying to explain that one can spend days in the same state is always a chuckle inducer.

    “Someone has to take humanity to the stars. And I say it should be us.” – From someone that does not follow space on a regular basis, I think we are in the forward position – If. If we let people that want to and are willing to move the project forward are in charge and not the government. If the second scenario comes true, then will fall into the pack and someone else will eclipse the US.

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      1. The Reader thinks you are a bit optimistic here. He sees clear evidence that the ‘government’ is at war with itself over Musk and the winner(s) haven’t been decided yet.

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        1. Ian – I do agree with your point about Musk, and were this a government that truly encouraged such things, I would agree. But to The Reader’s point there are elements that would rather see Musk fail and/or the technology co-opted by the government. And what is co-opted will never be done as well.

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  11. “I remember waking up to the newspapers being full of it.”

    So far as I can tell, the newspapers and media are full of it on any day ending in “y.” I know it wasn’t what you meant, but I could resist. 

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      1. I got a pic in the big city newspaper when they sent somebody to U of Redacted and the photographer took a picture of a couple of guys on bicycles. Didn’t know about it until I saw the paper. Kind of cool being Random Cyclist in the paper.

        Also got a pic when a local BBQ restaurant catered a company picnic/party and they took pictures. Got a bit surprised when we went there for dinner several months later and I was on a photocanvas, larger than life. And that’s *really* large. :)

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        1. I got my pic in a local birdcage liner when our Ham club provided support to a charity so-called ‘fun run’.

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        2. I had the Inverness cloak and anat least color-matched (or close enough) hat and was giving a wonderful team of Belgian horses some attention when the newspaper photog got a shot. I was asked if it was alright, and I agreed… to my astonishment, I wound up on the cover the local paper. I suppose I “looked the part” more than the actual driver of the team (dressed rather more practically). I was astonished again when he, after having shown me proper technique and watching, handed me the reins and stepped away saying to take the team around a few blocks while he warmed up. This was also the time I “blew through” a stop sign in front of a cop… with no repercussions[1]. I suspect simply keeping the team from cutting the corner was the Bigger Deal.

          [1] Also the ONLY time I “blew through” a stop that I can recall… if I ever did it any other time, ice was involved.

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          1. It was over 50 years ago when I practiced coming to the limit line in ice. My preference (on a road where I was the sole maniac person driving) was to have the right front and right rear wheels at the limit line.

            U of Redacted was notorious for having ice storms a few times each winter back then, so I had a bit of opportunity to practice. The frightening thing, I got good at it.

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  12. I have often argued that the US is the Land of Second Chances? Second? Third, fourth, and morth. I didn’t make it into college after high school for various reasons. Ended up going into the Air Force. Didn’t get into college on getting out of the Air Force for other various reasons. And only finally got into college right around the time I turned 30. Don’t think there’s anyplace else on the planet I could have done that and had it stick, gotten a good job based on that degree and be in the place I am now.

    America. F’ yeah!

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    1. I actually got a BA in History after high school, but went back to college when I was 30 to get a career instead of the $6k/year I was earning via manual labor. Never got the second degree, but I got the career. Now I’m on to writing. I may not get rich, but I don’t need to anymore. I’m all about reinventing myself (maybe not always successfully, but that’s on me).

      I spent 40 years making America more lethal. Actually I was on the aiming side, not the go-boom side. So you’re welcome! :) If you want to know what America’s all about even with government bureaucracy, read Never Mind, We’ll Do It Ourselves. For that matter, read a biography of Teddy Roosevelt, or even J. Michael Straczynski.

      As Sarah notes, America is the country where you become a citizen by swearing allegiance to A DOCUMENT, not the land, not the king, not the Volk, not Mohammed, not the Pope. A freakin’ document. I and everybody else swore to “protect and defend the Constitution” not New Jersey, or California, or Florida. For heck’s sake, Hawaii is further away from the Los Angeles than Los Angeles is from New York. And it’s a STATE with 2 senators and everything.

      Why do you think there are more Irish in the USA than in Ireland? Why is my Sikh friend, originally from India, arguably more patriotic than I am? Don’t let those silly people in New York City and DC, who get ahead by licking each other’s boots fool you. We’re still out here, and we still care, just maybe not about you, you lickspittles.

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      1. Way to bet is to not depend on one career, let alone one employer for your entire working career. Out of all our local friends and our generation, I think hubby was the only one who did. Know a few college classmates, while they managed to stay in forestry, they all didn’t stay with the same employer right out of college. Does not mean one career, one employer, still doesn’t happen. But not surprised when neither are true.

        Heard the comment, besides “learn to code”, that welders are needed everywhere. Know someone who just laughs at that. He is a welder. He worked as a welder, until about 10, or so, years ago. Company just evaporated. He now works for a local retail hardware company (was a family owned, now employee owned). His son has seniority over him at the same company. Role reversal. By the time dad joined the company, son had moved into employee training. Son conducted the training classes his dad had to attend.

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          1. Dad was awfully proud. As dad said, couldn’t drag son to Eagle, son just did not care to do the work. Same with school, truth be told. Started at company right out of HS graduation. Worked his way into the position. But in a position to be the top company trainer for new employees, and safety trainer? Bet dad was proud. So were we. Only teased dad a little. It was fun to watch dad strut a bit as his reaction.

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        2. I’ve heard those sorts of jobs (i.e. welder, etc…) tend to go through boom and bust cycles. The number of welders starts to get low, so demand per welder increases, which means that wages go up. More people start training for the job. After several years, the new trainees have entered in to the profession, and there’s now a glut. So the wages go down as the market stabilizes, and people leave for other jobs. Potential new employees stop training for the job as there’s now no demand for it. So as the number of people in that trade naturally decreases over time, a shortage starts to develop. And the cycle starts over again.

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          1. He, the welder, was kind of in the same position I was. Sure better paying programming jobs out there, but until very recently, meant moving. Difference was his spouse did child care, which could be restarted elsewhere. We didn’t have that option. This area was really our only option for both programming and hubby’s job. OTOH where the welding jobs tend to be right now are remote rough temporary camps where families are not encouraged. Trust me, it is very hard on a relationship to suddenly be thrown into remote bouncing, back and forth between work and home, relationship one hadn’t planned on.

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      3. When one of our LN ‘terps from Kabul got “here” and settled in Seattle some months after the 2021 [REDACTED IN EVERY LANGUAGE] with his wife and infant son (born in Qatar just months after, or Kabul just before, SHTF there), I was rooting for him all the way. But then I had to disappoint him that I could not come see them any time soon, because from my part of “here” to his part of “here” is about as far as Kabul is from Tokyo.

        This whole “continental nation” thing has its downsides.

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      3. Ahem.

        Giggle.

        Gut-busting laughter.

        Oh, I might resemble that remark. 20 years at (firm) and 25+ in my no-relevant-degree field.

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  13. I had a conversation once with two Argentinian women about why American men have, for want of a something better, physical presence. I tried to laugh it off with a — true — story about playing against Argies in the rugby and having my head handed to me, but they said it wasn’t size. American men they explained filled space. I had no answer. we moved on to how flexible the English language was.

    judging by the soy latte brigade, they must have been working with a small sample, but I can see what they mean. The wife pointed out to me that I’m very intimidating beyond my size — I’m quite large and once and future not fat. She said it was my way of standing, watching, and the way I shook hands and introduced myself with my first and last name. I suppose I learned it from my father who tended to have the same effect on people.

    Still, an interesting observation in line with the post.

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    1. Back when I first started going to Europe (Germany and Austria) on a regular basis, people said that Americans were the only ones who always walked with their heads up, looking around, and smiling more often than not. Since I tend to avoid the places where Americans congregate, I don’t know if that’s true or not. I do know I can identify Russians and Bulgars/Serbs/Slovenes by their shoes. And the Russians I’ve crossed paths with … move as a block and operate like locusts, either in groups or singly. Poles and other Slavs are not as all-consuming.

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      1. Shoes are the key to winning “spot the yank.”

        I don’t really smile at people I don’t know, but I do stand straight and I do look people in the eye. I’ve been told my head turns like a tank turret traversing when I walk into a room. It’s funny to me since I’m one of the world’s most laidback men. 

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          1. New Balance doesn’t work? They are about the only casual shoes that properly fit my feet. Some are quite cushy.

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              1. That’s happened to me over the years, with some of Redwing boots and shoes going from “easy on” to “gotta send it back”. Some of it was new tooling when shoes went from “Made in China” to “Made Elsewhere”.

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                1. Check out Merrills. Well made and extremely comfortable for posture etc. 

                  Done a large number of cross country, Florida to Mass, Florida to CA. Big and beautiful country.

                  One time my dad gave me directions from my house in Tampa to his house in San Pedro. Turn left onto I75, turn left onto I10, travel 2800 miles and turn left onto the Harbor freeway in LA, take it to 24th ave in San Pedro and turn right, Apartment is third on the right!

                  So three lefts and a right completely across the country. Amazing.

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                  1. Had a college roommate at FIT in Melbourne, FL
                    Directions from the dorm to his house in Massachusetts was Left on 192, right on I-95, Right on US (forgotten) House 4 miles down on the left.
                    OTOH, directions from there to the family house on Sanibel FL (only 200 miles, but 5+ hours at the time) took a whole page to write out. Something over 20 turns.

                    Even in a State as built up as Florida there are “can’t get there from here – go to X to start” routes.

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                    1. The school that was once known as “Forget Intercourse Tonight”! (~8:1 M:F ratio then)

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                  2. Merrell is one of my favorite brands, speaking as someone who goes hiking. Keen/Vibram is also pretty good for my feet. All shoes get gel heel inserts as a matter of course.

                    FWIW, I was reliably informed that anyone over roughly 200 pounds is going to get heel pain regardless of shoe quality, simply because human physiology is what it is. So you mitigate what you can.

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            2. I used to love New Balance. They were made in USA, reasonably priced, lasted a long time, and they FIT. Not so much on any of that now.

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              1. Wondered what happened. Wore a pair of New Balance forever (just not that hard on shoes). Got a new pair. WTH? Sigh. Does not help that I need either 7.5 women wide. Or shoes that run wide. Size 8 won’t work.

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                1. I found one pair of shoes in my life that fit well. A pair of custom made ballroom dancing shoes in 7.5 wide. I wear a 9.

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                  1. Had a pair of custom boots from Danner’s in Portland. Send an outline of each foot. Note how they were going to be used. Which heal you wanted and why. I couldn’t have the heal I wanted because my feet were too short. Size 5.5 wide, men. Popular with the foresters in Oregon. Pair of Redwings I had for my first summer lasted that summer. I do not wear out shoes easily. Those Danner boots lasted until the career change. Neglect got them in the end. Great for timber field, log truck and yards, not so much for regular hiking and backpacking. Now days Danner boots cost are “OMG!”. Probably were back then but given need, worth it ($85 custom, 1975. Cheap considering alternative was $50/summer).

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              2. Weird. Consistently proper fit. 990 series, for example. Still made in USA. Many of their others are not USA. Haveto look at specific model.

                And if you need 4E or 6E, they make them.

                Note also, most feet get wider with age. Arches often change, too. If you are trying to wear the same size for decades, you may actually be way off. I was an 11.5 narrow in high school, pre-Army. Now, ~40 years later, I am a 13 4E. (12 or 12.5 for some makers, 13 for NB. Cowboy boots are a particular challenge, but Ariat Ropers work.)

                Get your feet measured, professionally.

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                1. I copy the feet growing over time. Was 12D in Basic Training in Ft. Lost in the Woods in the state of Misery back in pre-Reagan presidency summer. Now usually go with a 13 4E. Can run with 12-1/2 if the cut is right. Getting old is for the birds. Bunnions, even more so.

                  Will have to look more closely at the New Balance line; I was just going by what was available in the mass warehouse shoe chains nearby. Thanks for the heads-up.

                  Liked by 1 person

                  1. I too can verify age has an effect on feet. Used to be size 7 women wide. Professional measurements put me just barely over size 7. Not super wide. But essentially if I can’t get my feet into off the shelf 7.5, then they run regular to narrow, and definitely need a wide in that style (rarely stocked). If I can. How tight do they feel. Can I wiggle toes easily in the new shoes, not broke in yet? If yes. Buy and take home. That is how I got my current pair of regular low trail hikers off Costco warehouse shelves. Problem with getting actual wide in my size, is as I wear them, the shoes get sloppy as they beak in. Sloppy, means plenty of room, just also means my feet hurt if I wear them too long.

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                2. I recommend dance stores for shoe sizing. They *have* to be good at it, and their shoes are very consistent. I got sized for character shoes and have been able to order subsequent pairs online.

                  A ballet dancer can go through a pair of pointe shoes for each performance if they’re starring. Dance shoes are therefore more consistent than anything else people wear.

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          2. I used to get SAS shoes in California, where they had an outlet store nearby. (For values: 25 miles from my house). When we moved to Oregon, on my last trip, I bought a couple pairs. (No SAS outlet stores appeared in S. Oregon.)

            I really liked the shoes when I worked in San Jose. After a while, I had to stop wearing them up here. The soles are great for concrete, but horrible when the ground is slick.

            My preference is Sketchers. The latest pair has an aggressive tread, somewhat like 50% of a Vibram hiking boot sole. Good enough for light snow. When it’s more fierce, right now it’s Danner boots with the Vibram sole.

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            1. Skechers has memory foam insoles in most of their shoes now. Just as a fair warning; if you have any foot problems, memory foam can degrade before you know it and cause further pain.

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              1. I’ve used custom orthotics for a few decades. Whether I keep the insole varies with the shoe. OTOH, the podiatrist who did my second set of orthotics (both are still in use) taught me a stretching technique to free up the Achilles tendon where it goes under the heel. It took about 6 weeks of 3X per day, but the improvement was wonderful.

                I’m told that heel spur surgery is generally considered either useless or worse than that. Don’t do the stretches much any more, but I’m not walking 10-20 miles per day, either. (Did, once upon a time.)

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    4. Hmmm… It could just be that we expect to *have* space.

      In any situation involving other people, especially in a public place, I’m always looking to keep my space a place where only I am welcome. Elbow room, you know. (And do I ever hate having my back to the door and my back to the rest of the room.) Plus we’re taught here in the USA that being direct is a virtue; squaring up to somebody and looking them in the face is normal on first meeting, and it could have a space-making effect.

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  14. During WW2 the Brits wanted to bulldoze a landing strip on an island in the Med. Plannersestemated tit would take them several weeks.

    Seabees did it in a day.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. When the US sent a whole bunch of stuff to Ukraine in the early part of the war, the Europeans I talked to online were shocked at how MUCH we sent in such a short period. Tens of thousands of artillery shells, along with a bunch of other weapons.

      …and then they really freaked out when I pointed out that we’d only used half of our airlift capacity, one time, over the course of a couple of days.

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  15. America is unique because may be the largest single country out there, period. China might have more people, Australia might have as much territory, Russia is even larger, but America is just larger in all the ways that matter.

    We’re not like a lot of other places. We could probably handle most of our economic needs internally with minimal imports if we’re willing to restart a lot of the heavy industry again. And the world doesn’t understand this, at all. Not really.

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  16. Cultural perspective (https://open.substack.com/pub/carolinesnewsletter/p/cultural-perspective?r=q3lc4&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web). American culture is based on doing, and usually doing the right thing. When we do the wrong thing, at least en masse, it’s usually because we got confused or taken in. Fool me once, shame on me, but fool me twice…..

    And yes, I think we’re going to the stars. We got to the moon, and we recently got back there. If anyone is going to make it, it’ll be America.

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  17. The obvious quote:

    “Let me tell you who those bad guys are. They’re us. WE BE BAD. We’re the baddest-assed sons of bitches that ever jogged in Reeboks. We’re three-quarters grizzly bear and two-thirds car wreck and descended from a stock market crash on our mother’s side. You take your Germany, France, and Spain, roll them all together and it wouldn’t give us room to park our cars. We’re the big boys, Jack, the original, giant, economy-sized, new and improved butt kickers of all time. When we snort coke in Houston, people lose their hats in Cap d’Antibes. And we’ve got an American Express card credit limit higher than your piss-ant metric numbers go. You say our country’s never been invaded? You’re right, little buddy. Because I’d like to see the needle-dicked foreigners who’d have the guts to try. We drink napalm to get our hearts started in the morning. A rape and a mugging is our way of saying ‘Cheerio.’ Hell can’t hold our sock-hops.
    We walk taller, talk louder, spit further, fuck longer and buy more things than you know the names of. I’d rather be a junkie in a New York City jail than king, queen, and jack of all Europeans. We eat little countries like this for breakfast and shit them out before lunch.”

    — PJ O’Rourke

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  18. The distances daunt even the natives. In ’91, we held a family reunion in Sandpoint, Idaho. The hostess — my sister — arranged for us to take a speedboat tour into Hell’s Canyon — down near Lewiston-Clarkson (whole other part of the state up against the Oregon and Washington borders.) A four hour drive from Sandpoint, which is 25 miles from Canada. It was fun, but a lot of time in the car.

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    1. Now that I live here, I can applaud the destination (the videos are amazing), but the drive? Sorry, it’s hotel time for the girl. No way I’d do it all in one day.

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  19. I think there’s a strong positive correlation between people who have driven at least half the distance across America and people who vote Republican.

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  20. On the subject of the kids with one immigrant parent being extremely American, I once knew a young woman who could have been Plato’s form for an American high school girl. She also happened to be genetically 100 percent Filipino. She had, however, been raised in America by her mother and American step father.

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  21. “We walk as if we have no superiors,” as Foxfier said. We don’t. You can see us coming a mile away in another country.

    I think Americans need to remember who we are. We’ll be fine. Ultimately, like Sarah said a hundred years ago or so, more American than we’ve ever been.

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  22. I grew up in Manhattan. Many of the people I grew up with and from my parents generation also didn’t understand the sheer size of America.

    Back in the 1970s, The New Yorker magazine had a cover depicting the country. Over half of the bottom was Manhattan from 9th Avenue to the Hudson River, thee remainder was a few landmarks, then the Pacific Ocean.

    That really was (and maybe still is) how all too many city residents saw things.

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  23. I was old enough to remember it but not through the news stories, through happening to hear some newscasters rehashing days later.

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  24. I was born in a country where you can walk across it (even at a moderate pace) in three days (via the Hadrian’s Wall trail). Where the longest official trail (The Pennine Way) takes three weeks at a stroll (but can be done in a week). The shock (I ‘knew’ it, had planned for it, but hadn’t really grokked it) of my first AT was ‘interesting’.

    I wonder just how much of the lack of understanding of distance by so many is partially a side-effect of never having to actually walk it? We forget (mainly because it is never portrayed that way) that many (most?) of the pioneers actually walked the whole way (with their animals – the wagons carrying necessities and the infirm/young). No-one here needs me to remind them that historically walking to the next village was about as far as most ever travelled (which puts those pioneer travails into even starker perspective).

    I have elicited some ‘strange’ reactions there over the years, as the expected stereotypical Brit (Hugh Grant clone, up their own butt, with a ‘posh’ accent) isn’t really me (son of a farmer, in a poor mining district, with a “Northern” accent you can cut with a knife who thinks ‘cammo’ is the height of fashion. I don’t ‘do’ east/west coast cities, but with my 95 DPM over jeans I’m a veritable fashion icon in the rural south and north). (To an extent it is similar to the ‘common knowledge’ about British cold beer and disgusting food – based almost entirely on close to starving wartime, and post-war penury rationing. It doesn’t reflect the “Mrs Beeton’s” reality).

    As “Airstrip one” we have a ‘lot’ of Americans here (based or just visiting) yet the supposed stereotype (really only held by those posh plonkers and the media) is of the vanishingly rare (don’t ask me why but usually from NYC) exceptions. Again it doesn’t reflect reality. (Although the media stereotype of you all having a basement room, bigger than my house, full of firearms and ammo does seem to be true … or is that just my friends? And seriously, what is it with certain people and plaid shorts?).

    Truthfully, I and most here have more in common with the ‘average’ American than either of us do with our respective metropolitan elitists. (I’ve served with uncounted nations soldiers, yet the only ones I have much in common with, other than role, were predictably Aussi’s, Kiwi’s, Canadians and … Americans. We’ve arguably closer ties, and more history/experience in working with the Swedes and Norwegians than anyone else, yet we don’t ‘gel’ with even them as we do you “Yanks”).

    From my perspective, and why I believe it can and has achieved so much, is because America is both a country and a (crucially united) continent (Whilst I ‘can’ see parallels and similarities in what is/was the norm in Portugal, the differences between that and what is the norm in France/Germany/etc. let alone Britain/Finland/Sweden/etc. are massive. Europe will probably never ‘work’ because the drastic differences override what few similarities there are). That and the (genius) federal system (envied, rightly, by the Europeans who, predictably, took all the good and threw it out to concentrate on the little bad).

    I’ve wondered at times (possibly/probably wrongly) if your unique position is mainly due to the size (and federal system), which allows (unlike smaller nations) for the ‘bad’ to be “quarantined”, or affect (infect) only a part of the greater whole?

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    1. We definitely need to reduce the powers of the national government in favor of the states. Federalism isn’t perfect but it’s better than the alternatives on display.

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      1. I seriously doubt you’ll need me to say it but … beware (government ‘never’ voluntarily lets go once it has its greasy fingers on power/money).

        Here, we had the (alleged/supposed) ‘devolution’ of power to sub-national and regional ‘assemblies’. Did it reduce the central governments over-reach (he says laughing hysterically), it did not, it merely added multiple new, additional layers.

        In favor of the States (as the Constitution requires) but better to make sure they aren’t just shifting unconstitutional powers (no-one, in government at any level, should have ever had) elsewhere.

        Is my cynicism showing?

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    2. The idea for the system of federalism (see Madison’s “Federalist 10”) was that states would be where ideas came from, all different. If a really bad idea developed, it would be tried in the state, and everyone else could see the results. The bad idea would go no farther.

      I enjoyed English and Scottish food the two times I’ve gotten to spend time in Britain. It was quite a contrast – East Anglia is flaaaaaaat. Suffolk wasn’t so flat, and both were (to me) oddly green for an official drought. The Yorkshire Dales were wet and steep, and Scotland where I was lacked flatness. Scotland is almost the only place I’ve ever blended in, being a stocky redhead and all. :D Neither place is easy to get around quickly by road once you get off the main highways.

      People were pretty friendly in a reserved way, and were quite curious about the small group of Americans far off the usual tourist route, and who were not researching family history. (But then I’ve gotten the same question way up in the middle of nowhere in Austria, so I and my groups are not the usual tourists.)

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      1. I don’t really know my own country that well. I spent my teen years out and about locally, but most of the next thirty-mumble in ‘for’n’ parts (I took leave anywhere ‘but’ home, only to return and wonder what had happened to the country I had been fighting, bleeding and collecting involuntary body-piercings for. Sigh!). But you’re as likely to find Scots and Irish in any village in England, as English (my local village has neither, we’re all “Borderers”). And we’d probably all turn out en mass if a group of Americans arrived, purely for the entertainment as there’s nothing else to do (people, literally, get up to watch and chat to the postman). “Reserved” is what everyone, whose granny didn’t go to school with your granddad, gets … well until the beer flows (or you muck-in and help at lambing, S&R, etc.), and then all bets are off and you may find yourself adopted … or married, depending).

        Much of ‘real’ Britain is still only served by single-lane roads (and watching the panic in the eyes of non-local drivers meting the milk-wagon coming the other way is … part of the local cabaret), and (for the record) an official drought is declared in soggy Britain if it doesn’t rain at least once a day (two consecutive dry days causes panic in the streets, hose-pipe bans and questions in Parliament).

        Federalism and a republic? It’s almost as if there were some really smart people thinking carefully about what might work (to prevent the excesses they’d experienced and predicted ‘could’ arise again), isn’t it? The saddest thing, for us, is that we have, almost word-for-word and document-for-document, the self-same ‘protections’, they just weren’t enshrined as formative documents of the nation, and thus have been utterly usurped.

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      2. Food wise, a lot of what is thought of as French was actually invented here (croissants, champagne … the guillotine). I had an apartment in Paris for a while (14th arrondissement) and spent many a happy day quoting from Stephen Clarke’s “1000 years of annoying the French” (I’m easily pleased).

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    3. “Although the media stereotype of you all having a basement room, bigger than my house, full of firearms and ammo does seem to be true … or is that just my friends?”

      The media projects too much.

      Many people do not have basements due to the expansive clay soils or low water tables.

      And all my friends have lost their firearms in tragic boating accidents to the point that local lakes will deflect a magnetic compass and the police have banned magnet fishing and regular fishing.

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      1. It’s tragic isn’t it? I had a number of “items” in the safe-keeping of friends across a number of States and … they ‘all’ lost them in various canoeing mishaps. I feel like the Black Knight, totally armless.

        I have some friends in Alaska who had that very issue, so moved 200 miles further north purely so they could build a “root cellar”, dug unaccountably some miles away from their residence (they also required assistance, grunt labour paid for with elk burgers, to move a large collection of 4ft lengths of ABS pipes, for some reason).

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      2. due to the expansive clay soils or low water tables.

        You forgot “and”. Actually for us it is high water tables. Two or three feet through the clay. “Oh. Look. Water.” Drinkable? Probably not.

        all my friends have lost their firearms in tragic boating accidents to the point that local lakes will deflect a magnetic compass and the police have banned magnet fishing and regular fishing.

        Same.

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    4. “which allows (unlike smaller nations) for the ‘bad’ to be “quarantined”, or affect (infect) only a part of the greater whole?”

      Jerven, what you’re forgetting, I think, is that there are no real controls allowed on movement between the states, and documents such as ID (concealed carry permits are a notorious exception) issued by one state are good in all the others.

      That disposes of any idea of quarantine, which is why you’ll see many complaints about formerly conservative areas being “Californicated” by out of staters.

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      1. You are of course correct, and isn’t California (or Sarah’s Colorado) the perfect example. Even I (as young as I delude myself I still am) still remember it as a very different State. Let’s be honest, whilst a lot ‘was’ due to “home-grown” idiocy, how far it has been taken, and the apparent inability to reverse it ‘is’ due (as you say) to the influx of (as some ‘real’ Californians rightly bemoan) “all the other States freaks and kooks” moving there. And like locusts, having ruined California they now search out other pastures to strip.

        We feel empathy for California since Britain ‘is’ California too (it’s almost as if it’s on the first page of their playbook). Almost everything (metro vs. rural divide, influx, corruption and manipulation of procedures and even constituency boundaries) that happened there, happened here too (and arguably a lot longer ago). Like a certain 1965 law, they long ago dismantled and replaced any slight protections we had against the very same influx (and even bragged about replacing us all).

        I ‘think’ what I was trying to say was that whilst one or two metropolitan areas infected ‘might’ taint a whole State, it is insufficient to change the whole country. Here, whoever ‘rules’ three key cities almost ‘owns’ the country unless (as has thankfully happened repeatedly) literally everybody else votes against them. Both the federal system and size act to, if not prevent, at least mitigate and slow the effect.

        I’ve often wondered if it wasn’t ‘just’ (as if it wasn’t sufficient on its own) their own recent experiences that caused The Founders to take the precautions they did. But, possibly, ‘our’ literal example, of a nation with The Magna Carta and The Bill of Rights (not to mention the whole canon of Common Law developed over a millennia), all of which was blithely ignored when it suited those in power at the time, too. Either way, you should get down on your knees every morning and thank them (and ‘we’’ wish we’d had someone with the same foresight, every. d*mn. Day!).

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    5. >media stereotype of you all having a basement room, bigger than my house, full of firearms and ammo does seem to be true

      To be fair, the basement scene in Tremors is not a documentary, but more aspirational – you may hear it referred to as the American Dream.

      Unfortunately, it’s farther than ever for most of us, thanks to a rash of boating accidents.

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  25. Be on your guard, everyone! The evil racists who made the new Shogun series didn’t cast any black actors to represent the black people living in Japan during the Sengoku Jidai!

    h/t Instapundit

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    3. What! Japan doesn’t have black population in it’s history? I’m shocked. Absolutely shocked! Where did we put that dang fainting couch?

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      1. Ace has the same stuff Insty did (either in the main article, or in the comments).

        The main claim seems to be based off of likely misinterpretation of the description of a single daimyo (Japanese lord)… who lived roughly 800 years prior to the era the novel and series is set in. The Ainu are absurd because they aren’t black (easily provable, since the ethnic group still exists both in Japan, and Russia), and because the Ainu and Japanese didn’t intermix during this period. They lived in the far north, had their own communities with Ainu leaders where Japanese didn’t live, and were outside of the Bushido system. And IIRC, their primary contact with the Japanese was through the northern daimyos that were granted exclusive trading rights. So they aren’t black, and they shouldn’t be in the series no matter what skin tone they have..

        There was *an* important black man in Japan right around this time. Oda Nobunaga met an African slave among the Portuguese. He found the man such a novelty that he asked for – and was given – the man. Nobunaga made him a vassal and retainer (with swords), and gave him the new name Yasuke. Yasuke served loyally until Nobunaga’s assassination at Hono-ji Temple in 1582. And shortly afterwards, he returned to the European settlement, and disappeared from history.

        Shogun is set in 1600 (it ends with the Battle of Sekigahara), so Yasuke is long gone by this time.

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        1. “Oda Nobunaga met an African slave among the Portuguese.”

          That would have been my surmise.

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          1. There’s a new biography of the gent that’s on the shelves at the regional B&N. I wonder if that sparked the “not enough Blacks in the series” silliness. (Although, this is the same media that called an Olympic runner from Canada an African-American.)

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            1. Possibly, but I doubt it . IIRC it was a year or two ago when one of the British newspapers ran an article claiming that black vikings were historically accurate. Inserting blacks into everything historical just appears to be a thing right now.

              if anything, being familiar with Yasuke’s story would demonstrate that blacks didn’t exist in Japan, as one of the first things that Nobunaga tried to do was to clean the dark off of the man. That’s not something that would have happened if stories of blacks were known.

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    5. The thing that gets me is these people do not think this makes them look foolish, let alone stupid.

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