What Made America Great?

Fertile land along the Mississippi? Mineral deposits? Relative isolation via-a-vis competitors? Sucked the most able-bodied men and women, the most enterprising entrepreneurs, from around the world?

Or is Hell what made America great?

Is it not the fear of Hell that stoked American industrial might, ignited the ingots of Pittsburgh, built the bridges, and baked the bread? Is it not fear of Hell that marched our champions into the the sweaty south and freed the slaves?

The idle hands of St. Francis dropped a moisture into the blast furnace. It was a strange ointment with many odors. It was an odd perfume that all but extinguished the fires of hell. The Reformation Past was sacrificed on the altar of Tolerance.

Tiger Woods stands smoking before us telling us his crimes were private, no one else's business but he and Elin's. He evokes the spectre of Tolerance, a universalist balm that guarantees peace, and mutual understanding.

Michelle Obama appears on TV angry that her father had to work a "shift," at a "factory."

While I myself would prefer not to work a shift at a factory, I'd prefer that to a shiftless population obsessed with tossing down pastries. Michelle Obama is trying to get kids to get the lard off. I agree that we should do this, but how can we do it without reigniting the fires of hell, and walking on a treadmill, and invoking industry? Isn't it true that hard work burns calories, and that we've gone soft, reclining on recliners, declining on decliners, while we let the Chinese build our goods while plying us with sweet drinks, and getting us to lie down on cushions?

Love is not a bad thing, but it has to be very narrowly defined as that which we will crawl through Hell for, that for which we are willing to sacrifice, and never forget. It is not something easy or sybaritic. The fifties were already a lazy time. The Beats Pied Piper'd many of us seemingly out of the endless Egypt, moseying like Moses, meandering like Menanders, to the endless sybaritic false idol of the San Francisco Beatific vision at the end of the rainbow.

To reject that love and demand instead the Puritan view of love, with marriage as a divine institution, kids raking leaves for a dollar, everyone doing their homework, people willing to work in shifts, working at least as hard as the trees and plants, who around us strain for the skies, doing their best, putting out thorns, protecting their inner lives, protecting their roses for the one they love.

While we may never reignite the fires of hell to the extent that our ancestors knew them, dowsed as they may be now with the unguent perfume of Tolerance, smoke billowing up in the names of Amy Bishop, Tiger Woods, and Saint Francis, and as immigrants pour in that have never read the Ten Commandments, and if the volcano of Puritanical Industry has been exchanged for the moonwalk, and hip hop, and sitting idle on a cushion and saying, um, um, we do look back on the greatness of American life as a time in which America's butt was scorched, long before the universalist message became a soothing balm, and we became marshmallows looking to the government for a bailout, an easier grade, a softer pillow.

Tolerance is what America must fear. And the answer? A narrower conception of love, an aperture, surrounded by the fiery foe & the furnace.