It doesn’t matter what is said…

…it matters who is saying it.

Case in point: The proposition that America hasn’t improve much over past three decades. If it were some hyperventilators on Talk Radio talking about how America is going down the toilet because of Obama and the left running us into the ground, most Righties would be cheering. Hell yes! Not only has America not improved, it’s going to hell in a handbasket and may require “second amendment remedies”! Why just last week we were hearing right in my comboxes about how the violent overthrow of the government was just good old fashioned patriotism in response to a long train of abuses and usurpation having as their object the reduction of the American people to absolute despotism. That’s not crazy talk. That’s just Jeffersonian Tea Party rhetoric and if you question that, you are a coward who thinks that death is the greatest evil.

But, if you are Jimmy Carter and you say America hasn’t much improved, suddenly you are a complete idiot for suggesting that everything about America isn’t absolutely perfect!

What always strikes me about my countrymen when I step back and look at our nation from the perspective of a foreigner is how much alike we are and how much our difference depend on how deeply we agree with each other. It makes me think of that passage from C.S. Lewis on the reading of old books from his introduction to Athanasius’ “On the Incarnation”:

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook – even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united – united with each other and against earlier and later ages – by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century – the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?” – lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books.

Carter is perfectly right that America has not much improved in 30 years. Our own tribe bangs very loudly on the drum that, not only has she not improved, she is in dire straits and must be saved. The only real problem with Carter’s observation is that Carter was the one making it, and must therefore be shouted down by those who care more about winning than about noticing the similarities between two tribal groups who share a lot more in common than they want to admit. Someday, the similarities will be evident to all. But by then so much water will be under the bridge that the quarrels of today will be as interesting as the passion over the Ghibeline/Guelph spats or the reign of Philip the Fair are to bored schoolchildren today.