Miscellany 4 - The American People, etc

The American People... It is apparently compulsory that any politician or public figure making a statement in the USA must make explicit and devoted reference to The American People. The Canadian People, for instance, or the Australian People, simply does not have the same resonance, although I suspect The German People once did. The American People is an entity surrounded and held together by powerful mythologies such as The American Dream, whatever that is.

It seems to be an amalgam of what they call democracy and the posturing and fraud Americans call the political process, the more sanitised versions of their history since Plymouth Rock, Hollywood, Davy Crockett and steamboats on the Mississippi, the flag and misty-eyed celebrations, and American Lives being lost at Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal and Tarawa, their rationalisations of the horrors of slavery and racism and attitudes thereby that persist to this day... Every people’s history, as told, is a little dishonest in places.

Americans rarely seem to realise that the rest of the world winces when they talk as though an American Life lost is somehow more costly than anyone else’s life lost.

It is apparently just and right that other nationalities should submit to the demands of international justice and the courts of The Hague, but no American Boy will be subjected to any foreign court.

Well ain’t it a goddamn shame.

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One day, in Paris, in a tour bus, we were swinging around into the square in front of Notre Dame Cathedral. In the seat behind us were an American couple maybe in their 70s.

Elmer, is that that Noeter Dayme...?

You got it, Gloria.

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I went to a family funeral this week. I got to speak at it. It was the funeral of my brother-in-law, as fine and gentle an Aussie man as you would ever hope to meet. He was an unassuming Christian believer, and he was always very active in his church and far beyond.

So, we had a Christian funeral. That is to say, the point of the service was the Word of God about life and death, comfort and hope. We heard words from the Bible, words from people of faith. We sang Christian hymns -- we did not play horrors from the current pop catalogue or what someone thought was trendy. It was in a Christian church, not in some football club rooms or school hall.

Above all, we did not have a string of people getting up to make scarcely articulate speeches about his life, their selective memories of him, telling silly inaccurate and sometime offensive stories and jokes, desecrating the place with their total inattention to the demanding challenges of life and death. In our sickeningly superficial culture, most people now become surprising heroes after they have died. We think somehow we owe it to them. We don’t. What we owe them is the truth.

Those of us who organised my brother-in-law’s funeral decided early on that we would not have a string of testimonies to someone who everyone already knew had been a good, even exceptional, person.

So it was a Christian service, and that was a huge relief. It paid attention to the facts of life and death, of love and hope. It paid tribute to my brother-in-law’s life, and his final illness. It marked his service as a Christian man, which was considerable.

It was all that needed to be done.