America: Rebel With a Cause

Clotaire Rapaille, the brilliant psychiatrist and marketer, has written about how America is an adolescent culture in all the good ways and all the vexing ways. Unlike old, stodgy Europe, America is youthful, headstrong, ambitious, indefatigable, defiant, and optimistic.

That came to mind while looking at a statement by Frank Schaeffer in his new book, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back. Schaeffer's observation:

We Americans -- secular, religious, of the left and the right -- like to think of ourselves as good. This national delusion is our real religion. We think we know something special about virtue, the way the French believe they have the inside track on food and wine. When we do bad things, we like to dress them up and call them good, for the same reason no Frenchman will admit to being a bad cook. We can't just hit an enemy, we have to call it "spreading democracy." We can't just abort a baby, we have to call it "reproductive rights".... Perception is reality in politics, maybe in ethics too.