It's curious. The Kurt Weill/Maxwell Anderson song, That's How You Tell an America, from "Knickerbocker Holiday," isn't Kurt Weill at his most melodic, but it isn't meant to be. Musically, it's meant to set off Maxwell Anderson's great lyric, which is a celebration of non - conformity and general American orneriness. The story within the musical is about pre Revolutionary War America, but it landed well enough when it premiered in 1938 that the show was a big hit. It even included a veiled jab at the early Roosevelts, which FDR is reported to have laughed uproariously at when he saw the show.

And I think that is how Americans saw themselves as late in twentieth century history as 1938. Hell, Edmund Wilson's "Patriotic Gore," which is one of the greatest books ever written by an American, is throughout a celebration of American non - conformity, and it was published in 1961.

So, how did we get here? World War II? The economic burst of the 1950s, keeping up with the Jones and all that crap, combined with the terror of The Cold War? Then what explains the cheerful subversiveness of the mid 1950s - 1980, approximately, everywhere in the arts?

When did people start to worry about terminology, about laughing inappropriately, about being "insensitive?"

My guess is that we are being warred upon by sinister spiritual forces. Demonically induced blindness, fear of being seen as retrograde, and the instinct to punish dissenters does a much better job of explaining it than any supposed weak national mind.

As a Christian, I am aware that only Jesus Christ defeats darkness, and that the anti Christianity which most readers of this Substack probably embrace is the thing which destroys freedom. Many have pointed out that the two regions of the United States which were the two most "Christ haunted" have been the two which produced the greatest eccentrics, New England and the South. Not only were these people indulged, they tended to be cherished.