America the beautiful

THE monstrous crime of slavery. The near-genocidal onslaught on native Americans. The American Revolutionary War.

THE monstrous crime of slavery. The near-genocidal onslaught on native Americans. The American Revolutionary War. The American Civil War. The era of 10,000 lynchings. The carnage of Prohibition - and its echo in our age of prohibited drugs.

The development and the use of nuclear weapons. The long list of America's colonial and imperial wars. Centuries of urban violence - from New York race riots in the '20s to the recent examples in Los Angeles. The brutalities suffered by African Americans and white activists in the struggle for civil rights. The assassination of presidents and political leaders. The massacres in schools. The prevalence of guns - from the millions of handguns to military weapons - defended by the National Rifle Association. The reintroduction of the death penalty. And the commodification of violence in the mass entertainments of film, television and video games. The list could fill this page, this entire magazine.

Yet my recent suggestion (September 15-16) that the US has had a particularly brutal history, and a culture that celebrates violence to an unusual and unhealthy degree – truths so painfully self-evident – resulted in an inundation of angry emails. Ignoring the fact that foreigners have been making similar points since Alexis de Tocqueville, and that US critics from Upton Sinclair to Michael Moore have been far harsher on America, readers went ballistic – a highly appropriate metaphor. But they didn’t so much deny the charges as deflect them, accusing me of turning a blind eye to Australia’s sins of omission and commission.

This is odd, given that I’m identified with the “black armband” view of Australian history and have spent decades criticising my beloved nation for its appalling treatment of not only the indigenous population but, more recently, of refugees. The White Australia policy, our environmental vandalism and a declining enthusiasm for social justice have been the focus of countless columns over the decades.

The other complaint was an alleged lack of appreciation for all that is good and true and beautiful in the American way of life. The fact the offending column concluded with the statement that America is the best and worst of nations, that it sets the noble as well as the bad example in almost every aspect of human activity, went unnoticed.

So here, just for the record, are some of the many things I admire about America – and the admirable Americans who aren’t Charlton Heston, Rush Limbaugh, Lee Harvey Oswald, Charles Manson or George W. Bush.

I admire a lot of other Georges, from Washington to Gershwin. Many, perhaps most, of my favourite writers have been American – from my discovery of John Steinbeck, Dos Passos and Ralph Ellison as a boy to more recent encounters with Joseph Heller and Don DeLillo. And offsetting the sludge of American cinema I’ve sung in the rain with Gene Kelly, admired Humphrey Bogart’s moral courage at the end of Casablanca and marvelled at the movies of Elia Kazan and half-a-hundred others of Hollywood’s finest.

Jazz? The Blues? America’s music is as much a part of my life as any American’s. Though I don’t have an iPod I’ve downloaded tens of thousands of American songs directly into the brain – including the scores of scores of Broadway musicals, from Show Boat to Sweet Charity via Porgy and Bess.

Clearly the United States Constitution is far grander than ours – and I envy them their Bill of Rights. To have the rights of freedom of speech and association in writing is a damn good thing. Comes in handy during a McCarthy era – or the current abuses of civil rights under the poor excuse of “homeland security”. And while US hubris in world affairs can be a bit of a worry, there have been times – and they’ll come again – when America’s belief in “manifest destiny” has been welcomed. As it was when Roosevelt got the US to give belated help to the Brits and to Europe in defeating Hitler, though I wish they’d acknowledge they played second fiddle to the sacrifices of the Soviets. It would, of course, be churlish not to acknowledge the US contribution to our survival from the Japanese onslaught.

American inventiveness – combined with the pounding pistons of all-powerful capitalism – gave the world much of the bounty we enjoy in our bloated lives, albeit at the price of wildly accelerating social change. And climate change. Take the US out of science in general and medicine in particular and we’d all be developing nations. So three cheers for all that.

And we have America’s awful example to confirm the wisdom of our calmer Christianity – verging on the agnostic – and for our saner approach to gun laws, stem cell research, abortion and capital punishment. That’s how to relate to America: cherry-pick the best, avoid the rest.

Then I’ll happily join God in blessing America.