LAND OF THE FREE
A Study of American Cultural Themes: Their Origin, Results, and Probable Future Paths
Written by David A. Bedford
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 David A. Bedford. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the permission, in writing, from the author.
Book & Cover Design by Sabrina Bedford.
Cover image: The author’s paternal granparents on their wedding day.
Published by Progressive Rising Phoenix Press.
www.progressiverisingphoenix.com
ISBN: 978-1-946329-04-2
Dedication
To William, Sergio and Sabrina and to all young Americans
Table of Contents
I. You Can Take the Boy out of the Country
II. The Business of America is Business
III. America the Unsustainable
IV. The Shining City on a Hill
VI. Be Afraid...Be Very, Very Afraid
VII. Advertising and Propaganda
VIII. Empire and Manifest Destiny
Foreword
On a dry, cloudless, and comfortable Sunday morning in Lubbock, Texas, I saw something at the church I had recently joined that shocked me. Between the Bible-study hour (also known as Sunday School) and the worship service, a well-respected member of the congregation was having a smoke on the sidewalk. Now, I had just arrived from Argentina, the country where I grew up, to attend college. Baptist churches in Argentina were likely to expel a member caught smoking. How was it that what was perfectly acceptable in Baptist churches in the US was anathema to the same churches in Argentina?
Then it struck me that Argentine Baptists drink wine with their meals, beer with pizza, a little liqueur, French style, for digestion and (why not?) a dash of cognac in their coffee. When my family was invited to eat at any of the pastors’ houses, we would be offered wine. My Baptist missionary parents always declined politely. As I started college, it became clear in an amusingly recurrent fashion that, if valued members of a West Texas church were seen openly consuming or even buying “liquor,” they would find themselves in the middle of a tsunami of gossip, taunting, and disapproval, if not worse.
Maybe it’s just me, but I felt compelled to make sense of this difference, as it was perfectly possible for both sets of churches to be wrong on what they condemned, whereas it was impossible for both of them to be right. Given my upbringing, I naturally turned to the Bible, to find that Jesus’ first miracle on record was to transform a large amount of water into wine so that the guests at a wedding party he was attending would not run out of the beverage and the hosts not be embarrassed. Parts of the Bible caution somberly against overindulging with wine and one incident even shows Noah being shamed because he got drunk, but nowhere does the Bible prohibit drinking wine. Moreover, passing the cup of wine and drinking from it is a central part of the Seder ceremony. In the first century, during the Seder of what was most likely (but not fully established) the year 30, Jesus passed around the cup of wine and proclaimed the establishment of a New Covenant. Among American Protestant congregations the ceremony is practiced as Communion or Lord’s Supper. So the Argentines are right in using wine so long as they show it sufficient respect.
What then, about smoking? The Bible has nothing to say about it, so I had to turn to what I knew about the effects of smoking other than the fact that second-hand cigarette smoke set me to coughing and always drove me from the room. Even back that far into the last century, it was clear that the tar in cigarettes made deposits in the lungs, causing emphysema, a horrible disease which kills in an agonizingly slow process of suffocation. It also can interact with the genes of certain people to become carcinogenic. The nicotine in cigarettes is addictive and increases blood pressure and heart rate. And I haven’t even touched on how cigarettes prey on one’s budget. For most people, then, smoking is nothing but bad news. Christian doctrine holds that we are to care for our bodies for a number of reasons. So in this particular case, the Argentine Baptists appeared to be vindicated, but they should have been wary of how alcohol use can get out of hand and they probably should not have expelled church members for smoking, but rather counsel people to give up tobacco. Where both communities had it wrong was to judge their fellow Baptists instead of looking to their own lives and endeavoring to live right.
At this point you may well ask what all this has to do with the history of the United States of America. You deserve an answer. For full disclosure I must tell you that I am an American by birth and by parentage, and proud to be so. My families have an unusually long history in the US. My mother’s maiden name is Watson, which is Scots-Irish, and her mother’s maiden name was Land (German). Both families came to the British colonies in North America at some point during the mid eighteenth century. The first ancestor in a direct line on my father’s side came from England (can there be any name more English than Bedford?) in 1701 or 1703. The record is not entirely clear. He married a descendant of a family who came over on the Mayflower. If that is not American enough for you, both of my father’s grandfathers married Native American women: a Choctaw in one case and a Cherokee in the other. I would assume those credentials should suffice. My father was born in Belen, New Mexico (yes, it was already a US state by then) and my mother in Lorenzo, Texas, just outside of Lubbock. My father’s family did tenant farming in west Texas and when his father died, the family moved to Clovis, just across the line in New Mexico. My mother grew up on tenant farms, in west Texas when she was little, and then in Roosevelt County, also in eastern New Mexico.
All this goes into the picture I constructed for myself about what the US was like while I was growing up in Argentina as a missionaries’ kid. We spoke English at home and lived an American family life, but outside the home, at school, church, social functions, and with friends,