How the American Character Defines Our Relationship to Our Leaders


Some day, someone will write the definitive study of our time and explain how 300 million people allowed themselves to be lied to, manipulated and exploited for eight long years while they waited for the terms of the guilty to play out instead of picking up the standard and declaring this government null and void.

What will explain our inability to act against our government will invariably evolve out of a better understanding of our national character.

Now, nobody suggests that the entire country is homogeneous for it is not, but there are decisive fringes that are extremists at both sides of the spectrum. But, mostly, Americans tend to be conservative in dress, habit and thinking. And this is not something new; it has been with us since the beginning of our nation. We have always been stereotypically
Quaker-like. When the French were thought by us to be the original progenitors of sin, we were going to Sunday school in our best and looking askance at those who experimented with clothes, attitudes and life styles. It was not in our nature.

Even as a young man I was exposed to the American way We were all proud of being silent and strong; we hated controversy or being exposed. During the Second World War, we did the right thing: We stood up for apple pie, motherhood and the American way. Goldstar parents retreated behind closed doors and became dead to the world; they had lost one or more of their loved ones but they would suffer in silence, in their own private grief.

We tended to detest things we didn’t understand very much. We hated communism; not that we really understood it. And we tried to root it out of our society. We admired Tail Gunner Joe for letting us know of the dangers it posed to the world and how we might all be taken in by the attractions of this Russian device to turn us all into slaves.

We hated the Hun and the Nip who were the enemies.

We listened to those who radicalized the enemy.

We belived in a boy called Nixon who ran for office in California and radicalized Helen Gahagan Douglas and her husband for their views—regardless of whether it was true or not. If you were not perceived as an American through and through, you were thought to be in cahoots with the enemy. In those years, the enemy was not terrorism but “communism.”

We hated Whitaker Chambers, and all the writers and folksingers claimed to be communists whose careers were ruined by rumor and innuendo—some of the best minds of their time.

We believed in Jimmy Stewart and we understood how he saved that little town he lived in by God and spirituality and his good Christian nature. After all, we were a good Christian country. We didn’t understand much about the plight of slaves—In the land of equality, they proved less than equal with separate stalls for water and a warning to get to the rear of the bus.

We all listened to the same radio programs, the Fibber McGee’s and Molly’s, Duffy’s Tavern and others that reinforced stereotypical images, including the over-arching cheapness of Jack Benny (was that, too, a stereotypical response to the Jews among us—the money lenders of the Medieval Age?).

We all went to see the same movies and saw the rest of the world through the Director’s lens.

What we did not know was that many of the war scenes were either faked or recreated to entertain the viewing public and to communicate American propaganda. We were all proud to be in sync in those days. We raised Victory gardens, we listened to the Air Raid Wardens and we sat in darkness to keep the Huns away from our doors…

In short, all Americans who were white and Christian were pretty much the same, listened to the same ideas, believed in goodness, charity and what their presidents had to say.

Trying to contrast this to today, you still have the bedrock of the American people believing in their government, come hell or high water.

There are still Amercans willing to give up their lives to perpetuate such an idea.

Even though during the intervening fifty years, we have seen much change and alienation.

Today, many Americans support the government because they are frightened by the prospect of some one coming into our country and taking our lives away. Today, the idea of “terrorism” has completely replaced “communism.” But we are still afraid of what the government tells us to be afraid as it consolidates its hold on what we see and think….

We still tend to believe what we are told by our ministers and our leaders; that has not changed all that much.

But we have changed in our ability to accept change. Today, in our capitalistic culture, we seem increasingly alone, increasingly isolated from the mainstream of life.

Many have left their churches because they do not find satisfaction there; that the churches and their religions leave them wanting somehow and unfulfilled.

We find, too, a growing inability to assimilate new ideas, a growing alienation from reading and other forms of improving one’s ability to understand the world arounds; that is, other than TV and there is a reason for that. TV does not make demands. It does not force the brain to think, to process complex information. It is the antithesis of reading and, thusly, it is where the bulk of America spends its time.


In our choices, we have 250 channels and the Internet and literally thousands of choices.
But with such enrichment, no two people share the same kind of information that shaped our thinking and our ideas back in the early part of the century.

In terms of economic distancing, there has never been so much inequality. Today, the top 1 ½% of the population earn more after taxes than the bottom 40% of the economic ladder; today, today, a manager on a production line can earn up to 400 times what his line worker earns. The top 5% of the population today controls more than 40% of the country’s wealth—something unheard of in a free, westernized society.

All of these forces have contributed to creating a population that hardly understands each other any more. Children don’t understand their parents. Parents do not understand their children. Christians don’t understand Islam; Islam does not understand the rest of the world; The East does not understand the West; the “haves” do not understand the “have nots.” It is a ringing denunciation of our way that there is so much living apart, so much unwillingness to come together as a people. And it is very dissimilar from the way the Asian’s live where so much of their lives are defined by family and relationships.

If there is any defining trait to our time, it has to be that we have forgotten how to live together and it is as if there is growing alienation held together by only the narrowest of strings which seems to be our religions—for many, deemed unsatisfying—and our president. To think of our president as someone who doesn’t have our best interests in mind is somehow unthinkable; yet, our forefathers did think of that and did equip us to do something about it. Still, it has become for Americans the ultimate breach of faith and for many, we are simply not up to the task.


Les Aaron