America's strong heart. (Transcript: words worth repeating).(Brief Article)

Excerpted from a recent speech by poet and TAE contributing writer Frederick Turner. (His full text will be published in the American Arts Quarterly.)

American society has a surface layer of fashionable, transient, amoral, inhuman modernism that conceals a great enduring American heartland beneath.

This contradiction between American appearance and American reality is dangerous--both to ourselves and to our enemies. It is dangerous to us because foreigners acquainted only with our Hollywood narcissism, TV sex, artistic trash, and academic twaddle can easily mistake us as morally flabby and unable to defend ourselves: ripe pickings for the samurai or mujahedin of a more determined culture.

It is dangerous to our enemies too, and to those who play with the idea of becoming such, to believe we are a paper tiger. Ours is the nation that defeated the most powerful nation on earth to get its independence, that fought the battle of Gettysburg with itself over matters of principle, the nation that smashed the Japanese Imperial Navy at Midway, and that outlasted the cruelest and most well-armed empire in the world in the Cold War. A nation slow to anger, but hazardous when roused and deadly patient when necessary; the only way to escape its just wrath is to seek its forgiveness--which is, admittedly, always immediate and generous.

American military prowess comes not from a militaristic society. It comes from a depth of culture and a density of history, from a constant striving for goodness. Most of us hardly appreciate our cultural riches and deep historical legacy, because we live in the middle of it, and because it has been denigrated by intellectuals and academics--using our tradition of freedom to attack the tradition itself.

The mistake that enemies always make about America is to believe that its surface of apparent relativism, hedonism, and cheap academic fashion goes all the way down. They do not bother to read deeper. They do not recognize the extraordinary anomaly of America--that unlike almost all the other technologically advanced and wealthy nations of the world, it has become not less but more religious.

Most critics, foreign and domestic, ignore the America that exists quietly between our coasts. And not just the geographical heartland of small-town America has this deep strength. New York City surprised everybody in September with its ...