Values

One of my earliest memories – I was not quite three and a half – is of being with my mother in a tea shop one Saturday morning. She had run into a friend, who used a word I had never heard before, and being a tiresome child I asked what it meant. The word was “assassination.” John F. Kennedy had been shot the previous day, and the talk, even in the English provinces, was of little else. In the 1960s one was assailed by American culture, but it was a form of imperialism that few found objectionable. America’s music bawled from radios. Its programs larded the schedules of our three television channels. Its films filled cinemas. Some of its usages were creeping into our language.

Combatants within our nation’s political class never suffer for lack of insults — and in recent years they’ve taken to hurling back and forth a particular aspersion with increasing frequency: “un-American.” In recent weeks we’ve heard pundits and politicians declaim that it’s un-American to blame gas prices on Joe Biden, to tax billionaires, to let states decide their own abortion laws, to oppose admitting Ukraine to NATO, to forbid sex-change surgeries for ten-year-olds, and to treat Disney like any other Florida corporation. Still others have declared “whiteness,” the NFL draft and racial disparities in student debt to be un-American.