[Dean's World] Dean: American Adam

[notify at powerblogs.com]

Posted by Dean:
American Adam
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1203964668.shtml


   Quoted:

     Looming over all of American history--but particularly the
     country's formative years--is the Biblical figure of Adam, the only
     person, according to the West's major religions, to have lived
     unburdened by what came before him. As literary critic R.W.B. Lewis
     wrote in 1955, in his wonderful book The American Adam, early
     generations of Americans became captivated by the idea that they
     could create a future without reference to the past. The
     revolutionaries who fought for America's independence saw
     themselves as breaking not only with the Old World but with history
     itself. "The case and circumstances of America present themselves
     as in the beginning of a world," Thomas Paine wrote in 1792. Thomas
     Jefferson believed the new nation should regularly renew itself,
     arguing that, if necessary, "[t]he tree of liberty must be
     refreshed ... with the blood of patriots and tyrants." But, as
     Lewis explains, it was after the War of 1812--after the United
     States had finally cut loose from Great Britain and other foreign
     entanglements--that the notion of a country unbound from the
     constraints of history really began to take root. Democratic
     Review--the magazine of a nineteenth-century progressive movement
     known as Young America--captured this sentiment in 1839, when it
     editorialized, "[O]ur national birth was the beginning of a new
     history ... which separates us from the past and connects us with
     the future only."

   It's about Obama. Read [1]the whole thing.

   (Also via [2]Instapundit.)

References

   1. http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=a559152f-70db-4183-8a8e-ed818ce6df7c&p=1
   2. http://www.instapundit.com/