For those who find this characterization of "The American Man" odd or offensive, remember that the mortality rate for the first Virginia settlers was something like 98% for the first few years. Thus, those that remained were of the sturdiest stock available. They didn't survive by playing Sudoko or badminton but by biting and killing their way to reproductive maturity. This kind of brutality is almost entirely lost on us in the Northeast, but it's nonetheless a vital bloodline of the country. We ignore it at our peril.
Here is my favorite quote from the introduction:
"The problem was that, while the classic European coming-of-age story generally featured a provincial boy who moved to the city and was transformed into a refined gentleman, the American tradition had evolved into the opposite. The American boy came of age by leaving civilization and striking out toward the hills. There, he shed his cosmopolitan manners and became a robust and proficient man. Not a gentleman, mind you, but a man.
This was a particular kind of man, this wilderness-bred American. He was no intellectual. He had no interest in study or reflection. He had, as de Tocqueville noticed, "a sort of distaste for what is ancient." Instead, he could sterotypically be found, as the explorer John Fremont described the Über-frontiersman Kit Carson, "mounted on a fine horse, without a saddle and scouring bare-headed over the prairies." Either that, or whipping his mighty ax over his shoulder and casually "throwing cedars and oaks to the ground," as one extremely impressed nineteenth-century foreign visitor observed. In fact, to all the foreign visitors during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the American Man was a virtual tourist attraction in his own right, almost as fascinating as Niagara Falls or that ambitious new railroad system or those exotic Indians. Not everybody was a fan, of course. ("There are perhaps no people, not even excepting the French, who are so vain as the Americans," griped one British observer in 1818. "Every American considers that it's impossible for a foreigner to teach him anything, and that his head contains a perfect encyclopedia.") Still, for better or worse, everyone seemed to agree that this was a new kind of human being and that what defined the American Man more than anything else was his resourcefulness, born out of the challenges of wrenching a New World from virgin wilderness. Unhindered by class restrictions, bureaucracy, or urban squalor, these Americans simply got more done in a single day than anyone had imagined possible. That was the bottom line: nobody could believe how fast these guys worked."
Clearly this take on American productivity was written before the Detroit Union Era. When Obama says that no one works harder than Americans do, I always scratch my head. Seriously? How can they work so hard when they're all obese and on 2 dozen medications? I figure what motivates hard work is hunger - like the kind they have, say, in, oh, I don't know. . .China? Or any other country looking to claw its way out of desperate poverty? How can the fat, unionized American worker compete with that? What the hell was Obama talking about?
But I guess he was resurrecting the old frontiersman myth to try and inspire us anew. But when I look at the unionized stagehands at Carnegie Hall who make low six-figures for moving music stands two times in an hour, I have to wonder how far along this line of reasoning is really going to bring us into the 21st Century. It was one thing when the rest of the world was riven by warfare and destitute with disease and poverty. But now, we will have to call on something other than distant memories to allow us to compete. I'd bet on the hungry guy over the fat guy any day.
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