HI MZ
Thanks for taking the trouble to do a long post. What you say is really interesting. But I do take issue with its ideological significance.
MZ33 wrote:From what I understand, hunting over in the UK is a very different affair than what it is here. You dress up in sport coats and ties, or some such? Here, you dress for the elements, camp, and go out into deep woods. (As deep as you can, depending) It is a throwback to the time when people had to hunt to eat.
Spot on. In the UK hunting is a social and sporting event, and carries with it implications of social class. Hunters don't go into 'deep woods' because there aren't any deep woods left to go into.
You may be right about the masculinity thing. It may not be that useful a concept. I'll think about that. But in the meantime, this issue of hunting illustrates what I was getting at. Correct me if I'm wrong over this, but from what I can gather, in the States hunting is overwhelmingly a 'man' thing. Man is the hunter. It is part of the way masculinity is understood. In the UK things couldn't be more different. Here hunting is not a particularly male activity. Women, in fact, hunt as frequently as men. The idea of going into the woods with guns to shoot animals isn't a big part of the way most British men see themselves.
Once a gun culture is established there is a real material need for self-protection. That's a real issue. (In the UK, where private possession of firearms is rare there is no such problem.) Man the hunter, man the landowner protecting his family, man the lone pioneer might just have had some validity in the past but it certainly doesn't have any material relevance any more. There is no necessity for the American male to hunt. To say that history explains present attitudes might in one sense be true - it might - but by making that argument you are also justifying and perpetuating the status quo. Just because its part of your history doesn't mean nothing can be done about it. That's a specious argument and one that, in one form or another, I see made all the time in the US.
MZ33 wrote:Now, remember our war for independence. Those farm boys who hunted were the militia. Their guns, to hunt for food, and fend off bears & Native Americans, became their means to fight for their freedom. It is not uncommon, in many societies, for those in power to decide that the underlings, lower classes, peasants, are not allowed to bear arms. Now, our ancestors may have been a bunch of peasants, but in the colonies they were land owners. Land, and the ability to support your family on it, can be a great equalizer. The social structure was not eons old and predetermined with birthright, it was a lot more fluid. When the British started to play nasty, they also began seizing and banning weapons. This did not go over well: the peasants didn't consider themselves peasants. When freedom was won, it is no surprise that the right to keep and bear arms was written into the constitution.
I understand this too. But once again, history is history, not present reality. These facts have no material substance in modern culture except as a set of romantic ideas. The notion that ordinary working class Americans could overcome the physical might of the state with a few handguns, grenade lauchers, etc, is anachronistic. Once again, simply to state the history as an explanation of the present situation is implicitly to justify it. It just obscures the real argument.
MZ33 wrote:It would be lovely if our culture had not depended on firearms so much to get established, but really, we have you Brits to thank for that.
LOL. Trust the British state to screw things up for everyone else. They are very good at that.
But just to correct you on one point. It's the British ruling establishment you should be 'thanking', not the British people. My ancestors, who were farm labourers in Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire, were being treated just as badly if not worse than eighteenth-century Americans. I've pointed this out before but I think it is worth saying again: when the news of the Declaration of Independence reached London, the ordinary folk of the city broke into the churches en masse and rang the bells in celebration. The city was in turmoil for days. For most ordinary people in London the D of I meant that their brothers and sisters overseas had thrown off the yoke of the hated Hanoverian monarchy - a cause for rejoicing as they saw it.
I am always suspicious of history anyway. Every nation makes its own mythology to justify its inner power struggles. British and American history books are littered with dubious justifications of this kind. The notion that American individualism arose out of rugged pioneering activity appears to be only partly true. Most of it - the image - it seems, was invented post-1945. In reality, only a small percentage of those early settlers were actually land-owners, and they treated their workers as badly as any exploiting businessman back east or in the UK.
In fact, a lot of the original independent spirit of the US arose in manufacturing industry where industrial practices gave working men a great deal of autonomy. Sadly, that was all crushed by the Carnegies and their ilk in the early years of the 20th century in their unremitting pursuit of profit. Philadelphia is actually the home of oppressive American industrial practices as well as so-called 'Liberty'.
Some of the history we are taught is not only distorted it is just plain wrong. For instance the image I was given of Britain during the Second World War turns out to be a complete lie based on contemporary propaganda. Instead of the gallant nation pulling together to defeat the dreaded Hun, it seems that the government behaved in wholly authoritorian and opressive ways toward the labouring population. In response there was regular dissent as well as continual workplace strikes and industrial unrest. It seems working people were not quite bamboozled into believing the ideological guff they were fed about the war by Churchill and his government, after all.
And sceptic though I am, even I was shocked to discover recently just how much of the history of the American Revolution as it is generally taught is complete nonsense. I was all for GW and the rebels when I was at school (I hated aristos with a passion) and I got really fired up by the story of the 'Winter at Valley Forge'. Stunningly, it turns out to be a complete fabrication. It was one of the warmest winters on record. The army that was barracked there was largely composed of mercenaries and conscripts and it was all the commanders could do to prevent troops mutinying and setting off home. The commanders by all accounts were brutal men, largely incompetent and cynical who treated their troops with utter contempt. There were constant fights between officers and men. There was also conflict with the local farmers who were robbed and intimidated by the army. From what friends in the US tell me that's not what is taught in American schools and it is certainly not what I was taught as a kid or at university.
Another favourite myth bites the dust. Sigh!
Good Grief! How did I get into all this stuff again. I swore to myself that in future I would stick to bikes.
Wrider! It's all your fault! (
)
Y'know, I've been up and about for 3 hours, passed by several thousand 'murricans, and not one of them (with the possible exception of the NJ state trooper) was toting a gun.
) When there is general availability, you never know who might be carrying - and it's a hell of a way to end a domestic. 
(:humm:) - despite having better roads - but probably not that many more, and the gap is closing.
