american faith


america So far as there was an American faith, a belief, a mystique that America was more than the sum of its constituencies, its trillions of dollars and billions of acres, its constellation of factories, empyrean of communications, mountain transcendant of finance, and heroic of sport, transport of medicine, hygiene and church, so long as belief persisted that America, finally more than all this, was the world's ultimate reserve of rectitude, final garden of the Lord, so far as this mystique could survive in every American family of Christian substance, so then were the people entering this Gala willynilly the leaders of this faith, never articulated by any of them except in the most absurd and taste-curdling jargons of patriotism mixed with religion, but the faith existed in those crossroads between the psyche and the heart where love, hate, the cognition of grace, the all but lost sense of the root, and adoration of America congregate for some.

forget the pen... Their own value was in this faith, the workings of their seed from one generation into the next, their link to the sense of what might be life-force was in the faith... They believed in America as they believed in God -- they could not really ever expect that America might collapse and God yet survive, no, they had even gone so far as to think that America was the savior of the world, food and medicine in one hand, sword in the other, highest of high faith in a nation which would bow the knee before no problem since God's own strength was in the die... now they were looking for a leader to bring America back to them, their lost America, Jesusland.

Norman Mailer

American author writing about Republican Gala in 1968
days before presidential convention where Nixon was nominated
(emphasis mine)


© Norman Mailer