Weekly "what are you reading" Thread #72

I read G.K. Chesterton's What I Saw in America. It's a delightful look at !burgers from the !britbongs perspective in 1922. He sees a lot of profound differences between the two nations which he wants to celebrate. In his usual paradoxical way, he says that the American president is more like a king, and the king of Britain ought to be considered more of a president; he also fancies he has the politics of a Jacksonian Democrat despite being against slavery.

Some of his observations on Prohibition, Irish independence and the new Soviet Russia are of historical interest, and he also shares how he became giga-blackpilled:

[A] number of educated Americans are very warmly and sincerely sympathetic with England.

What I began to feel, with a certain creeping chill, was that they were only too sympathetic with England. The word sympathetic has sometimes rather a double sense. The impression I received was that all these chivalrous Southerners and men mellow with Bostonian memories were rallying to England. They were on the defensive; and it was poor old England that they were defending. Their attitude implied that somebody or something was leaving her undefended, or finding her indefensible. The burden of that hearty chorus was that England was not so black as she was painted; it seemed clear that somewhere or other she was being painted pretty black. But there was something else that made me uncomfortable; it was not only the sense of being somewhat boisterously forgiven; it was also something involving questions of power as well as morality. Then it seemed to me that a new sensation turned me hot and cold; and I felt something I have never before felt in a foreign land. Never had my father or my grandfather known that sensation; never during the great and complex and perhaps perilous expansion of our power and commerce in the last hundred years had an Englishman heard exactly that note in a human voice. England was being pitied. I, as an Englishman, was not only being pardoned but pitied. My country was beginning to be an object of compassion, like Poland or Spain. My first emotion, full of the mood and movement of a hundred years, was one of furious anger. But the anger has given place to anxiety; and the anxiety is not yet at an end.