The protagonists of American popular culture are outsiders with scant patience for authority. The Western heroes invented and Louis L’Amour and portrayed by John Wayne, and their urban cousins – the private detectives of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler they have an inviolable inner code.
They don’t betray their friends and they don’t exploit the weak. They don’t aspire to entry into the elite, and they don’t apologize for their vulgarity.
They come in comic form for example Huckleberry Finn, or nastily serious, like William Munny in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, or a bit of both in Hammett’s wise-cracking angel of vengeance.
Americans are pilgrims. We invented ourselves as a nation out of the Protestant imagination, and we must journey towards a goal that we never will reach. The goal — salvation — always awaits just beyond the horizon.
Whether and in what way Trump is a Christian is far less important than the fact that he is instantly recognizable as the protagonist in a Christian drama: the lone avenger who stands up to the depraved powers of the world and calls them out for combat.
Donald Trump could be a character in a Frank Capra film. That simply is the kind of people we Americans are, or rather the sort of people we have become at two and a half centuries’ distance from our Revolution.
We never have succeeded in training an elite. Whenever an American elite finds itself in power it chokes on its own arrogance. I cheered Mr. Trump to victory in the last election out of disgust for the do-gooders and world-fixers of both the Republican and Democratic mainstreams.
(Excerpt) Read more at atimes.com ...
