Yeah, the bit about our Christian founding fathers always makes me wild. I’d learned that they were primarily Deist, and was befuddled to hear apparently sane US types arguing that Deists were basically Christian. I’d been out of the country for a while, and thought there’d be a historiographical paradigm shift. Glad to know you guys are out there trying to de/un-woo people.

Do you really believe in “memes”? Should not human thoughts be imagined as something greater than self-replicating parasites gorging on zombie brains?

I’ll take Auerbach’s Mimesis over “mimetics” any day.

It’s also worth remembering that the English and Spanish raised beef in contrasting ways. The infamous Billy the Kid became an outlaw defending the Spanish way, and then couldn’t adapt when his side lost. In other words, the English way of beef production contributed in no small measure to the expressions of violence that became our Western mythology (including Reagan on horseback, and George W. giving Saddam till noon to get out of town). Your point about English cows goes to the heart of America so deeply that McDonalds and all the evils they represent begin to look like minor footnotes.

I like beef, but much prefer salmon and bison and venison–all of which are healthier for the human body and for the land. As one example of efforts to mitigate what we’ve lost, hatcheries in the Pacific Northwest have been donating salmon carcasses in recent years to groups that spread the dead fish along the edges of rivers where they once spawned so that MDN (marine derived nitrogen) might continue to support the trees and grasses and critters that require such sustenance.

However, if the English colonists hadn’t introduced cattle, they still would be found in the Spanish colonies–Colorado and everywhere south and west of there.

Your first point suggests the sort of true patriotism we don’t hear about much in the MSM.

How do we get from love of America to nationalism? Just because most folks use these terms interchangeably does not mean that they are identical. Ask a few Native American Indian soldiers why they are willing to die, and you’ll quickly run into the idea that the land they defend (even if they do not agree that this particular war has anything to do with American land) was theirs before there was a United States, and still will be theirs when the United States no longer exists (if it ever comes to that).