Athens, Georgia
We just got back from another road trip in search of America, the country where I was born but which I still find surprisingly foreign in so many ways. It’s the second such trip this year. Last spring, we drove around East Tennessee whose top historic sites included Davy Crockett’s birthplace along the Nolichucky River, Dolly Parton’s hometown of Sevierville, and Andrew Johnson’s gravesite in Greeneville.
This last trip was a six-day, five-state, 1,100-mile extravaganza that took us from Georgia, to western Tennessee, Kentucky, across the Ohio River into Indiana, then back south through North Carolina, and South Carolina. Among the key points of interest in Kentucky were Daniel and Rebecca Boone’s grave in Frankfort; Cane Ridge, the site of what was perhaps the most culturally significant religious gathering in U.S. history; a 170-year-old Trappist monastery near Bardstown where Thomas Merton lived, and Muhammad Ali’s gravesite in Louisville. Oh, and we saw Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace and ran a 5k along the way.
What most of these sites have in common is that they evoke both national mythology and popular culture. The more I study U.S. history, the more I am struck by how much and how often Americans wrap themselves in virtue and heroism in order to justify far less lofty, material goals. From the Revolutionary War to FTX cryptocurrency exchange, the nation and its citizens have had the unfortunate tendency to hide base desires and interests in high-minded idealism. (The CEO of FTX charmed investors by touting his belief in effective altruism, a social movement that encourages followers to make as much money as possible so they can give it away. And America’s Founders would not have looked so heroic had they simply expressed how angry they were that the British prohibited them from crossing the Appalachians and seizing land.). But then there are the genuinely heroic outliers like Ali and Merton, who puncture American myths but are themselves products of the nation’s remarkable cultural alchemy.
This little trip got me excited to return to the University of Georgia library, where I have a few more precious weeks to study this year before heading back to Madrid. Each day as I read–trying to understand the roots of evangelical Christianity, its link to America’s cult of individualism, and how they both relate—or not–to the country’s founding ideologies of liberalism and republicanism–I am reminded of what my late father used to say about Richard Nixon. In law school, poor Nixon spent so much time studying in the library that his classmates nicknamed him “Iron Butt.” So, yes, it’s nice to get off my butt and hit the road from time to time.
