I Love the Smoke

I’m reading a book I was supposed to read nineteen years ago: Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Freshman year European Civilisation class. I couldn’t be bothered. Nineteen years later I’m quoting passages to the Mista.

“Listen to this! Listen to this!”

I read aloud from Monsieur de Tocqueville’s eerily still apt assessments on a variety of topics, from the role of religion in the United States to the fate of native American Indians, from an analysis of the two party system to the glorification of American women.

I can’t help myself:

He writes, “I have nowhere seen woman occupying a loftier position; and if I were asked, now that I am drawing to the close of this work, in which I have spoken of so many important things done by the Americans, to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: to the superioirity of their women.”*

Bravo, Alex, Bravo!

It is on p. 103 of my (abridged) version, where my jaw drops, where a lightbulb flashes on, where a Frenchman writing in 1830 puts into words the answer to a question that has been posed to me a number of times: “Why do you prefer to live here rather than in America?”

Every time I’ve been asked, I’ve struggled with the explanation. I’ve hinted at intangibles; at an insubstantiated feeling of restriction — some feeling the couldn’t really be true, it must have been something wrong in my head, because every good American knows that America is the home of the brave and the land of the free. No other country knows freedom like America knows freedom.

Right there on page 103, Alexis de Tocqueville authenticates my none-too-sophisticated inkling:
“I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America. In America the majority raises formidable barriers to liberty of opinion ….”

Well, shut my mouth. How about that!?

*In point of fact, the tracts praising women are anachronistic causing the pat-on-the-back for my feminine compatriots to thud into nothingness.