Glad to be American
It’s always enlightening to read a foreign novel. Not just one set outside of America, but one written with an entirely different background, by someone with a wholly different culture cascading around him. One finds a different perspective on many things taken for granted, and some things not even noticed.
While reading Stieg Larsson’s trilogy beginning with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I found myself walking in a style of plot and prose similar to Dostoyevsky himself, with a particularly frightening approach to human nature. One of the most shocking passages, however, wasn’t a radical reversal of a character; it wasn’t a savage attack on someone defenseless; it wasn’t a terrible revelation. It was a simple warning of the Rule of Law.
Sweden –the setting of the series, and the homeland of Herr Larsson- is a relatively progressive country. In fact, it is often radically progressive, and is sometimes an excellent example of the dangers that wrong ideas can lead to. This point is made many times over throughout the books, but never more terribly nor more subtly than in a brief passage in the final book, The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.
While alone in her house, and fearing the return of a violent stalker who had broken into her house earlier that night, one of the lesser characters arms herself with a golf club, placing others around the house for use in an emergency. The following morning, when meeting with an operative from a private security firm, she is warned by her impromptu bodyguard that, if the stalker had returned, and if she had killed him, she would have faced manslaughter charges. Further, if it was shown that she had placed golf clubs around the house for that express purpose, she would have been charged with murder.
The revelation came as a total shock to me. Grounded as I am in the American idea that man has a right to defend himself, the prosecution of a woman defending herself in her own home against someone who was repeatedly threatening her is not only literally foreign to me, but utterly incomprehensible.
Nor was this the only example of this throughout the books. I was not surprised that any gun owned by a non-police civilian was illegal. What surprised me was the Mace. A series that spends much of its time concerned with violence towards women –especially defenseless women- puts illegal pepper-spray into a sharp contrast.
This is not the first work that, while enjoyable, had caused me to pull out some hair. I once attempted to watch the British cop show Luther, and, while I enjoyed much of the couple episodes I did see, I couldn’t stand the impossibility the police faced while hunting a cop-hunting serial killer… who was armed. The police, like good Royal Subjects, bore no arms. In fact, they had to wring and wrangle their bureaucratic supervisors in order to get barely a handful of Kevlar vests. While police were dripping left and right because they could not legally protect themselves from the psycho, I gave up my faith in British television and watched something American. (Many thanks to Sherlock, which redeemed the British ability to tell a story in my eyes.)
In one of the many delightful works of Terry Pratchett, we are transported to a distant continent on the mythological Diskworld where “swords are outlawed, so only outlaws have swords.” In Hugh Laurie’s side-splitting novel entitled The Gun Seller, we find the central ex-army hero at the mercy of those villains with guns, many of whom happen to be... (shockingly) American. (Of course, give the guy a weapon and he decimates the enemy forces, one ground-to-air missile at a time. I sometimes wonder if Laurie should try an action movie… but he’d probably have to work a while to get rid of his House limp.)
The ability to defend oneself, so firmly entrenched in the American mind, heart, and Constitution, is something that I often take for granted. It is illuminating to see the result of that ability’s legal castration. It extends into the very minds of those restricted. It is a statistical fact that it is far more likely for an American law-enforcement officer, fireman, or other first-responder to die as the result of a risk he took than in any European nation. The idea that they are called to be individual heroes, and not simply cogs in a heroic system, is culturally ingrained into the American psyche since before there were United States.
America is a nation of individuals. She is a nation of heroes. And I am proud to be an American.
