Still in the Shining Sea - An American Myth

    By Keith E. D. Buhler  
    Presented with all love of God and Country,  
    To my fellow Americans  
    in the Hallway  
    July 2nd, 2009  

Dramatis Personae

Dr. Adam Johnson, high school American History teacher
Joshua Johnson, a high school graduate.

Setting

On the 3rd of July, just before Independence Day.
Dr. Johnson rides with his son, on a transatlantic cruise from England to New York.

Section 1. Myth and Identity

JOSHUA
I’m tired, dad. Tell me a story.

DR. JOHNSON
What kind of story?

JOSHUA
We’re still sailing from Europe, and the Statue of Liberty is not yet in sight. Something long enough to take us home.

DR. JOHNSON
Something about the origin of the world,

JOSHUA
I’ve heard those before, the Big Bang, or Adam and Eve or whatever….

DR. JOHNSON
That’s the same story. For God created nature, and designed her to create herself. Perhaps I’ll tell you again about how your mother and I met?

JOSHUA
I’ve heard about you and mom a hundred times. Why not something appropriate to the setting?

DR. JOHNSON

Like what?

JOSHUA
America turns 230 tomorrow. Tell me an American story.

DR. JOHNSON
What does it mean to be American?

JOSHUA
Isn’t that your job? You’re the American History teacher.

DR. JOHNSON
You’re the one who skipped my class in favor of economics!

JOSHUA
Who wants to take a class from their dad?

DR. JOHNSON
I did when I was 18.

JOSHUA
Yeah, well, Economics was easier.

DR. JOHNSON
All that to say, I could explain what I think it means to be an American, but I don’t think you would enjoy a lecture or a discussion right now.

JOSHUA
No, I want a story. Something that tells me where I can from, and where I’m going, as an American.

DR. JOHNSON
If I’d have known you would turn patriotic, I would have brought some books. I know some of Song of Hiawatha. If anyone was an American mythmaker, it was Henry Wadworth Longfellow (1807-1882):

Should you ask me,
whence these stories?

Whence these legends and traditions,

With the odors of the forest

With the dew and damp of meadows,

With the curling smoke of wigwams,

With the rushing of great rivers,

With their frequent repetitions,

And their wild reverberations

As of thunder in the mountains

I should answer, I should tell you,

“From the forests and the prairies,

From the great lakes of the Northland, 
 From the land of the Ojibways,

From the land of the Dacotahs,

From the mountains, moors, and fen-lands

Where the heron, the Shuh-shuh-gah,

Feeds among the reeds and rushes.

I repeat them as I heard them

From the lips of Nawadaha,

The musician, the sweet singer…
By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,

Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,

Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.

Dark behind it rose the forest,

Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,

Rose the firs with cones upon them;

Bright before it beat the water,

Beat the clear and sunny water,
Beat the shining Big-Sea-wat–

JOSHUA
Wait, wait, wait! I want an American myth, not a Native American myth.

DR. JOHNSON
But that’s where we’ve come from, isn’t it?

JOSHUA
Going that far back, I guess. But start closer to the Declaration of Independence.

DR. JOHNSON
You’d prefer the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere? OK.. .

JOSHUA
I don’t like Longfellow, dad. Too rhythmic, to regular, too forced.

DR. JOHNSON
Then perhaps you prefer some Ralph Waldo Emerson? (1803-1882) He too is a very American poet, I think most people agree:

If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.
Far or forgot to me is near,
Shadow and sunlight are the same,
The vanished gods to me appear,
And one to me are shame and fame.
They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.
The strong gods pine for my abode,
And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

JOSHUA
I don’t much like Emerson either.

DR. JOHNSON
Would you prefer Poe?

JOSHUA
God, no! Anything but the Raven! Don’t you know any free verse? Like TS Eliot?

DR. JOHNSON
Free verse? Why didn’t you say so? I do know some Whitman (1819-1892):

ONE’S SELF sing—a simple, separate Person;
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-masse. Of Physiology from top to toe I sing;
Not physiognomy alone, nor brain alone, is worthy for the muse—-
I say the Form complete is worthier far; The Female equally with the male I sing. Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power,
Cheerful—for freest action form’d, under the laws divine,
The Modern Man I sing.”

And that little ditty called “To the States:”
To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist 
much, obey little,

Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
 Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever
afterward resumes its liberty.

JOSHUA
Ugh! I don’t like him. He is a self-obsessed, arrogant airhead.

DR. JOHNSON
Then who? I don’t know The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by heart. You would like if I put on a Disney DVD of Peter Pan?

JOSHUA
Why don’t you make one up, like when I was a kid?

DR. JOHNSON
Make one up! And compete with these geniuses? Easy for you to say.

JOSHUA
It doesn’t have to be Homer’s Odyssey, dad.

DR. JOHNSON
I think if I’m going to make an American Myth, then we’ll have to get clear together on what America is.

JOSHUA
Like a lecture and discussion?

DR. JOHNSON
Do you want the story or not?

JOSHUA
OK, ok.

DR. JOHNSON
Now, the first problem in understanding the identity United States of America is that we are American. “A fish doesn’t know it’s wet.” There are only two ways to see yourself. To ask someone who is not you to look at you, and ask them what they see. in this case, someone who is not American. Or to look in a mirror and see for yourself. The friends we made in Europe are thousands of miles behind us now, but we can read Tocqueville and Montesquieu. Furthermore, literature is like a mirror in which we see ourselves.

JOSHUA
OK.

DR. JOHNSON
Hearing these descriptions, and looking in this mirror, we should be able to build a description the ideal American citizen, don’t you think?

JOSHUA
Sure.

DR. JOHNSON
And wouldn’t we be able to know him by learning where he comes from, and where he is going?

JOSHUA
Definitely.

DR. JOHNSON
And then we might be able to extrapolate out, knowing where we came from as a country, and where we are going?

JOSHUA
Sure.

DR. JOHNSON
Fine then. The second problem in identifying the American Man, and therefore ourselves, is a bit harder. That is, there is hardly an obvious American Type, many American types. The American identities are so amorphous and pluralistic.

JOSHUA
How’s that?

DR. JOHNSON
America is a Melting Pot. It’s multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, religiously pluralistic. So what is it that all such people, believers, non-believers, and cultures have in common?

JOSHUA
They all have in common the fact that they have nothing in common.

DR. JOHNSON
But that’s a mere conceptual paradox. What is it in reality, that makes us e pluribus unim, out of many one?

JOSHUA
We are all free.

DR. JOHNSON
What do you mean by free?

JOSHUA
The government isn’t imposing on what we want to do, like they are in England or Germany or France.

DR. JOHNSON
Do you mean there are no laws and limits?

JOSHUA
Well the limits only prevent crazy people from hurting others, they don’t limit people from doing what they want, like I said.

DR. JOHNSON
Didn’t you want to download copyrighted music from your FTP site, but the laws prevented you?

JOSHUA
Well, yeah. But that’s different, it’s wrong to steal.

DR. JOHNSON
It’s only “stealing” because there is a copyright law in place. You could be more free, namely, without that law.

JOSHUA
So what are you saying?

DR. JOHNSON
That every nation has a mixture of freedom and restriction. It’s not very clear to say America has “more” freedom. Does that mean we have less laws, or less central restrictions, or less pervasive?

JOSHUA
Are there any other possibilities?

DR. JOHNSON
The government we are under (or rather participate in is common to us all.

JOSHUA
That makes sense.

DR. JOHNSON
That government is a presidential, constitutional, republican democracy. So perhaps (1) the American Man is he who has a say in the government.

JOSHUA
But Greece was a democracy too.

DR. JOHNSON
Good point!

JOSHUA
And in America, so few people actually vote.

DR. JOHNSON
That is sadly true.

JOSHUA
So try again, pops.

DR. JOHNSON
But I notice we are speaking in English.

JOSHUA
So?

DR. JOHNSON
Yes, English is our mother tongue, not Italian, German, or even American.

JOSHUA
Not everyone speaks English. Part of the Melting Pot, remember?

DR. JOHNSON
I remember. But this fact this reminds me that the government and laws under which all citizens live are the product of the Anglo-Saxon intellectual tradition. We come from Europe, sure, but most directly we come from England. So there seems to be some strong connection between England & America.

JOSHUA
That makes sense when you say it, but I can barely make out the connection.

2. Laws and Gods

DR. JOHNSON
I think we are being fish right now, struggling to see we are wet. Let’s turn to some outsiders and perhaps get insight from them.

JOSHUA
OK. Like who?

DR. JOHNSON
Montesquieu and Tocqueville. These, thankfully, I happen to have with me. Montesquieu does confirm that the American-ness of America might be rooted in her laws. He opens his Spirit of the Laws by saying, “Laws, taken in the broadest meaning, are the necessary relations deriving from the nature of things; and in this sense, all beings have their laws: the divinity has it’s laws, the material world has its laws, the intelligences superior to man have their laws, the beasts have their laws, man has his laws.” He continues, “The intelligent world is far from being as well governed as the physical world. For though the intelligent world also has laws that are invariable by their nature, unlike the physical world, it does not follow its laws consistently. The reason for this is that … it is in their nature to act by themselves.” And later, “Man, as a physical being, is governed by invariable laws like other bodies. As an intelligent being, he constantly violates the laws god has established and changes those he himself establishes; he must guide himself, and yet he is a limited being; he is subject to ignorance and error, as are all finite intelligences; he loses even the imperfect knowledge he has. As a feeling creature, he falls subject to a thousand passions. Such a being could at any moment forget his creator; god has called him back to him by the laws of religion. Such a being could at any moment forget himself; philosophers have reminded him of himself by the laws of morality. Made for living in society, he could forget his fellows; legislators have returned him to his duties by political and civil laws.” (SL, 1.1.1) So in other words, laws are those relations between man and himself, men and men, men and god, which govern him. And yet certain of those laws man is himself in control of. These he is able to disobey, and to change, which tells the story of the history of the thousands of different political institutions in the history of man. So it seems these French outsiders have found the single factor which not only determines the nature of the government, but, through the government, exercises its inevitable influence on all the people and cultures and languages under that government, be they Chinese, Dutch, English, or Mexican.

JOSHUA
Can you say what it is?

DR. JOHNSON
The American laws.

JOSHUA
But what is specific about American laws?

DR. JOHNSON
Well, during the Colonial Era (167-1775) the Colonies had laws akin to their separate mother countries. So Swedish colonies had Swedish laws, German colonies had German laws, and English colonies had English laws.

JOSHUA
The same Melting Pot problem.

DR. JOHNSON
Not yet. These were many metals in many pots. For it wasn’t until the Articles of Confederation in 1776 that there was a common law to all the colonies.

JOSHUA
Then the pot started melting them into one?

DR. JOHNSON
No, the Articles of Confederation, as well as the Declaration in 1776, and eventually the Constitution in 1788, were written mostly by English-speaking men like Washington, Adams, and Jefferson English in mind and spirit.

JOSHUA
What do you mean English?

DR. JOHNSON
They speak the mother tongue, as I have already said. Secondly they all share the American philosophic method.

JOSHUA
How’s that?

DR. JOHNSON
I’m drawing from Alexis De Tocqueville here in his analysis of the ‘philosophic method of the Americans’.

JOSHUA
What’s the Frenchie say?

DR. JOHNSON
He says, “There is no country in the civilized world where they are less occupied with philosophy than the United States. They have not philosophic school of their own, nevertheless, almost all the inhabitants of the United States direct their minds according to the same rules: To escape from the spirit of system, from the yoke of habits, from family maxims, from class opinions, and up to a certain point, from national prejudices; to take tradition only as information, and current facts only as a useful study for doing otherwise and better; to seek the reason for things by themselves and in themselves alone, to strive for the result without letting themselves be chained to the means, and to see through the form to the foundation: these are the features of … the philosophic method of the Americans… If I go further and seek among these diverse features the principle one that can sum up almost all the others… each American calls only on the individual effort of his reason. America is therefore the one country in the world where the precepts of Descartes are least studied and best followed… The American way of taking the rule of their judgment only from themselves leads to other habits of mind. As they manage to resolve unaided all the little difficulties that practical life presents, they easily conclude that everything in the world is explicable and that nothing exceeds the bounds of intelligence. Thus they willingly deny what they cannot comprehend: that gives them little faith in the extraordinary and an almost invincible distaste for the supernatural.”

JOSHUA
Seems right to me.

DR. JOHNSON
He says, “Let us consider for a moment the chain of events: in the sixteenth century, the reformers submit to individual reason some of the dogmas of the ancient faith; but they continue to exclude all others from discussion. In the seventeenth, Bacon, in the natural sciences, and Descartes, in philosophy properly so-called, abolish the received formulas, destroy the empire of traditions, and overturn the authority of the master. The philosophers of the eighteenth century, finally generalizing the same principle, undertake to submit the objects of all beliefs to the individual examination of each man. Who does not see that Luther, Descartes, and Voltaire made use of the same method, and that they only differ in the greater or less use that they claimed one might make of it?”

JOSHUA
I can’t tell if he thinks it’s a good thing or a bad thing.

DR. JOHNSON
He claims not to be “precisely in anyone’s camp,” but he sees us from without with an uncanny accuracy, I think. For George Washington was home-educated; John Adams went to Harvard; Jefferson was was classically educated by James Maury until he went to college. He called John Locke, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton “three greatest men the world had ever produced. And James Madison was privately educated by Donald Robertson, and went to college at what is now Princeton. All these forms of tutoring and all these universities were English speaking in language, Enlightment-minded in philosophy, and Puritan, Anglican, Presbyetrian, in denomination. Jefferson’s college, the college of William and Mary, was founded in 1693 by a royal charter from England.

JOSHUA
But we were talking about laws, not philosophic method.

DR. JOHNSON
Good reminder. But we haven’t strayed from the topic. For it was these English-speaking, American-thinking fathers who were behind uniting as a new nation under Articles of Confedaration. But there was a problem.

JOSHUA
What?

DR. JOHNSON
The Confederation didn’t work. Or it didn’t work well enough. The Confederation had the benefit of keeping power de-centralized, but it couldn’t collect taxes or organize an army. Without economic and military centralization, how could the colonies survive against massive, wealthy, established empires like France, England, Spain?

JOSHUA
Unite!

DR. JOHNSON
Yes, under a King, right?

JOSHUA
No!

DR. JOHNSON
Well, that would simplify things, certainly. But Jefferson and company wanted a Republic, not another Monarchy. But every Republic needs a speaker to preside over the assembly. So they wanted a president. But much like the Medieval English people’s concern in the Magna Carta to limit the Monarch’s power by dividing into the aristocracy and power of the aristocracy, the founding fathers’ principle concern in composing the Constitution was to limit power the powers of the executive branch into the legislative and judicial branches.

JOSHUA
So is the Constitution imitatively British or uniquely American?

DR. JOHNSON
It is uniquely American. It is a “bundle of compromises.” It’s primary concern is to give the Federation enough power to be worth having (as opposed to autonomous states) but to limit that power by dividing it, and strictly defining it. Of course, not everyone thought it worked: George Mason thought, the government “would commence in a moderate Aristocracy, [and] in its Operation would produce a Monarchy, or a corrupt oppressive Aristocracy.”

Even James Madison told Jefferson that he thought “the plan should it be adopted will neither effectually answer its national object nor prevent the local mischiefs which every where excite distrust against the state governments.” The Federalists had to convince people both that, “a firm Union will be of the utmost moment to the peace and liberty of the States as a barrier against domestic faction and insurrection,” at the same time as being keeping the power within the people, and passed to representatives by consent, with no one person having enough power to develop into a tyrant.

Thus the over-weakness of disunity and the over-strength of any one branch of the government are ever-present twin dangers. Alexis De Tocqueville, the other French thinker, puts it this way:

“Our contemporaries are incessently racked by to inimical passions: they feel the need to be led and the wish to remain free. Not being able to destroy either one of these contrary instincts, they strive to satisfy both at the same time. They imagine a unique power, tutelary, all powerful, but elected by citizens. They combine centralization and the sovereignty of the people. That gives them some respite. They console themselves that they have chosen their schoolmasters.”

Tocqueville warns against the dangers of this system in his chapter entitled “What Kind of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear:

“When I think of the small passions of men of our day, the softness of their mores, the extent of their enlightenment, the purity of their religion, the mildness of their morality, their laborious and steady habits, the restraint that almost all preserve in vice as in virtue, I do not fear that in their chiefs they will find tyrants, but rather schoolmasters… I myself seek in vain an expression that exactly reproduces the idea that I form of it for myself; the old words despotism and tyrnany are not suitable. The thing is new, therefore I must try to define it, since I cannot name it: imagine an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, withdrawn and apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others: his children and his particular friends from the whole human species for him; as for the dwelling with his fellow citizens, he is beside them, but he does not see them; he touches them and does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone, and if a family still remains for him, one can at least say that he has no longer a native country. Above these an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary it seeks to only keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living?”

JOSHUA
So what it means to be American is this: (a) submission to American Law, (b) the division and limitation of power because of the fear of tyranny, and (c) self-reliance in philosophy and everything else – Do we have it yet?

DR. JOHNSON
Not quite. We are missing the Religious identity of America.

JOSHUA
I’m afraid we still have the Melting Pot problem there. Even at our Unitarian church, dad, there are Muslims, Jews, and Hindus. Everyone seems pretty well blended, and don’t mind letting others do their own thing and co-exist.

DR. JOHNSON
But you’re missing the obvious fact.

JOSHUA
Which is?

DR. JOHNSON
That there must be some one religious disposition underlying all that pluralism.

JOSHUA
Why must it be there?

DR. JOHNSON
For a canvas to show up a rainbow variety of colors, the canvas itself has to be an exact and specific color: white. Most nations in most places at most times of history in the world have had a unity of some religion and some governmental method. The Athenians worshipped Zeus, Athens, Apollo, and the Olympyiad under the leadership of priests and oracles; the Romans worshipped Jupiter, Minerva, Apollo much the same, until they converted; medieval Italy worships the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit under the leadership of the pope and the bishops. The Church of England was Catholic until Henry VIII and they became Anglican or Anglo-Catholic, worshipping the Holy Trinity under the leadership of the King and bishops instead of the pope and bishops. Now, one of the reasons so many English Puritans fled was because they were forced to be Anglican in regards to sacramentology, ecclesiology, and theology when perhaps they wanted to be more or less Calvanistic, more or less Zwinglian. And so they subsisted in colonial communities, practicing the denomination or religion of their choice. But when it came time to unite into one Federation, what did Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and Madison remember, more clearly than their own childhood? The tyrannies of the Roman Popes and the English Kings. And so they had to institute a civil religion “blank” enough to account for all the varieties of Christianity, but stained with enough tint so as to capture the sensibilities and hearts of the majority who were pious, believing Christians. They could not be atheistic, explicitly, nor could they be explicitly Roman Catholic, or Anglican, or Calvinist, or Lutheran. And so they aimed carefully and hit their mark: the belief in “Nature and Nature’s God,” without bothering themselves about the controversial details: whether this God is One or Three-in-One, whether he wants us to worship him under the authority of bishops and presbyters, or presbyters alone, whether he wants us to baptise our babies while they’re young, or let them decide for themselves, whether he is really present in the Lord’s supper or symbolically present.

JOSHUA
Those do seem like trivial details, but how is that a “civil religion”? It seems very carefully a non-religion.

DR. JOHNSON
Do you think the King of England could be truly Anglican and allow atheism to be the official State stance towards faith and religion? Do you think the Pope could be truly Catholic and not make Catholicism the State Religion?

JOSHUA
Well, no. But not all our heads of state have been Catholic or Anglican… They haven’t all been religious.

DR. JOHNSON
But have any of them been Hindu? Have any been Muslim or practicing orthodox Jewish?

JOSHUA
None that I’m aware of.

DR. JOHNSON
None at all. They have all been members of the same American civic religious community, Christian, but without ascribing to any particular denomination. 50% of them have been Episcopalian (which is American Anglican) or Presbyterian, as it happens, because these two are the official denominations closest to the unofficial state religion.

JOSHUA So everyone in the country secretly belongs to this unofficial state religion, whether they know it or not?

DR. JOHNSON
Of course not! There is truly a great diversity of religious belief within the body politic, but the higher in the government and the more official the position in the private sector, the more one ascribes to a liberal Christian deism, like that taught, as it happens, at our church. In fact, most of the actual citizens of the nation are evangelical, like your friend Sarah.

JOSHUA
How do you explain that?

DR. JOHNSON
Well, Evangelicals have given up their interest in governing the State, and receded more to the private sector. George W. is the first of their number to be President, and when he says highly specific things like, “Jesus Christ saved me from my sins,” he made quite a stir, even amongst Christians, because it crossed the line. They expect a more liberal, open view. Of course, there are plenty of Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Confucianists, Taoists, Wiccans, and Atheists, but they too tend to remain in their sub-culture. Tocquevill highlights another phenomenon of American Religion, the tendency towards pantheism. He says, “As conditions become more equal and each man in particular becomes more like all the others, weaker and smaller, one gets used to no longer viewing citizens so as to consider only the people; one forgets individuals so as to think only of the species. In these times the human mind loves to embrace a host of diverse objects at once; it constantly aspires to be able to link a multitude of consequences to a single cause. The idea of unity obsesses the mind. Not only does it discover only one creation and one Creator in the world; this first division of things still bothers it, and it seeks to enlarge and simplify its thought by enclosing God and the universe within a single whole. If I encounter a philosophic system according to which the things material and immaterial, visible and invisible that the world includes are considered as no more than diverse parts of an immense being which alone remains eternal in the midst of the continual change, I shall have no trouble concluding that such a system, although it destroys human individuality, or rather because it destroys it, will have secret charms for men who live in democracy; all their intellectual habits prepare them to conceive it and set them on the way of adopting it. It naturally attracts their imagination and fixes it; it nourishes the haughtiness and flatters the laziness of their minds.” The rise of Wiccanism and Transcendental Meditation, Yoga and Buddhism since the 1960’s seems to make sense in this light. So, including the civic Christian religion and all its adherents, all other religions, and those who consider themselves spiritual, but not religious, I conclude that the vast majority of the nation sits somewhere on the spectrum between between the “hard” deism in the intellectual class, and “soft” pantheism.

3. An American Myth

JOSHUA
Is that it?

DR. JOHNSON
Yes. I think we can put this together into a blueprint from the American Myth.

JOSHUA
Be my guest.

DR. JOHNSON
The American Protagonist is a young Man or Boy who lives in a paradisiacal State of Nature. This natural state is threatened by an unjust tyrant, and so our rebel-hero revolts in order to establish peace and freedom for the majority. God, or the gods, are within him, and through his superhuman strength and intelligence, he overthrows this unjust power, but he refuses to replace it with a similar power. He divides power amongst others and within himself. The story ends with the new power being either too weak to do its job, or else too strong, and thus in danger of starting the cycle over again. And through it all, there is a fear of the tyrant and desire to be free mixed with a desire to be lead and thus a hope for the rise a benevolent king in whom we can trust.

JOSHUA
Would King Arthur be an example of the American Myth then, dad?

DR. JOHNSON
I suppose so, son. But I think a more exact type is George Washington or Luke Skywalker.

JOSHUA
Even then, wouldn’t Tocqueville say: “beware the benevolent tyrant”?

DR. JOHNSON
Yes, he definitely would. So it would be of the utmost importance to distinguish the mild schoolmaster and the just and powerful king.

JOSHUA
Well, this has been fascinating dad, but my friends are going to go swimming in the ship’s pool before we dock tonight. Thanks for the lecture/discussion.

DR. JOHNSON
But we’ve just finished our analysis, and I haven’t made up the American Myth itself!

JOSHUA
Are you going to?

DR. JOHNSON
Of course!

JOSHUA
OK then. If it is pleasing enough, I’ll stay and listen.

Fin