A great read for fundamentalists, rednecks, the PCA, and the SBC...

Last night I finished a book recommended by my good friend, Bob Patterson, titled Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America (2004). We started the book during our family vacation, reading it aloud in the car as we drove. But we didn't get to the end so now we all have to finish it on our own.

Born Fighting is a broad-stroke history of the Scots-Irish, combined with a good bit of personal narrative by the author, James Webb, whose love and respect for his ethnic background runs gold-mine deep.

Webb's father was an Air Force colonel who clawed his way up the ranks by sheer determination. Webb followed in his father's footsteps, graduating from the Naval Academy, then serving as a Marine officer in the An Hoa Basin in Viet Nam. He was wounded twice and decorated with the Navy Cross, the Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, and two Purple Hearts. Forced to leave the military because of a wound that wouldn't heal, Webb went on to earn his J.D. at Georgetown University where the faculty sought to humiliate him for his military service. His final work with the military came as Secretary of the Navy in the late eighties.

Since then, Webb has been a journalist. His work includes what many consider the classic novel of the war in Viet Nam, Fields of Fire (1978). Tom Wolfe writes, "In my opinion ( Fields of Fire is) the finest of the Vietnam novels."

If you've read The Great Santini to which Webb makes a glancing allusion in the final pages of his book, you could say Webb is the mirror image of the Great Santini's biographer-son, Pat Conroy; and therefore, his precise opposite. Many of his father's traits Conroy portrays as despicable could easily serve as the basis of Webb's honorable and loving tribute to his own dad. It's all in the perspective. Only one of these men has learned the truth of Wilde's observation, "Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them."

And as an aside, I've rarely hated a book as much as I hated The Great Santini. Vulgar, sanctimonious (although I doubt anyone has ever applied this term to Conroy's work before), and patricidal, I do wish Conroy had read the account of Noah's drunkenness before taking up pen. Does America really need one more child bent on destroying his father's reputation? Conroy and Frankie Schaeffer would have done better to shut up. How do men cash royalty checks they receive for this kind of work?

But back to Webb. I'm telling you, this book is required reading for Baptists and Presbyterians with Scots-Irish blood. With me, you also may have the joy of recovering your ethnic roots and pride, realizing why, raised on Handel's Messiah playing from a stereo speaker above your crib in infancy in a suburb of Philadelphia, as you grow older you find yourself growing in your love for most things Southern. You love it's humor (Jerry Clower and Barney Fife/Citizen's Arrest); its music (Merle Haggard and Bill Monroe); it's manners (from the time of first meeting, your daughter's husband [a Nashville man] addressed you and your wife "Sir" and "Ma'am"); its literature (Flannery O'Connor, Dabney's bio of Stonewall Jackson); its sports (Nascar); its denominations (Presbyterian Church in America and the Southern Baptist Convention); its movies (Driving Miss Daisy and Deliverance [yeah, I'm joking--it's just a joke, chill out, wouldya?]...

As a matter of fact, if I'm trying to find a movie, I'm always a sucker for something shot in the South. The culture of the rest of America is so utterly banal it bores me to tears. But the South--it may not have quite been successful, but it's resisted the homogenization campaign of Washington D.C. better than the rest of us, and therefore still has something that may be called culture.

Putting it briefly, Webb reveres rednecks and gives us a place to stand in history that allows us to honor the Scots-Irish, both dead and living, who, for way too long, have done America's dirty work with absolutely no expression of gratitude from New York, Boston, Virginia, San Francisco, or Minneapolis-St. Paul.

One caveat: Webb demonstrates almost no understanding of the Christian faith that lies behind a substantial part of what he honors. But informed Christian readers will be able to fill in the gaps.

Anyhow, unless you're an Eastern seaboard snob whose smug superiority was confirmed by The Great Santini, someone who thinks a married couple with more than one child has engaged in "feckless breeding," get Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America and settle in for a good read that will "honor your father and mother" and help you understand your PCA/SBC/fundamentalist roots.

PS: If you use my above links to purchase the book, it WILL NOT increase the price you pay at Amazon, but David and I WILL be awarded Amazon credits in the amount of 4% of your purchase price.