Free Across the Pond by Terry Eagleton

British. It is acceptable for them to indulge their emotions in public with a certain theatrical touch, which is less true of their transatlantic cousins. Almost all Oscars received by American actors need a thorough rub-down with a towel by the time they leave the stage. The British are sentimental about animals but not much else, while the Irish are scarcely sentimental at all. Perhaps the harshness of their history plays a part in this tough-mindedness. Irish children are notably more mature than British or American ones. Generally speaking, the Irish do not suppress emotion like the British, but they do not wallow in it either. European politicians are rarely to be found moist-eyed and broken-voiced, with a catch in the breath and a lump in the throat. Some of them are more likely to be found hurling each other across the debating chamber. American politicians, by contrast, are occasionally to be found sobbing in public, as are American judges, bishops, police chiefs, newscasters, and business executives. This is partly because American feelings are near the surface, but also because in the case of politicians, crying in public can be something of a vote-catcher.
    Americans like their leaders to be human, a quality which one demonstrates by sobbing or saying something folksy. Being a republic means demanding a government which is in touch with everyday emotion. Americans tend to be suspicious of the aloof, clinical and impersonal. This is why U.S. popular culture almost always portrays crazed scientists, invading aliens and demonic psychopaths as speaking in sinisterly robotic tones. The nation is instinctively humanistic. Many American movies are about the conflict between an anonymous political or technological order and the rugged, warm-blooded individual. The opposition is in fact deceptive. Historically speaking, it was rugged individualism which gave rise to technocratic systems indifferent to human feeling.
    Sentimentality and the Family
    Sentimentalists tend to believe that the more emotion you display, the more human you are, but the reverse can be the case. I have seen concentration camp survivors in Germany reduce an American audience to tears with an account of their experience, while remaining impassive and level-voiced themselves. The idea that emotion is an adequate response to such horrors is absurd. They lie in a region as far beyond sentiment as the theory of relativity. Those who can sob and wail are the lucky ones. It may be that some American business types and politicians are sentimental because sentimentality is the emotional mode of those unaccustomed to genuine feeling. Rather as broad humour is the only kind of comedy appreciated by the humourless, so stagey, broad-brush emotion is the speciality of those who are not often called upon to cope with the subtle motions of the heart.
    “Family,” as I noted earlier, is a mantra-like American word, guaranteed to evoke a flow of profit and a flood of warm feeling. To find this domestic piety in such a robustly Christian nation is odd, since the New Testament displays a marked hostility to the family. Jesus, Mary and Joseph are a curious parody of one. As a child, Jesus wanders off to teach in the Temple, making it clear to his distraught parents that his public mission takes precedence over his domestic affections. He is careful to point out that his apparent father is not his real one. His parents do not seem to be among his immediate comrades, though his mother shows up at his execution and his brother James ran the church in Jerusalem (he, too, was later to be executed). When a woman in the crowd calls out a blessing on the womb that bore Jesus and the breasts that suckled him, he responds with an acerbic put-down.
    At one point, his family members want a word in his ear while he is on public business, but Jesus tells them peremptorily to wait. A few of his relatives even try to lay violent hands on him, claiming that he is “beside himself.”