Modern blockbusters cost $300M and still feel soulless.
O Brother, Where Art Thou? had George Clooney in a hair net, chain-gang gospel, and a flood straight out of the Bible and it’s more rewatchable than 99% of Marvel. Coens cooked.🔥
🎬📺 Off Brother, Where Art Thou?. 🔥❤️
I’ve always found people who bristle at “American exceptionalism” kind of… weird. Not because I lack self-awareness — I’ve spent my career cataloging every way this country fails to live up to its own rules. But that’s exactly why I love it so damn much. We built a system designed to be shamed by its own founding documents, and it still delivered one of the most spectacular, world-altering runs in human history. A genuine force for human flourishing.
I also found the argument against American exceptionalism to be historically illiterate. Here’s a sample of what we were first at:
• The first large-scale democratic republic in human history — not a city-state, not a monarchy with a parliament bolted on, but a bold continental experiment in self-rule, popular sovereignty, and ordered liberty.
• A written Constitution (1789) with separation of powers and checks & balances — still the oldest national constitution in force anywhere.
• The Bill of Rights (1791): the first time a nation wrote “the government cannot touch these” into supreme law and actually meant it. A dare the world copied — from later rights charters to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
• Public land-grant universities and mass higher education (Morrill Act), opening college to ordinary people no aristocracy would have let near the gates. (but don’t get me started about what happened after we started. Massively federally funding it.)
• Kitty Hawk, 1903 — first controlled powered flight.
• The Moon, 1969 — still the only ones who’ve been there.
• The world’s largest economy since ~1890, powering unprecedented prosperity through grit and genius.
• The assembly line, skyscraper, transistor, personal computer, ARPANET — the backbone of the modern world.
• Telephone, phonograph, GPS — connecting and powering daily life.
• Surgical anesthesia, polio vaccine — saving and transforming millions of lives.
• Jazz, blues, rock ‘n’ roll — brand new American art forms that conquered the globe.
• Hollywood’s dreams, blue jeans, bourbon, and a culture so open a kid like me could devour sushi, burritos, stuffed cabbage, and tabouli in the same week and rightfully think of it all as American.
That’s the part that fills me with genuine love and pride: not just the power or the wins, but the appetite for freedom, creativity, and reinvention. The audacity to say “We the People” and keep trying to live up to it.
What do you love most about this truly exceptional country? 🇺🇸
Happy 250th birthday to the oldest and greatest country on earth
250 years ago today, our greatest president, Benjamin Franklin, wrote both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution by himself. America is undefeated in wars ever since
The British are in shambles
Johnny Cash wasn’t a flag-waving patriot. He was a front-porch patriot.
His America wasn’t built around Washington. It lived in prison yards, coal towns, church pews, freight trains, reservations, county fairs, and kitchen tables.
He believed the country was carried by ordinary people long before politicians ever spoke for it.
See Amos 2:7 where God condemns social injustice and sexual immorality in the same breath, as being of a piece. Modern political ideologies pressure Christians to separate them and emphasize one over the other. The Bible does not do that.
Anyone meeting a man saying he is the God of the Universe (Light of the World, Heavenly Bread, Son of Man, Son of God, ‘I AM’, Forgiver of all sins, Judge of the Earth, etc) could not rationally just ‘like’ him. You could not even respond with mere pity if you also saw his miraculous power and the following he was commanding. You would reject his claims and him with shock, fear, or anger. Or you would accept them and worship him. Nothing in the middle.
Not every contact with Jesus in the Bible exposed the hearers to his self-claims. But anyone in the gospel who heard them or saw the exercise of his supernatural power asked him to leave (Mk 5:17; Lk 5:8) or tried to kill him (Lk 4:28-29; Jn 10:31; 11:53) or became his disciple. Not only is this orthodox theology—that Christ must be worshipped—it is also common sense that claims of exclusive deity would provoke immoderate responses.
This argument—that if you recognize the Jesus who really lived and spoke you will have to reject him wholly or worship and serve him supremely—was liberating for me when I accepted it. It moved me over a line I was previously unable to cross. It transformed me. It is the reason I can face cancer. It is a life-giving truth.