American Ferocity

Having watched Ken Burn's excellent nine part series on the civil war again I have come to a conclusion about the historical basis for the American ferocity. That it exists there can be no doubt. Fierce loyalties, unbridled entrepreneurism, passionately binary-focused, seen from outside, as typical of the country. That it has led to enormous power, energy, and an equal capacity to do good, there is no doubt, but capacity is not implementation and power may corrupt. We Canadians have nothing remotely comparable in our history. This may account for the differences in our collective natures, our bridled entrepreneurism, the dispassionate greyness of our observations and our tempered loyalties. In war and peace we always rose, and rose early and competently to the occasion, but within the bridled context of our collective nature. America's poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow probably, for me, describes his country best in the poem describing her vividly as:
There was a little girl,
Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
And when she was good,
She was very, very good,
And when she was bad she was horrid.