How the Tartan Army helped America see what it is

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🍸 As she marks the 250th anniversary of America’s independence from British rule today, July the fourth, one notable US columnist has found some joy in the way Scots saw the country during their - now famous - visit for the World Cup.

Peggy Noonan, former speechwriter to Ronald Reagan and one of that nation’s most elegant and perceptive political writers, is characteristically lyrical about the Tartan Army and the “small sweetness that was gratefully received”.

Writes Noonan: “As we near our 250th birthday, let us never forget the gift of the Scottish national soccer team and its followers, the famous Tartan Army - the pleasure and delight they gave as they marched through America, drank our cities dry, sang their songs and said: We love you. They brought something out in us; they moved us and helped reveal something we’d stopped noticing. They allowed us to see our battered old country whole, and through fresh eyes.”

She describes scrolling through her social media at night, marvelling at the visitors from across the world who - in turn - were agog at the glories of the United States: its hospitality, its kindness, its spirit, its abundance. All this Despite Everything.

“Those young visitors, who saw us clearly and said what they saw, gave us a little 250th birthday present,” she writes.

“And here, soon, it comes. No party owns this birthday, no president has dibs on its meaning; we’re simply marking an epic journey through history as a people who invented a new political arrangement for man, who knew how to survive, how to triumph, and still care about the opinion of the stranger.

“What a journey.” (Wall Street Journal)

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In 1990, after years of practicing medicine and reviewing Van Gogh’s case history via his hundreds of letters, Arenberg published a paper in JAMA diagnosing Van Gogh as suffering not from epilepsy, as the artist’s physician claimed a century earlier, but from Ménière’s disease, an inner-ear affliction that can cause vertigo, of which Van Gogh complained, and tinnitus, a persistent ringing in the ears. Ménière’s, to Arenberg, could better explain Van Gogh’s decision to slice off his ear. After retiring, in 2017, Arenberg recommitted himself to studying Van Gogh and became convinced that art historians had made an even more alarming mistake: Van Gogh had not committed suicide. He’d been murdered.

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