In which I try to tie together several of the books I am currently imbibing

I've been listening to the audiobook of The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, and the most interesting parts have been about the thief at the center of the book and his refusal to classify what he does as theft. In his mind he is fighting some small class war against the people who can afford to be rare book collectors, because it is unfair, he believes, that they can afford this hobby and he cannot. He also has interesting ideas about guilt, believing that when he gets rid of a stolen artifact by selling it to someone else he is then absolved of blame for the original crime.

I find the idea of the person who is plainly doing one thing yet from whose point of view nothing at all is being done to be fascinating. To put it more simply, people who seem to absolve themselves of the rules they set for the rest of the world are interesting, though sometimes dangerous, people.

Perhaps we decide who we are and then tend to ignore our actions during the rest of our lives, therefore not noticing if our conception of ourselves starts to slip away from our actual selves.

It may go something like this: I am a moral person. I would like to steal books. I am a moral person who steals books.

And then I started Unfamiliar Fishes, the latest from Sarah Vowell. I've barely started it, but on page 10 I found an interesting quote from Kipling, who, having just been dragged through a museum exhibit on Native Americans by his host Theodore Roosevelt, said, "I never got over the wonder of a people who, having extirpated the aboriginals of their continent more completely than any modern race had ever done, honestly believed that they were a godly little New England community, setting examples to brutal mankind."

Thus was the US of A revealed as a nation of self-deluders. Not that this is terribly surprising, but there it is.

America being the country I call home, it seems that I can tie in a third book to this little thematic utterance, and that book is Home: What It Means And Why It Matters by Mary Gordon. This is a slim book, less than 100 pages, that I expected to be a quick read, but as the author is a wealthy woman who goes on about her multiple homes and privileges, I'm finding it hard to stay interested. It does, however, offer quotes from other authors every few pages, and the last one in the book (I flipped through) is from Christian Morgenstern: "Home is not where you live, but where they understand you."

And so does this mean, for those of us who do claim the USA as home, that we are collectively agreed to ignore certain realities? Of course it isn't quite so pat. Opinions vary, history classes have changed, fewer of us view our country as the same sort of Beacon on a Hill in the way that Kipling indicated. At the same time, however, we're still fighting wars to show people the way to peace, or at least prosperity, for us if not for them.

Are communities based on, among other things, collections of agreed-upon untruths?

And if people believe themselves to be truly above reproach for an action that seems immoral to others, who is right? The majority rules, obviously, but is there anything beyond that?