Time & Perspective Quote by James Lee Burke

America likes its violence like it likes its calories: invisible on the label, undeniable in the body. James Lee Burke, a crime novelist steeped in the moral weather of the South, isn’t offering a history lesson so much as puncturing a national self-image. The line turns on the contrast between performative condemnation ("we decry violence") and an origin story that’s basically a baptism by gunfire. That pivot - "but look at our history" - is the whole strategy: a hard shove from rhetoric into record.

The subtext is less "America is bad" than "America is not honest". Burke’s phrasing makes violence feel structural, not episodic. "Born in a violent revolution" frames brutality as foundational myth, the kind we romanticize in schoolbooks; "in wars ever since" collapses centuries into an unbroken habit, implying not just participation but appetite. He’s also nudging at the way the country externalizes its aggression: wars overseas, force outsourced to uniforms, then surprise when violence returns home in familiar forms.

"We're not a pacific people" lands with deliberate bluntness. It’s not policy critique; it’s temperament critique, almost anthropological, as if the national character has been trained to solve moral contradictions with force. Coming from Burke, whose fiction often asks what violence does to the soul of a community, the intent is warning as much as diagnosis: you can’t cure what you insist is merely a few bad actors.