Obvious

A day or so ago, I was telling a friend about part of quote that I remembered, but I had no idea where I remembered it from. I thought I "had read it somewhere." Well, I have this big ole commonplace book--does anybody not familiar with the pre-computer age have any idea what this is? Anyway, I did indeed find the source of the quote, which in full ran this way:

It's nonsense that Americans are individualists. Deep down, we are a nation of herd animals: mouselike conformists who will lay at the doorstep all our rights--if you tell us that we won't have to worry about crime and that our property values will be protected.

This is from a guy named Dennis Judd who was quoted in Robert Kaplan's An Empire Wilderness (1998). But of course. This is one of those observations that is so blatantly obvious that anyone making it will be immediately condemned as anti-American. But one of the many anti-American things you can say in this land of the free that are blatantly obvious.