|
Mark Steyn: American Treasure
Speaking as a misfit unassimilated foreigner, I think of Thanksgiving as the most American of holidays. . . . Well, Americans have a lot to be thankful for. Europeans think of this country as the New World in part because it has an eternal newness which is noisy and distracting. Who would ever have thought you could have ready-to-eat pizza faxed directly to your iPod? And just when you think youre on top of the general trend of novelty, it veers off in an entirely different direction: Continentals who grew up on Hollywood movies where the guy tells the waitress Gimme a cuppa joe and slides over a nickel return to New York a year or two later and find the coffee now costs $5.75, takes 25 minutes and requires an agonizing choice between the cinnamon-gingerbread-persimmon latte with coxcomb sprinkles and the decaf venti pepperoni-Eurasian-milfoil macchiato. Who would have foreseen that the nation that inflicted fast food and drive-thru restaurants on the planet would then take the fastest menu item of all and turn it into a kabuki-paced performance art? What mad genius! But Americans arent novelty junkies on the important things. The New World is one of the oldest settled constitutional democracies on earth, to a degree the Old World can barely comprehend. Where it counts, Americans are traditionalists. We know Eastern Europe was a totalitarian prison until the Nineties, but we forget that Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal) has democratic roots going all the way back until, oh, the mid-Seventies; France and Germanys constitutions date back barely half a century, Italys only to the 1940s, and Belgiums goes back about 20 minutes, and currently its not clear whether even that latest rewrite remains operative. The U.S. Constitution is not only older than Frances, Germanys, Italys or Spains constitution, its older than all of them put together. Americans think of Europe as Goethe and Mozart and 12th century castles and 6th century churches, but the Continents governing mechanisms are no more ancient than the Partridge Family. Aside from the Anglophone democracies, most of the wests nation states have been conspicuous failures at sustaining peaceful political evolution from one generation to the next, which is why theyre so susceptible to the siren song of Big Ideas Communism, Fascism, European Union. If youre going to be novelty-crazed, better the zebra-mussel cappuccino than the Third Reich. . . . Posted by: Mike 2007-11-19 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=208139 |