On the occasion of G.W.'s 60th birthday (and a couple of days after July 4th) here is a rather nice piece in praise of America:
What's So Great About America?
By Dinesh D'Souza
The newcomer who sees America for the first time typically experiences emotions that alternate between wonder and delight. Here is a country where everything works: The roads are paper-smooth, the highway signs are clear and accurate, the public toilets function properly, when you pick up the telephone you get a dial tone. You can even buy things from the store and then take them back if you change your mind. For the Third World visitor, the American supermarket is a marvel to behold: endless aisles of every imaginable product, 50 different types of cereal, multiple flavors of ice cream, countless unappreciated inventions like quilted toilet paper, fabric softener, roll-on deodorant, disposable diapers.
The immigrant cannot help noticing that America is a country where the poor live comparatively well. This fact was dramatized in the 1980s, when CBS television broadcast an anti-Reagan documentary, “People Like Us,” which was intended to show the miseries of the poor during an American recession. The Soviet Union also broadcast the documentary, with the intention of embarrassing the Reagan administration. But it had the opposite effect. Ordinary people across the Soviet Union saw that the poorest Americans had television sets and cars. They arrived at the same conclusion that I witnessed in a friend of mine from Bombay who has been trying unsuccessfully to move to the United States for nearly a decade. I asked him, “Why are you so eager to come to America?” He replied, “Because I really want to live in a country where the poor people are fat.”
Read on...
Found it via: instapundit
5 comments:
Point well made, Wemb. The writer's comparison is very much between the US and his native India.
My only additional comment is that (from my limited experience of both countries) the US seems slightly better (than the UK - I cannot speak of Oz) at making immigrants feel like they belong to their new country. Big national holidays like July 4th and Thanksgiving feel very inclusive and broadly secular (despite the fact that the latter has undoubted Christian roots.) The secular approach allows people to add as much (or as little) of their own religion to the holiday as they choose. America often feels more nationalistic than the UK, but I wonder if they have found a way of harnassing that nationalism in a way that fosters more of a sense of common identity. (Compare and contrast with British multicultiralism is you will.) I think we have moments like that here too; qv. winning the Olympics for 2012, the World Cup. But in the case of the second example the bonds of togertheness are slightly undermined by anti-English sentiment north of Hadrian's Wall and subsequent calls for the dissolution of the Union in the south.
By the way, I often like Jonathan Freedland, but he recently wrote one of the most poorly argued articles I have ever read. Many of the comments beneath the article do an excellent job of exposing the flaws of the piece. (Surprised at Freedland - I've often found him sensible in the past.)
Here's the Freedland book Bring Home the Revolution referred to by Wembley. Great read.
Nice to read a positive piece on the US and very well reminded by Wembley that those cherished American values find their roots in Britain.
Margaret Thatcher in her book 'Statecraft' approvingly quotes the late Warren Burger, American Judge & longest serving chief justice, who makes the distinction that 'The US Constitution represented not a grant of power from rulers to the people ruled - as with King John's grant of the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215 - but a grant of power by the people to the government which they had created.'
I still think the British should be very proud of their part in evolving the political values & legal systems that inform the American Constitution though.
Creating an English Parliament in York is an interesting idea. I'm not sure it would adequately address the issue of the centralisation of power though. To really achieve that would mean pushing power down to the local communities.
It's ironic that Britain was once a highly devolved nation with dynamic local governments and is 'now the most centralised state in the developed world' performing less well in areas such as health, education, housing and crime than other nations of similiar size and wealth.
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