Posted on 05/03/2007 8:41:46 AM PDT by Sopater
I am happy to report to you that the Oxford Union, in its infinite wisdom, has allowed America to continue existing.
After a raucous debate in front of a packed house, the motion - "this House regrets the Founding of America" - was overwhelmingly squashed.
My colleague Jonah Goldberg, from the National Review, made a witty and punchy case for the birthright of America, lambasting the Union for a motion that "sounded like a bad joke".
Peter Rodman, a former US assistant secretary of defence, entered the fray with patrician aplomb and, for what it's worth, this was some of my contribution to joust for the country where I keep my toothbrush and pay my taxes:
It is very easy to find Americans who disagree with its current direction. But you'll be hard pressed to come across those who regret its very existence in a fit of collective self-annihilation. The confusion of one with the other strikes me as the fundamental flaw of this motion.
Let's say you didn't need to regret the founding of America, because it had never been founded. How different might our lives look? We would not be listening to George Bush's fluent Texan. We would never have had the benefit of Donald Rumsfeld one-liners or clogged our arteries on a Big Mac.
But what music would we be listening to on our iPods? Would it be German marching songs or Russian ballads? Would we even have an iPod?
Yes, the beloved iPod was designed by a British citizen, Jonathan Ive, a son of Chingford, Essex. But would his design have changed the world of music if it hadn't been for Apple, an American company, based in Cupertino, California?
Freedom to dream
So much for iPods... what about ideas? How different would the world be without the Bill of Rights? What about Thomas Jefferson?
The Declaration of Independence was the quintessential treatise of self-determination. If America had never been founded it would have remained unwritten. And who can imagine life without the Dumb Waiter, another Jefferson innovation?
The list goes on and on (and I apologise for any omissions): Thomas Edison, who had 1,093 patents for inventions in his name; Henry Ford; the Wright brothers; Bill Gates; the Boeing corporation; Desperate Housewives; The Sopranos and, of course, SpongeBob SquarePants.
As a TV correspondent, I would be out of a job. The television was invented over decades by a German, a Brit and a Russian but their ideas all came together in the middle of Middle America.
The United States created an environment in which inventive minds had access to easy credit, a willing market and the freedom to dream and create without fear of prosecution or recrimination.
As the writer and poet John Ciardi put it: "The Constitution gives every American the inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself"!
Europe's offspring
If we regret the founding of the US we regret a thoroughly European creation. If George III hadn't been as mad as a hatter, if the Redcoats had been more in touch with the feelings of His Majesty's subjects in the colonies, the English colony of Jamestown might never have given way to Yorktown, where 174 years later the English crown was finally defeated in the War of Independence.
To be against the founding of America is not to be original but to continue a long line of misguided bigots who always resented the birth of the US. In the late 18th Century, the eminent Dutch scientist Cornelius De Pauw wrote that everything from America was "either degenerate or monstrous". He was considered the foremost expert on the New World of his time and, like many critics of America, he never went there once.
Then there's the Oscar Wilde quip, plagiarised by former French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau: "America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilisation". Anti-Americanism is as old as America and it continues to miss the point.
America did not come from nowhere. It was an offspring of Europe, the step-child of a corrupt, moribund post-feudal system. America encapsulated the principles of the Enlightenment - Liberty, Equality, Fraternity - wrapped them in the pursuit of happiness, underpinned them with an inalienable right and turned an IDEA into a country.
It took the missteps of the French and the English revolutions and it made them work.
Yes, there were terrible mistakes - the gross hypocrisy of slavery, segregation and McCarthyism, to name a few. But America found and keeps finding the solutions to its mistakes. It is a giant, rolling social experiment in constant pursuit of self-correction. As Bill Clinton once said: "There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America."
In America the idea was ragged, rough and imperfect but it kept growing, it kept evolving and, if this isn't a vote of confidence, it kept attracting people, millions of them - Dutch pilgrims, Russian Jews, persecuted Egyptians, hungry Mexicans, uprooted Kurds, homeless Armenians, unloved and underpaid British film stars, now luxuriating in Hollywood. Ask them if they regret the founding of America!
Real promise
The US is a nation built not on ethnicity, not on religion, not even on history but on an idea.
Not only does this make America different, I would argue it also makes it ideally suited for the 21st Century. We live in a globalised world in which national boundaries are less and less relevant and the citizenship of ideas is more and more defining.
Al-Qaeda also strives for a world without borders, a trans-national entity based on ideas, which a majority of Muslims find as unpalatable as we do. So, ask yourself and be honest: where would you rather live - the Caliphate or California?
We Europeans created America and to regret this is to engage in a colossal act of self-denial verging on self-mutilation. We have a stake in its survival and its success and we ought to nurture it, not bring it to its knees or delight in its misfortunes. We can criticise its leaders without regretting its existence.
The reality of America may be vexing, frustrating, infuriating and puzzling but its promise is no less real and, given the right voice, should be no less inspiring.
Guantanamo Bay, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and yes, so many aspects of the war in Iraq, were big mistakes. But these are aspects of current foreign policy, not part of the nation's DNA. They are lamented as much inside the US as outside. And that too speaks for America!
To quote the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington: "America is not a lie; it is a disappointment." But what is worse than being disappointed? It is not even to know what you're missing.
There will always be an England, as long as America can afford one.
Ingratitude with a posh accent is still ingratitude.
Great post!
Yes Europeans are the reason America exists. And we threw your sorry a**es out over 200 years ago.
Why? The results of their debate were more in favour of America than your Congressional elections were.
Yes, as I reminded my wife went we went to Europe -— most of her her relatives looked around and got on boats with just a suitcase because the place sucked so bad.
Oops, sorry JMP!
Bugger off, Oxford.. Ouch....good point.Why? The results of their debate were more in favour of America than your Congressional elections were.
The comment about the German or Russian songs was stinging as well. >:)
-Eric
No need for you to apologize. Have probably done the same, personally, a few times.
Yes! They came here for a new start and got fed up with Europe’s long leash.
Actually POSH may no longer be the pervue of England.
I fully expect she may come along with her husband David Beckham to LA thereby depleting the UK of all things POSH.
It doesn't criticize the Bush administration that much, but nor is it overly flattering and "kiss-uppy." (It does seem to tend toward both, though).
The part about "Europe's offspring," and especially that Europe has a stake in the United States' future, is somewhat a thing to brindle at--personally. View on that is that Europe's--and more specifically England and the rest of the British Isles--and the United States' cultures are analogous (to an extent) to a plant. American culture came from a seed that sprung forth from the European/English plant. However, as is the case with plants, as the new plant begins to grow, the seed shrinks and withers until all that remains is a husk of the original seed. And then that husk either disintegrated, gets blown or washed away if exposed, etc. While the new plant originated from that old plant, it grows into its own plant by drawing resources from the soil, water from it's new home, air from it's own location. Not only is it independent from its parent plant, but it is primarily composed of "foreign" material, not material from the original plant. Similarly, though the United States may have come from Europe, this culture and civilization will become more and more independent from Europe as it draws useful parts from the cultures of its immigrants all around the world, along with making use of new cultural aspects (new things can be added to culture) that are native, and--as has already been done in some areas--from Amerindian tribes who are within the United States.
America and England elites can all go p*** up ropes.
In sum, we got tired of getting on our knees and asking a king or queen for permission to form a government, so we formed a proposition, novel in modern times:
that men and women are capable of governing themselves.
At present, and for the last 100 years or so, American culture is influencing Europe (and the rest of the world) at least as much as they are influencing us.
"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other." -- - John Adams, Oct. 11, 1798 Address
Our Constitution: No ambiguity about the plain language chosen after a dozen years of debate, conflict and disagreements; no debate about the meaning of "is". No uncertainty about the status of citizenship. No doubts about the rule of law, as opposed to the perversion of that noble concept, and far from the insidious creation of penumbras.
I bailed out after he quoted Bill Clinton while calling McCarthyism a mistake.
We have been poor and starving at times but I can't think of any of my ancestors that would have gone back, Ever!
We ain't them.
Yep. I owe Ann Coulter for educating me about McCarthy. (Other than that, she’s about half nuts.)
Heh. I concur.
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