There was an article posted yesterday I think you might want to see.
There was a video link of George Michael, too. I'll try to find it for ya......
Posted on 07/06/2002 4:57:52 PM PDT by Pokey78
Two words: Softwood Lumber
But America is also a historical anomaly: the first non-imperial superpower. It has no colonies and no desire for any. For almost 60 years, it's paid for the defence of the West virtually single-handed while creating and supporting structures - the UN, Nato, G8 - that exist only to allow its "allies" to pretend they're on an equal footing. For "allies", read dependencies: it's because the US provides generous charity defence guarantees that the European governments have been free to fritter away their revenues on socialised health care and lavish welfare. The non-arrogance of Washington is unparalleled in human history: it's American muscle that tames Bosnia but it's the ludicrous Paddy Ashdown who gets to swank about the joint playing EU viceroy.In Washington, meanwhile, cooler assessments are being made. America knows now what multilateralism boils down to: after September 11, Nato invoked its famous Article Five - an attack on one member is an attack on all - and, even as the declaration was rolling off the photocopier, a big chunk of America's nominal allies were insisting it didn't mean anything. There's no point pooling resources with people who have no resources to pool. There's no point getting together and forming a whole that's less than the sum of your individual part.
If that sounds "arrogant" to Europe, well, do something about it. You don't want Bush to topple Saddam? Fine. Sign a mutual defence pact with him. You like Yasser that much? Send your mythical Rapid Reaction Force to guard Ramallah. That's what real powers do. But sneering civil servants being patronising about colonials isn't going to cut it. That argument was settled in 1776.
A little item I found this morning pointing out that Europe's disdain of USA goes back a long way:
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19th-Century Fashion and the Sewing Machine
The notion of mass-produced clothing, cheap and well made and available to all, is peculiarly American. Perhaps nothing affronted old-fashioned European ideas of caste and class so flagrantly as the fact that by 1900 or so, a poor factory girl in America who worked six days a week in the same rough dress could, if she liked, wear store-bought silks or laces on Sundays. Or that an illiterate immigrant, if he had the cash, could go from Ellis Island to Broadway and after a few hours of shopping transform himself into a plausible-looking American.
In his essay "A Democracy of Clothing," in "The Americans", Daniel Boorstin observes that even by the middle of the nineteenth century, long before there was much of a garment trade, foreign visitors to the United States fretted about the upstart sartorial habits of the lower classes. As one British merchant complained in the mid-1850s: "You meet men in railroad-cars, and on the decks of steamboats, rigged out in super-fine broadcloth and white waistcoats, as if they were on their way to a ballroom, and common workmen you find attired in glossy black clothes while performing work of the dirtiest description."
LOL.
US Calls for Michael to Quit
See Post #7 for Video Link
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/711981/posts
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