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Wednesday, March 19, 2003
posted by gbarto at 3:28 AM:
Tritt: Celebs Should Support TroopsCountry great blasts Dixie Chicks
This seems to be a fairly common phenomenon. I ran into all sorts of anti-American expats during the times I spent in France. They seem united in one thing: an obliviousness to the way in which our culture allows them the time, the money and the other resources needed to go have a look.
And then, you see all those cathedrals and you think, wow! this culture's really old, really enduring. As if. We hear a lot about Bush's arrogance, but this is one place where a little more arrogance is called for. The US and England have the oldest enduring democratic structures in the world today. Our democratic institutions' ages are measured in centuries, not decades. Our ideas about freedom have not of late known regular interruptions by absolute monarchs, emperors and dictators. We have not had dictatorships within living memories. The UK has the longest stop and start tradition of gradually increasing freedom in the world today. The US has the longest enduring written Constitution. France and Germany have governments built on the ashes of Hitler and Vichy. Have every reason to remember the dangers of letting tyrants grow in strength and power. And yet they don't take it seriously. Never have. Letterman wasn't joking when he said the last time France needed more evidence they got it in the form of German tanks in Paris. He was just stating a fact. And so as we hear about American hubris, about the US-UK alliance in unpleasant terms, etc., it is time to remind our critics that we of the English-speaking world have been successful in the freedom and democracy biz a damn sight longer than anybody else and don't need lectures from still brash and immature child nations who think that the monuments of their grandparents' tyrannies confer anything at all upon free societies that haven't yet reached 60.
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