In todays Times, Gerard Baker has an absolutely bog-standard response to the Virginia Tech massacre. The title is "Only the names change. And the numbers". He may as well have added "but never the Op Ed arguments."
"Perhaps of all the elements of American exceptionalism... it is the gun culture that foreigners find so hard to understand. The countries religiosity, so at odds with the rest of the developed world these days, its economic system which seems to tolerate vast disparities of income; even all those strange sports Americans enjoy- all of these can at least be understood by the rest of us, even if not shared."
Oh my God! I wince at the parochial, wizened nature of this commentary. Where is the sense of America's unbelievable achievements? Where is the recognition that these gun-totin', Bible-thumping, weird-sport luvvin' wacko's have created an economy twice as big as the next two largest economies, with the longest-lived Democracy and the least corrupt society on the planet? Why does Gerard Baker, indeed all the millions of Gerard Bakers braying at their dinner parties about America's multitudinous crimes and uglinesses, insist on only seeing the negatives? It can't just be envy. What exactly is wrong with being religious? Whats wrong with having an economic system that rewards hard work and creativity and penalises laziness and lassitude? Whats wrong with taking a British sport and re-working it into an American one? Whats wrong with taking personal responsibility for the safety and protection of your family with your own gun?
Only a pitifully diminished man from a pitifully diminished polity would argue that any of those things are wrong. The orthodoxies of 2007 are light years away from the ones that made Britain great. But all is not lost! Soon the wheel will turn, people.
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