No, I'm not talking about Independence Day with President Bill Pullman. (Although, I don't think it was accidental that the redneck-type had to be sacrificed to for the greater good and survival of humanity...)
A little over a month ago, I found myself in a heated discussion with a good friend, who shall remain nameless, from school. Originally Bulgarian, he had emigrated to the United States as a young teenager. I mention this only because it has some bearing on our argument.
He insisted that the United States was not something new; that it was -- at best -- a molten-pot copy of Europe. I instantly took offense at such a preposterous suggestion.
Me: The United States is an original!
Nameless: How could you say anything like that? What language do you speak? What kind of clothes do you wear? What kind of foo-- er, uh... OK... wait... uh... what kind of culture do you have?
Me: You misunderstand me. It's like a work of art: sure there might be influences, borrowed techniques, even, but it forms its own, whole and complete work.
Nameless: Always with the politics! You'd think that Americans invented democracy or something!
Me: Well, no, but we did invent something just as important: inalienable rights.
Oh yes we did. And it was good:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...
That particular conversation then dovetailed into a discussion of separation of powers and whether or not the Judiciary was really independent here or in backward Europe, and whether or not "sophistication" was nothing more than a mask people affected to hide their weakness. Still, something was missing that hadn't occurred to me, until now.
Absinthe & Cookies points out this marvelous Op-Ed in the Scotsman in their post, For The Fourth. The tasty morsels:
As Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, has put it, we are engaged in a great struggle in which "both our security and our moral conscience tell us that this [the Middle East] is a part of the world that can no longer be isolated from the prosperity and human dignity that freedom brings".
In Paris this year, she said: "This is not an issue of military power. This is an issue of the power of ideas."
Those ideas are what made the American revolution. The idea that all men - and now women too - are conceived in liberty and granted certain inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Revolutionary stuff in 1776 - and still, alas, far from self-evident in the dark corners of the world today.
Two centuries later these ideas have not lost their power, or their appeal, which helps to explain why young men from Tulsa or Omaha are giving what Abraham Lincoln called "the full measure of devotion" in far-off Mesopotamia.
But wait, there's more:
Unlike every other western country, the US retains a purpose greater than maintaining the comfort of its present circumstances. Highfalutin words such as liberty and progress have not been stripped of their meaning and - at its best - modern America still looks to the future with confidence, not trepidation, confident in its ability to stare destiny in the eye and not shirk from the challenges ahead.
And, finally, there's this:
But it is also important to say, this 4 July, that one need not have ever visited the US to feel in tune with what it means to be an American. It is an empire of the mind (and the imagination) as much as it is a military and economic superpower. The principles of the American Revolution remain sound. The World Trade Centre no longer stands, but the language of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights does.
No other country has embedded the "pursuit of happiness" - the great goal of mankind - in the foundations of the state; nowhere else is the idea of liberty so revered. There is such a thing as an American sensibility and it can be felt from the Baltic to the Pacific.
Could the United States be doing better? Wrong question. If not America, then who? No-one, that's who. At its best, America and American ideals remain, in Lincoln's famous words, "the last, best hope of mankind". The United States still believes in a place called hope. As it celebrates its 229th birthday today, we should too.
Imagine. How ironic to think that the nation considered by most to be an intellectual wasteland is secretly the font of subversive ideas like "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness". How strange to think that these ideas are worth fighting for, and remain worth it, even when we fight on behalf of others. How remarkable to think that "unsophisticated" America is "the last, best hope of mankind". No wonder Europeans are so resentful.
Did the American Revolution transform the world with the infusion of "an American sensibility", i.e. "a purpose greater than maintaining the comfort of its present circumstances"? That might be a little bit of a stretch. But the infectious idea -- the very American idea -- the hope that things can be better, not by believing in a Big Idea, but beginning with love of liberty and the pursuit of happiness... well, this is another thing, completely new and original to this country, which we celebrate this day.
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