Posted on 11/04/2002 3:40:00 PM PST by wideawake
And I believe the metric is growth, not size - i.e. the EU 15 has grown, say, 1.5% per year, while the euro 12 has grown 1.3%. You see that when we're discussing growth rate, it's possible for the Euro 12 to outperform the EU 15 if the three noneuro countries have lower or negative net growth.
The Brit history series is super, however. Did you note the less-than-humane way that King Henry's guys eliminated Becket? Ouch! If you go to Canterbury cathedral, they show you the exact spot where the bloody deed was done.
In St. Peter's in Rome there is seal on the floor to mark the spot where Charlemagne was crowned emperor on Christmas Day, 800.
VBWC, methinks you've too flippantly accused Americans of being uncultured compared to their European brethren.
I think as high a proportion of Europeans' lives revolve around local football and cheap beer as Americans' revolve around cheap beer and the NFL.
I think the attenuated disco, imported rap and light pop which forms the soundtrack of most young Europeans' lives is just as inane and empty as the original rap and light pop which American teens listen to.
I think that all culture, in the final analysis, derives from the religious life of a people, and Americans have a more vigorous religious life than Europeans do. More Catholics attend Mass on Sunday in New Jersey than they do in France.
An anecdote: one of my favorite poets is Hoelderlin. A few years ago I took a train from Freiburg-in-Breisgau to Tuebingen, the university town where Hoelderlin was born and where he spent the last years of his life in a tower overlooking the Neckar. I sat there on the train, dressed in jacket and tie, quietly reading selections of the poet's works in German. At one stop an Englishman sat down in the seat across from me. He was wearing a Nike tracksuit and was, yes, eating some McDonald's cheeseburgers from a paper sack. He had clearly been drinking. The conductor told him to put the food away, and when he was slow to cooperate a tipsy German (it was about 10 a.m.) dressed in full Bayern Muenchen soccer kit made some comments - they began arguing over soccer since they were apparently both on their way to Munich to watch the match.
There I was, a sober properly dressed American trying to enjoy the work of a German Romantic poet, while two drunken mannerless Eurolouts were arguing over a sports club.
Whenever I hear a European describe Americans as cultureless, that scene replays in my head and I laugh to myself.
America is headed down the same path. We are only doing it more slowely since we don't have a parliamentary system where the majority controls everything. The only good news in this for America is that Europe's fall due to socialism will occur before ours and might wake up some over here who still believe in their utopian dreams.
In Europe, they still conceive of legitimate authority as descending from the government (top), to the bureaucracy (middle), and finally down to the people (bottom), basically welfare state serfdom, but serfdom nonetheless. The average European has to deal daily with insolent and abusive bureaucrats who make ours look like saints.
The reason ? After living in Europe for three years I concluded that they fundamentally view the people as servants of the government. In older times, before the death of any real European faith in a higher power, authority would have originated with G*d. Now, the apex of the pyramid is made up of petty bureaucrats and insanely corrupt politicians.
America is in no way perfect, but our conception of the proper social order is the opposite. To us, legitimate power descends from G*d to the people and then to a government made up of what we still like to think of as "public servants". In other words, in Europe power flows from north to south. Here we believe power should flow from south to north.
This is one reason the Europeans have never and probably will never really understand us nor be able to fully emulate our success. It would require of them a complete and genuine revolution in thought of which they are probably not capable, and which they would mightily fear.
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