Stardate 20020131.1626

(On Screen via long range sensors): The United States is unique in the world; it's often been called "the melting pot" because it is the largest nation on earth made up almost entirely of immigrants. One reason that the other nations of the world often feel a special kinship with the US is because they have contributed some of the people that make up the US population. There is no nation on earth that doesn't have grandchildren living in the US. To the world, the US is their child.

So too many of them think that the US is just like them, or at least that it should be, because kids always take after their parents. This attitude is particularly prevalent in Europe, and it may be part of the confusion they seem to be having about us. When they think they look at the US, what they really are looking at is a mirror, and it's got a great big crack in it. The image is distorted, and because they look in a mirror they don't actually see what we really are.

Case in point, this editorial by Jonathon Freedland in the Guardian. It is subtitled "the state of the union address George W should have given to Congress last night – but didn't dare." And he proceeds to paint a picture of America as he wishes it would be. The image he creates is a self-portrait; it bears no resemblance to the US. It is America created in Europe's image.

"My fellow Americans – and fellow citizens of the world." Because America is made up of people from all over the world, it should serve the world. He views America not as a sovereign nation, but as an extension of the rest of the world. He sees the US as being the only non-sovereign nation on planet; not a nation, but the territory of the United Nations, equally part of all nations. Since nearly everyone here "came from someplace else" then we owe it to the rest of the world to serve and help and cooperate with the places from which we came.

Freedland posits the US becoming socialist. He wants us to raise taxes, give more power to the government, use the power of taxation to do good deeds both in the US and around the world. He sees new social spending, an increased role for the government in nearly everything.

He wants the US to become a missionary, to use its strength "to prevent wars starting in the first place".

He wants a new multilateralism. He wants the US to sign the Kyoto accord, to cooperate on world policy. He wants the US to rape its economy and go to central planning. He wants controls on American business.

Freedland looks across the water and sees a nation made up of immigrants from all over the world, but especially and mainly immigrants from Europe. Thus he expects us to be just like them.

Yes, the majority of Americans are descended from European immigrants. But those who came here were not the same as those who stayed behind. It was the slum dwellers who came; the "huddled masses yearning to be free". It was the Irish tired of being starved, who abandoned Ireland and moved to a richer place, so that now there are more Irish living in the United States than in Ireland. It was the Dissenters, those whose religions subjected them to legal discrimination in England. It was the Jews, tired of pogroms. It was the Poles, the Czechs, the Italians, the Spaniards, the Swedes. It was Russians and Bulgarians and Greeks and Turks and Georgians. It was the peasants, abandoning the strict class structure of Europe which held them on the ground. It was the city dwellers, who worked 14 hour days in the mills for a pittance, until they died from brown lung. It was the racial minorities, who were routinely oppressed there, and even exterminated. And it was mostly the poor, the underclass, those who felt they were condemned to a life of misery, who seized the opportunity for a better chance and a new life.

They abandoned everything. They left behind family and friends; everything they had ever known. They took a few poor belongings, sold everything else to pay for the steamship ticket. They crossed the ocean and left that all behind; they came to America and started over. They came through Ellis Island, and became Americans. Many of them even left their names behind and took new ones, the better to fit in.

The United States is made up of people whose ancestors hated Europe. They came here to get away from what Europe stood for; they came here because they wanted something different. And they were resolved not to let this nation become another Europe, because they'd seen the worst Europe had to offer.

They left a place which was socially stratified, which had a caste system, and in the US vowed there would be no such system. They left a place full of dictators and tyrannical monarchs, and built a nation where the government answers to the people and can be peacefully ousted by free and fair elections. They left a place where the government told them how to worship, and came to a place where the people told the government to keep its hands out of religion. They left a place where news and history was whatever the government said it was, and came to a place where there was a right of free speech and free press, where a man could criticize the government without disappearing afterwards.

Some of them revolted against European domination and created a nation built on a different philosophy. Others came later and joined it because they liked what it stood for. The most patriotic Americans have always been its first g