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... and little pink houses for you and me |
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Written by NEIL GODBOUT
Citizen news editor
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Thursday, 03 July 2008 |
Happy birthday, America.
Enjoy it while you can.
Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, a great poet wrote.
Like Canada, I'm doubtful you will survive this century intact.
A history too short, a geography too vast, a society too diverse, an economy that leaves too many behind, an education that leaves too many stupid.
In the Mexican-American War and the treaty that ended it in 1848, you took 40 per cent of Mexico's territory -- Texas, California and the states that comprise your entire Southwest.
Mexico has been taking them back ever since through a wave of immigration and higher birth rates than the general population. Hispanics make up more than a third of the residents of both California and Texas. As for that legendary melting pot where everyone who comes to America becomes American, only the pot is melting now. Nearly 40 per cent of the residents of Texas and California speak a language other than English at home.
Even if you bother to read the same history books together, you don't come to the same conclusions about your past. Depending on who you ask and where you ask, the Civil War was about slavery or about the economic subjugation of the South by the North. Depending on who you ask and where you ask, it was America's richness of natural resources or a free labour pool of black slaves that built the country into an economic powerhouse. Depending on who you ask and where you ask, nigger rolls off the lips easily, a common word, rich in meaning, different in tone.
Like the people you fight, you are distorted by religion, where hucksters have twisted the words of Christ into a weapon to justify hatred, ignorance and violence. Like the people you hate, you look to a book for the divine, you worship your modern guns and modern conveniences, but despise modern understanding. You want to suspend history and science. You are united in fear of the unbelievers, in fear of losing your right to cheap gas, in fear the Wal-Mart won't be open when you have a craving for Twinkies and Coca-Cola.
You rose to great heights on your ability to modernize, but you are now afraid to continue down that road. Much has changed since 1791, when the Bill of Rights was ratified. Militias are no longer required to rise up to keep the peace and defend residents from outside invaders, but every one of you still has the right to carry a gun and the only way you'll apparently give them up is from your cold, dead hands, according to one of your great thinkers. So you go to more than 10,000 funerals each year because nothing touched the trigger but the devil's right hand, as another one of your fine poets sang.
Your ignorance is a source for comedy and you deplore the educated because they lead you to complex things like climate change and evolution, concepts that if you understood them would force you to change the way you see the world. To paraphrase one of your angry men of words, don't come round with all that reading and all that counting. You got a master's. What? You my master now? So what you got a master's degree? Let me ask you this -- can you kick my ass?
And even that final retreat, your great might, is in horrible decline. The Navy has only half the ships in the water now that it did just 30 years ago. Your last generation was brought to its knees by an insurgency. You still haven't learned what the word means. You cling to your strength and your good intentions, even as the rest of world turns away. China is not laughing with you but at you.
Despite all of this, you hold my fascination. You are the best at being the worst but you are the best at being the greatest, too. And for that I would leave this reasonable facsimile of you, this cold, dreary, bland and grey version of you.
I would be one of you, live among you, in a New York minute.
Happy birthday, America.
Wish I was there.
-- Neil Godbout is The Citizen's news editor.
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 03 July 2008 )
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