That’s us, folks. Andrew Gimson, writing in London’s Daily Telegraph, pays the United States one huge compliment:
We are inclined, in our snobbish way, to dismiss the Americans as a new
and vulgar people, whose civilisation has hardly risen above the level
of cowboys and Indians. Yet the United States of America is actually
the oldest republic in the world, with a constitution that is one of
the noblest works of man. When one strips away the distracting symbols
of modernity – motor cars, skyscrapers, space rockets, microchips, junk
food – one finds an essentially 18th-century country. While Europe has
engaged in the headlong and frankly rather immature pursuit of novelty
– how many constitutions have the nations of Europe been through in
this time? – the Americans have held to the ideals enunciated more than
200 years ago by their founding fathers.
Read the whole thing.
