...and the American Way

Geek with a .45 notes that those very words have been deliberately omitted from the current Superman movie. Now its just "truth, justice, and all that stuff." Well, Whoopie. You've got some really great rhetoric that is going to get me fighting the good fight. No wonder Supes ran off to Krypton to find his roots.

What is it with the US today? Once upon a time we knew what we stood for and we knew we were better off than 95% of humanity and so we tried to export what we had with all our hearts. Religion, government, education, goods. You name it and we either sold it or more often just gave it away.

Not today. Today it seems like vast swathes of Americans want the US to be someplace else. We should be modeled on the crumbling societies of Europe or on "international law" created by hordes tin pot dictators at the UN. Just being America isn't good enough.

What happened to the American Way? What is so wrong with the American Way that we shrink back from it? That emblems like "cowboy" that we embraced a generation ago are now epithets reserved for our political enemies?

Well I'm not ashamed damn it. I'm a gun nut and a god nut, a rugged individualist and a rampaging capitalist. If you have a problem with that, then by all means come get some. Or better yet, follow up on your threat to move to France the next time somebody like me actually gets elected to national office.

UPDATE: But then some people do get it. The funny thing is that they're immigrants like Dinesh D'Souza, who has a great piece in The American Enterprise.

The immigrant cannot help noticing that America is a country where the poor live comparatively well. This fact was dramatized in the 1980s, when CBS television broadcast an anti-Reagan documentary, “People Like Us,” which was intended to show the miseries of the poor during an American recession. The Soviet Union also broadcast the documentary, with the intention of embarrassing the Reagan administration. But it had the opposite effect. Ordinary people across the Soviet Union saw that the poorest Americans had television sets and cars. They arrived at the same conclusion that I witnessed in a friend of mine from Bombay who has been trying unsuccessfully to move to the United States for nearly a decade. I asked him, “Why are you so eager to come to America?” He replied, “Because I really want to live in a country where the poor people are fat.”

He goes on to discuss the benefits of limited government, opposing special interests, and our egalitarian social standing. It is a great read. I wish I could find a copy of the man's book somewhere.