My friend Michael Broschat has a very interesting post on his recent Canadian vacation. All I could come up with about ours was "we seen a bear."
I’ve long thought Canada was a much more reasonable country than ours because it lacks our inflated sense of ourselves and our role and responsibilities in the world. Broschat and I were discussing Graham Greene’s The Quiet American recently, a very fine narrative of just the kind of thing I’m talking about. American history might be understood at least in part as the unintended and mostly negative consequences of our sense of our moral selves.
Also greed, but still.
I’ve long thought the world would be a better place if the North had simply allowed the South to secede. I wonder if there was ever any serious discussion of that option. In fact, it may not be too late. At no time since the civil war have we been so divided into red and blue states, and the best solution could be the two-state solution: The red states can realize their dream of small government and legalized discrimination, and the blue states can quickly evolve toward a European-style social democracy. Those who find themselves geographically and ideologically misplaced could just move.
Anyway, Broschat's post is much more interesting and thoughtful than mine, and you can read it here: http://www.michaelbroschat.com/MontlakeBlog/DisplayBlog.aspx
2 comments:
Of course, I know what you mean about the red/blue divide. But perhaps Canada also shows us the value of containing differing opinions within itself.
But most of all, Abraham Lincoln gave his life to preserve the union. At the end, he was nearly the only one left in the US who cared. Everything I've read by this guy impresses me. Maybe, just maybe, he knew something that more easily escapes us.
E pluribus unum
Being a good liberal, I’m all for diversity, and I can’t deny the importance of the clash of ideas and values within society and government. It can lead to healthy debate. But when the county is so profoundly divided that at the absolute most, only one Republican legislator, Olympia Snow, is even remotely likely to vote yes on health care reform, I’d say we’ve reached a point at which a two-state solution is a rational idea. And note that all the plans on the table right now have already made huge concessions to the right.
Of course, I know that the two-state solution will never happen, but at times I like writing in my blog just because it allows me a space to let my ideas range wide. In everything else in my life, written or acted upon, I’ve had to be far more practical. Boring!
I share a reverence for Lincoln as a great president, though in the South he’s not at all universally admired. And he may have given his life for his cause, but so did 679,000 soldiers from both sides, not to mention the near destruction of much of the South from the scorched earth policy of General Sherman and others. (Sherman, btw, wrote an excellent autobiography much admired by me and Mark Twain, among others. For other Civil War statistics, see here: http://www.phil.muni.cz/~vndrzl/amstudies/civilwar_stats.htm ).
Thing is, if we took a vote today, I wonder how many in the Red States might actually vote to secede. It’s not such a fanciful idea. Texas governor Rick Perry has already said he’s ready to go, and he wasn’t just whistling Dixie.
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