Something to contemplate...

from the Times on Line, United Kingdom.

July 4th

I spent much of last week in Aspen, Colorado. I know what you're thinking. But someone has to be brave and tough enough to get out there in the real America and find out what the beleaguered liberal intellectual plutocracy makes of the horrors of living in this benighted country.

I was at the Fortune Magazine/Aspen Institute Brainstorming conference. The air's thin up there but the main reason I found myself gasping was not lack of oxygen but psychic shock at the way in which in these gabfests the entire canon of leftist orthodoxies is, for the most part, simply assumed as factual starting points for discussion, not arguments for debate. The US's foreign policy is based on religious fundamentalism. The Bush administration's economic policies are immoral. The right way to tackle globalisation is to raise taxes and increase unionisation. Or, as the chairman of one panel on the environment put it, "We're not even going to debate global warming because we all agree about the threat".

My God it was hard. As I nibbled on vegtable samosas and sipped Cabernet in a big tent in Michael Eisner's meadow (yes, Disney shareholders, your tax dollars at work) I was riddled with conservative guilt. But what could I do? I owed it you, dear reader, to hold tight and endure.

Actually there were some real signs of intellectual life beyond the liberal permafrost. My favourite session was one that should make all Americans sit up and and think as they celebrate another July 4th. Juan Enriquez, a bioscientist-turned-general-thinker, presented the argument of his book, The Untied States of America. His thesis is that, all over the world nations that we assumed would last for ever have been breaking up - from the former Soviet Union and the Balkans in Europe to former colonies in Africa and Asia. He notes that other countries - from Canada to the Czech Republic to Spain to Mexico - might be headed the same way. And he wonders why we should all believe the US will really be different. It's not just growing Hispanic separatism he cites but the status of Native Americans and the sort of growing economic and social disparities that increasingly characterise the country.

He overstates the case, of course. But it's certainly a useful jolt to the natural tendency to assume that what has been always will be. And in one of those fabulous statistics you really wish you'd uncovered yourself he points out that no president in American history has been born and buried under the same flag. The current stretch of almost 50 years without adding states is the longest in US history. Who's to say that the next change won't be fewer stars on the flag rather than more?