Diablevert

And that's one to grow on, peeps

Read a really interesting article yesterday --- The Atlantic makes a habit of coughing up interesting articles from its vast and dusty archives --- to wit, "What Makes An American," by Raoul de Roussy de Sales, first published in March 1939.

I'm still chewing over the things he says and trying to figure out what I think of them. I'm all excited because this type of article is exactly the kind of thing I'm interested in, and it's good, very very good, to have someone else's ideas to bounce off of and help form my own....but seeing as I have nothing substantial of interest to say at the moment, I'll leave you with this quotation, in some ways the nub of the article:

"If the improbable choice were given to Americans by some great jokester, 'Would you prefer to go on living in your country and be deprived of your Constitution and everything that it stands for, or would you prefer to take it with you to some new wilderness?' I am not quite sure what the results of the referendum would be."

Take the Constitution and run, right? That's what I thought, pretty much immediately. I should far rather lose the Rockies, the Grand Canyon, the Everglades and the Missisippi, Georgia's red clay and Oregon's hushed cloud forests, the glaciers of Alaska and the black sand beaches of Hawaii, and last but not least be deprived forever of a crisp fall day among the orange leaves in my native New England, than lose any one of those first ten amendments. Particulary the first. And yet...is it possible that no other country in the world would chose so?