Americans...

I wish to make the point that the majority of Americans are a lazy and easily fooled lot. And I wish to make this point by refering to last nights riot protest in Budapest, Hungary. Why the people of a small European country can take to the streets and demand their president resign after he admitted to lying and we Americans can't even get out bed on a Saturday to protest an unjust war or a president who is becoming more and more full of himself and power hungry, is beyond me.

We are a country made from Patriots and great rebel rousers. What happened?
French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy, in his newest book, American Vertigo, says he "set out to uncover America’s crisis of identity. The most powerful country in the world does not know what it is, it feels itself in a deep trauma, a deep neurosis." Says an interview in New York Magazine, his conclusion is that America is a curious sort of empire—not like Rome at its zenith or decline—with a particular character of individualism that he hopes will cause the country to do the good it could do in the world. He’s disappointed that we aren’t living up to our noblesse oblige responsibilities. “The reason I am so angry against neoconservatives is that they spoiled the very idea of intervention,” says the self-described Wilsonian. And he’s flabbergasted that the American left can be so accommodating to the puritanism of the right.

I wish we would wake up.