[Skybird]

Typed a longer reply and deleted it again. It's hopeless, and ignorrant self-justification and blaming the others for one's own blindness has become part of American national self-perception, I'm sorry to say. I think america never saw any need to question itself, and it never has, if I think of it. I just wished we wouldn't be effected by this country so much. For the time beeing I keep my memories of American friends that I knew, and perception of the country's reality now strictly separate, to avoid doing unjustice to those that I knew. Although you gave the impression to the world that I think of all Americans as idiots, I do not.

Simple fact is, August, you will never be willing to see how far your nation's political status and procedures have fallen apart from what your founding fathers wanted it to be. You, like many of your countrymen, still think that the ideals of the past and the status of the present are still one and the same. But in the times since WWII ended a growing part of mankind happens to disagree with that assessement more and more. Some people even fell victim to the more obvious acts of perversion of american ideals, like Vietnam, or now Iraq. The ideas from over twohundred years ago (prepared by French forethinkers that were discussed in the salons on the eastcoast, leading to the american revolution, that in some strange kind of a feedback thanked France's philosophers by igniting the revolution in France) were great, and worth to be an example for others - as they actually have been for a long time. If it still would be like in those days, I even would think to live in your country myself. But with time they were hollowed out, financial elites have taken over and are the the prime determinant of your nation'S policies now, and the vocabulary of these ideals is only a tool that since long has lost most of it's original meaning. You, like many of your countrymen, refuse to open your eyes to that as long as you have a good life by the status quo and your hunger for ideals is feeded with word-shelling by your leaders. It could be of zero interest for us, if we were not so massvely effected by even your "innerpolitical" events, unfortunately. For that reason I dare say the average European knows more about American inner politics than the average American knows about inner politics in let's say Germany, or Luthenia, or Denmark ("exceptions just proove the general rule"). America is like a huge tree that still looks healthy from outside, but under the skin is rotten.

Not much different with European democracies, at least that I admit.

BTW, in Europe we have had our experiences with making "leader" and "country" one and the same. And they were not good. A soldier making a vow on his people and country is one thing. Swear him in on one single person is something very different. L'etat c'est moi - not with me, if this would happen in Germany, I would be willing to think about no longer unarmed resistance. And if "putting your leaders under the microscope of your public" leads to such formidable results as the phenomenon Bush, than you must excuse that the vast majority of the rest of the world has massive doubts in the convincing power of this statement you made so proudly.