is the title of a piece by Lewis Lapham in the April edition of
Harpers, which unfortunately does not have complete content available online (at least, not for non-subscribers). I did find a complete copy on a listserv, which you can read
here.
I happened to encounter the article today, and decided there was enough of value to look for it online so that I could share it. I will, from the source above, offer a number of selections below. Perhaps you will then be enticed sufficiently to go read the entire piece through the link above.
The article is about a trip that Lapham took to observe and talk with the members of the European Parliament. Here's an example of what he encountered:
For the better part of three hours, the discussion was sufficiently wide-ranging to allow for the chance of comparison with the political arguments that take place on Capitol Hill, most obviously in the number of questions asked that seldom reach the floor of the United States Senate - global warming accepted as scientific fact rather than as tendentious theory, concerns, even on the part of politicians associated with the parties of the right, as to the wisdom of easing the environmental restrictions on the European chemical and automobile industries in the hope of a higher number expressing the rate of economic growth. Although I may have misheard the translation from the Swedish, on the latter point I think somebody said that probably it wasn't a good idea to fatten a banker's goose in return for a mess of poisoned fish.
If the quality of the discussion he has just described makes those of you who watch C-Span a bit jealous, I assure you that I had somewhat the same reaction
What first really caught my attention - and made me go back and reread some of what I had been skimming, was when I encountered a passage that offered some comparisons between the US and Europe. Here, in an extended selection, is what so grabbed me:
over the course of the afternoon I had the time to reflect on the differences between the indices of a European and an American success - $20 million apartments on Fifth Avenue and the world's most wonderful air force as against the freshness of the bread on a Roman table, the absence of machine guns at the border crossings between Austria and Switzerland, free admission to a hospital, the certainty of an intelligent education. For everybody who can afford the price of a Harvard diploma and a pet politician, America is a very nice place to live; for people not so fortunately situated, America is fast becoming a brand name pasted on a bad movie or an empty box.
Various sets of statistics establish the exchange rate between the currencies of the private and the public good - one American adult in every five living in a state of poverty, as opposed to one in every fifteen in Italy; the quality of America's health-care services ranked thirty-seventh among the world's industrial nations; productivity per hour of work lower in the United States than in Belgium, Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, and France; Europe in 2003 giving $36.5 billion to other countries in need of development money, while a third of that sum was forthcoming from the United States; the disparity in the incomes of a CEO and a common laborer standing at a ratio of 475 to 1 in America, 15 to 1 in France, 13 to 1 in Sweden. The less abstract comparisons between the standards of living show up on postcards (the look of the architecture, the taste of the food and drink, et cetera), but I think it worth noting that in the arena of foreign trade the American export of advanced-technology products declined by 21 percent in 2004, as opposed to its rising export (up by 135 percent) of scrap and waste. The numbers serve as a gloss on our current accounts deficit ($164 billion) and the fall in value of the dollar over the last few years (nearly thirty percent) when fixed against the euro.
The passage above offers stricting qualitative differences in the first paragraph. The comparatives statistics on CEO compensation is something of which I have been aware, but when combined with the statistics on poverty, healthcare, productivity and the like gave me a far better - and much more clear - context for what that discrepancy means in everyday terms. I do not think it coincidental that the imbalance in CEO compensation in the US is accompanied by our poor performance in other areas.
Another key point in the article is the difference in our sense of history. Lapham talks with a member of the European Parliament named Daniel Cohn-Bendit. If you are over 50 the name will be familiar, since he waas the major leader of the student movement in Paris in 1968. It would be hard to find an equivalent in the US, although I suppose Congressman Bobby Rush comes closest.
Let me offer a bit of Lapham's encounter with Cohn-Bendit:
I stopped by his office two days after the parliamentary debate to ask a number of questions about the politics of the EU. He chose instead to talk about President Bush telling an audience of military officers in Washington on the night before his second inauguration that as Americans, he and they had "a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom".
"Where is that?" Cohn-Bendit said. "Beyond the stars. What do you say to people who think that freedom is given by God, not made by men? You can say, 'Are you mad?' but then, please tell me, what do you say next?"
Please note how Lapham connects this with the European sense of history:
The question touched on what over the course of three days I came to regard as the chief difference between the usages of the democratic idea in Washington and Brussels. On Capitol Hill as at the White House and the Pentagon the idea comes wrapped in the swaddling cloth of holy writ, accepted on faith and formulated as doctrine - Thomas Jefferson born in a manger, the Constitution brought from afar, by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton riding to Philadelphia on camels. The members of the European Parliament know something of history, and whether I was talking to the Baroness Emma Nicholson, a British peer whose ancestors had come to England with William the Conqueror, or to Bronislaw Geremek (member from Warsaw, jailed as a political dissident during the early days of the Polish uprising in 1981, subsequently the Polish foreign minister), the conversations invariably took place in the presence of both the near and distant past. Europe in the twentieth century had twice attempted suicide, and nobody was eager to repeat the performance.
I realize that the material in this article is from a time before various countries voted against accepting the new European Constitution. I do not believe that diminishes the understanding that Lapham is able to provide us. Nor do I think it makes obsolete or inaccurate his conclusion, which I offer now:
I had come to Brussels with the hope of encountering a less terrified response to the storm of the world than the one I'd encountered in Washington, and despite the many failings of the European Parliament - the going to Strasbourg once a month to cast its ballots, the labyrinth of bureaucratic inertia, et cetera - I took heart from its willingness to learn from experience and to employ the tools of constitutional government that in America have become museum pieces, to find its security in the health, courage, and intelligence of its citizens rather than in the four-color photographs of invincible aircraft carriers, to understand the democratic idea not as a projection of power but as an expression of liberty.
"We have made Europe", Geremek had said, "but how do we make Europeans?" What he had in mind was a civilization in place of a fortress, and although his question was unanswerable, it seemed to me somehow better matched to the complexities of the twenty-first century than the ones that get asked in Washington about the size and throw weight of the President's codpiece.
Thre were several relevant and/or interesting items in the Harper's Index for April as well. Here are some of those items, with .... representing items I have not included.
Ratio of active workers at General Motors to retirees on its pension rolls: 2:5[General Motors Corporation (Detroit)]
Total pension costs of the company per vehicle General Motors Corporation produces: $675[General Motors Corporation (Detroit)]
Percentage of Social Security contributions that go toward administrative costs: 0.6[U.S. Social Security Administration]
Average percentage of contributions to Britain's privatized pension system that do: 30[Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (Washington)]
. . . .
Rank of Colombia's stock exchange among the best performers tracked by The Economist last year: 1[Thomson Financial (N.Y.C.)]
Rank of China's among the worst: 1[Thomson Financial (N.Y.C.)]
Rank of China among nations where world business leaders say they are "most confident" to invest this year: 1[A.T. Kearney (Chicago)]
Number of private jets in China: 2[Raytheon Aircraft Company (Wichita, Kans.)]
. . . . .
Number of prime ministers of Baltic states since 1990 who have finished a full term: 0[Harper's research]
Back taxes on Mein Kampf sales owed by Adolf Hitler while chancellor in 1934: $11,500,000[Klaus-Dieter Dubon (Immenstadt, Germany)]
. . . .
Estimated number of visitors each week to the grave of Harry Potter, a Briton buried in Israel in 1939: 45[Ramle Museum (Ramle, Israel)]
Ratio of ultra-Orthodox jaywalkers in Israel to secular jaywalkers: 3:1[Tova Rosenbloom, Bar-Ilan University (Ramat Gan, Israel)]
Percentage of born-again U.S. Christians who have been divorced: 35[The Barna Group, Ltd. (Ventura, Calif.)]
Percentage of other Americans who have been: 35[The Barna Group, Ltd. (Ventura, Calif.)]
Chances that the divorce of a born-again Christian happened after he or she accepted Christ: 9 in 10[The Barna Group, Ltd. (Ventura, Calif.)]
Estimated number of young Christians in 1995 who had pledged to wait until marriage for sex: 2,500,000[Peter Bearman, Columbia University (N.Y.C.)]
Estimated percentage who waited: 12[Peter Bearman, Columbia University (N.Y.C.)]