h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I had missed this (as it was 'Not for Review') until LLWaz, bless her, posted the link for us.

This works much better than Bellamy's 'Looking Backward', which quickly turns into a laundry-list of utopian desiderata.

Beautifully done, but you don't need to be told that. I like the little ironic touches, of course - General Howe's showing up was, well, way-cool, and put me in mind of one of my favourite counterfactuals, 'The Two Georges'.

That being said, I think on the whole America will collapse a bit more gracefully than herein described. Deprived of the delusion of global significance - and of a limitless frontier - most of my fellow citizens will actually be less belligerent, I believe.

Or do I merely hope?

Thanks. Any praise of yours is an honour.

Howe made an appearance to annoy a RL American friend who characterised him (pretty unfairly) as a monster and persecutor of the colonists.

The piece is apocalyptic in parts but optimistic in others. I think your hope might be rewarded in a more pragmatic America than this one. For the time being, though, I believe strongly in the idea that it's America's idealism that lends it the capacity for tyranny. Though not really touched on by the piece, I'm also intrigued by the philosophical collision of America and Islam, implacable through their similarities in simplistic religious zeal and conviction of destiny.

I'm maybe too susceptible to the notion of Britain as the nation that has reconciled these lessons and been improved by it, but I like another slant on the same subject better - this one: A2650240

I like that one. It snuck up on me. Moving story, good analogy.

Well put, about the wrong reasons for travel.

What I think people miss about America is that it is basically a European experiment. The qualities that are noticeable from the outside - greed, manifest destiny, all that striving - are expressions of what people came to this place looking for.

There are other things going on, of course - lots of people just looking for a home.

I think this all-or-nothing religious thinking is a legacy of the English Civil War. Quakers were running from its aftermath, the Puritans were diehards who wouldn't stop naming their kids Flee Fornication Brown, the Catholics were looking for tolerance.

Most of the Muslims I have known and appreciated were no more fanatics than most of the other people I have known, and just as good neighbours. Personally, I find a 'fundamentalist' anything a betrayal of whatever was good in the original idea.

It has been said by observers that a philosophical commitment to idealism - trying to fit people to the concept, not the concept to the people - was at the root of Nazism.

Elektra over here says thanks for sticking up for General Howe (there's a joke in her family that they are related, although this is almost certainly apocryphal). That sort of false atrocity-mongering is why we hated 'The Patriot'.

Mostly agreed or at least understood. Not sure that the English Civil War can be blamed for today's fundamentalism. It was an imperfect diaspora, and the philosophical legacy of those times in their own place is decidedly secular.

I think that there's something inthe idea that you can be preoccupied with virility, or you can be mature, but you can't be both. And I certainly believe myself that Johnson was one place out when he referred to patriotism. It's the second-last refuge of the scoundrel. The last refuge is evangelism, since true faith doesn't crave the reassurance of a like fixation in others.

Less of that. A question, if it's OK. I should have paid attention, but which part of the US do you count as home?

Oh, I'm a Southerner.

That's misleading: I mostly grew up in Pennsylvania and have lived in Europe as well. But 'Southerner' is a form of ethnicity.

I live in North Carolina these days, after ten years in Philadelphia. (Outsourcing. The Irish got my job, I got some Norwegian's.)

Never been to NC. To be honest, the only places in the US I know well are in the Rust Belt. In the authentic south, the one place I've spent more than a few days is Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

I know I'm conditioned by stereotypes, but your sharpness means I'd have guessed wrong. I'd have guessed a lot of wrong places, all too far north or west or both.

The Irish always move in sooner or later. And I used to work for Norwegians. Then it was Austrians. Now it's Germans. I'm sanguine. Whatever happens next, it'll seem like the boss has a great sense of humour.

Since I'm a Germanist, and have worked over there, I know exactly what you mean.

Working for Greeks will drive you nuts, though. Even though I love them.

About Southerners: some of us are smarter than we look. We just have horrible taste in music. And just about everything else, I suppose.

I've never been to Tuscaloosa. My dad's folks are from Tennessee, where I was born. My mother's people were from the Deep South, though: the Mississippi Delta, which is northern Miss'ippi. Faulkner country.

Or, as my mother said about that genius, 'There may *be* people like that, but you don't have to write books about them.'

I wonder if people said that about D.H. Lawrence...