Tag: society

Paterno is still a decent man

One of his biographers, Joe Posnanski, defends Joe Paterno:

I’m not saying I know Joe Paterno. I’m saying I know a whole lot about him. And what I know is complicated. But, beyond complications — and I really believe this with all my heart — there’s this, and this is exclusively my opinion: Joe Paterno has lived a profoundly decent life.

Nobody has really wanted to say this lately, and I grasp that. The last week has obviously shed a new light on him and his program — a horrible new light — and if you have any questions about how I feel about all that, please scroll back up to my two points at the top.

But I have seen some things in the last few days that have felt rotten, utterly wrong — a piling on that goes even beyond excessive, a dancing on the grave that makes me ill. Joe Paterno has lived a whole life. He has improved the lives of countless people. I know — I’ve talked to hundreds of them. Almost every day I walk by the library that he and his wife, Sue, built. I walk by the religious center that tries to bring people together, and his name is on the list of major donors. I hear the stories, the countless stories, of the kindnesses that came naturally to him, of the way he stuck with people in their worst moments, of the belief he had that everybody could do a little bit better — as a football player, as a student, as a human being. I’m not going to tell you these stories now, because you can’t hear them. Nobody can hear them in the howling.

But I will say that I am sickened, absolutely sickened, that some of those people whose lives were fundamentally inspired and galvanized by Joe Paterno have not stepped forward to stand up for him this week, have stood back and allowed him to be painted as an inhuman monster who was only interested in his legacy, even at the cost of the most heinous crimes against children imaginable.

Shame on them.

And why? I’ll tell you my opinion: Because they were afraid. And I understand that. A kind word for Joe Paterno in this storm is taken by many as a pro vote for a child molester. A quick, “Wait a minute, Joe Paterno is a good man. Let’s see what happened here” is translated as an attempt to minimize the horror of what Jerry Sandusky is charged with doing. It takes courage to stand behind someone you believe in when it’s this bad outside. It takes courage to stand up for a man in peril, even if he stood up for you.

And that’s shameful.

I don’t know Joe Paterno at all. I don’t know Joe Posnanski either. But I very much agree with what he is saying here, which is that one act of omission, one moment of cowardice, one moral failing, is not definitive of any man. And I also agree wholeheartedly that is shameful for people to pile on Paterno in an attempt to morally preen. Posnanski isn’t saying that Paterno did the right thing or that he shouldn’t have lost his job. Failure has consequences, after all. But the loss of a man’s halo doesn’t render him a devil, merely another fallen man.

The situation reminds me somewhat of when my father was being tried in federal court. Virtually none of his peers, including a number of his friends, were willing to step forward and testify on behalf of his character. No one was being asked to lie or spin anything, merely to recount their personal experience of a man who had paid their salaries, given to their charities, hosted them in his home, or eaten at their table over the course of thirty years. They didn’t have any substantive reason not to do so, but were simply afraid of the social consequences of stepping forward and saying “this man may be guilty of what he is accused, but because that is not the entirety of who he is, let me tell you what I know about him.” I was extremely proud of my friends, several of whom volunteered to testify on my father’s behalf without even being asked to do so.

I wasn’t angry, only disappointed with those who hid behind the rationale of “not wanting to get involved”. What a lame excuse that is, as if anyone would ever seek to get involved in such unpleasantries. But even though I was disappointed, at no point did I lose any affection or respect for people I had known nearly all my life. It would have been outrageous for me to judge them on the sole basis of a single moment where their moral courage failed them.

The irony is that some of those posturing so dramatically about Paterno are exhibiting a failure of moral courage similar to the one that gave them grounds for criticizing the man in the first place. The man merits criticism , to be sure, and I think he deserved to lose his job, but it is simply ludicrous to claim, as some have done, that his behavior was on par with Sandusky’s or even the university administration’s. There is an important difference between a fundamentally decent man whose moral courage failed him at a vital moment and a fundamentally indecent man, and it is not only foolish, but downright societally destructive to equate the two.

Logan’s Run looks better all the time

I told you it wasn’t just Gen X’s imagination that the preceding generation is, when viewed in the collective, a selfish, worthless, generation of grasshoppers:

“Paws off, Junior, this cash is mine.”

Don’t expect a big inheritance from your boomer parents — even if they are rich. Less than half of millionaire boomers say that leaving money for their kids is a priority for them, according to a 2011 U.S. Trust study. But 64% of boomers say they plan to use their money to travel and more than one in three say they want to use it to “have fun.”…

“Make room kids, we’ll be living with you when we’re old.”

Boomers are expected to live longer than any other generation. At the same time, it’s no secret they haven’t saved nearly enough for retirement. Overall, the average retirement savings shortfall for married baby boomers is about $30,000, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute. Nearly half of early boomers, born between 1948 and 1954, and 44% of late boomers, born between 1955 and 1964, may not be able to afford even basic living expenses in retirement, according to EBRI. The result? Kids could be supporting mom and dad well into their eighties and nineties.

Yeah, I don’t see that happening on a grand scale. My generation is going to turf the Boomers into government housing faster than we saw them put our grandparents into nursing homes and we’ll do it with the same lack of remorse that they left us alone in the afternoons with a bowl of cereal and the television.

What the Boomers have forgotten is that they broke the generational contract. So they have no claim on the younger generations.

The downside of meritocracy

Ross Douthat explains the dangerous downside to America’s experiment in meritocracy:

For decades, the United States has been opening paths to privilege for its brightest and most determined young people, culling the best and the brightest from Illinois and Mississippi and Montana and placing them in positions of power in Manhattan and Washington. By elevating the children of farmers and janitors as well as lawyers and stockbrokers, we’ve created what seems like the most capable, hardworking, high-I.Q. elite in all of human history.

And for the last 10 years, we’ve watched this same elite lead us off a cliff — mostly by being too smart for its own good.

In hereditary aristocracies, debacles tend to flow from stupidity and pigheadedness: think of the Charge of the Light Brigade or the Battle of the Somme. In one-party states, they tend to flow from ideological mania: think of China’s Great Leap Forward, or Stalin’s experiment with “Lysenkoist” agriculture.

In meritocracies, though, it’s the very intelligence of our leaders that creates the worst disasters. Convinced that their own skills are equal to any task or challenge, meritocrats take risks that lower-wattage elites would never even contemplate, embark on more hubristic projects, and become infatuated with statistical models that hold out the promise of a perfectly rational and frictionless world. (Or as Calvin Trillin put it in these pages, quoting a tweedy WASP waxing nostalgic for the days when Wall Street was dominated by his fellow bluebloods: “Do you think our guys could have invented, say, credit default swaps? Give me a break! They couldn’t have done the math.”)

Hubris on the part of the highly intelligent is particularly stupid because it reflects both ignorance and a lack of self-awareness. For example, I am in the top one percent of the top one percent when it comes to intelligence, and yet I could provide you with an encyclopedia of my mistakes, failures, and errors in judgment. I doubt that I have made any fewer of them than the average individual, but they do tend to be of a different order.

For example, was it the right thing to write The War in Heaven instead of Blizzard’s first Starcraft novel? Almost surely not. As it turns out, creating your own intellectual property from the start is less effective than riding someone else’s media tie-in wave, building a following from it, and then publishing your own material. My decision certainly made sense and was intellectually defensible at the time, but in retrospect it was a serious blunder.

Douthat doesn’t have it quite right, however. The problem with the mistakes of the meritocratic elite isn’t that they are too smart for their own good, it is that they are too smart for everyone else’s good. This is why technocratic visions so often go so badly awry, and why the Socratic dream of a government of philosopher-kings has almost invariably proven to be worse than the variously flawed alternatives. The worst aspect of a meritocracy is its lack of respect for tradition. Meritocracy represents the ultimate triumph of theory and potential over experience and reliability, so it should come as little surprise that by historical standards, the new meritocratic societies appear to be destroying themselves in a remarkably short period of time.

In the end, however, Douthat misses the point. A society will benefit most from being ruled by its best, not its brightest. As one of this society’s brightest, I can attest that the members of a society’s intellectual elite are no more likely to merit being described as its best than the average individual and they possess no more intrinsic right to rule by virtue of their intelligence than the obese elite do by virtue of their weight.

A society that deserves to die

I don’t see how you could possibly reach any other conclusion:

A few years ago, Joe Therrien, a graduate of the NYC Teaching Fellows program, was working as a full-time drama teacher at a public elementary school in New York City. Frustrated by huge class sizes, sparse resources and a disorganized bureaucracy, he set off to the University of Connecticut to get an MFA in his passion—puppetry. Three years and $35,000 in student loans later, he emerged with degree in hand, and because puppeteers aren’t exactly in high demand, he went looking for work at his old school. The intervening years had been brutal to the city’s school budgets—down about 14 percent on average since 2007. A virtual hiring freeze has been in place since 2009 in most subject areas, arts included, and spending on art supplies in elementary schools crashed by 73 percent between 2006 and 2009. So even though Joe’s old principal was excited to have him back, she just couldn’t afford to hire a new full-time teacher. Instead, he’s working at his old school as a full-time “substitute”; he writes his own curriculum, holds regular classes and does everything a normal teacher does. “But sub pay is about 50 percent of a full-time salaried position,” he says, “so I’m working for half as much as I did four years ago, before grad school, and I don’t have health insurance…. It’s the best-paying job I could find.”

Now, I don’t believe in capital punishment by the state, for the obvious reason that it only encourages them. But I don’t think anyone could reasonably disagree with the idea that if we’re going to have capital punishment anyway, the decision to pursue a master’s degree in puppetry should definitely qualify an individual for immediate hanging.

Mimes should be decapitated, of course. One can’t be too careful when dealing with the nasty bastards.

At this point, I can’t even find it within myself to feel the least bit sorry for Americans any longer. It would be one thing if they were foolishly going into debt while studying something useful instead of Sociology, Black Studies, Womyn’s Studies, Business, and English. But a society where people are actually paid to teach puppetry, go into debt in order to obtain master’s degrees in puppetry, and believe that what a pseudo-revolutionary movement needs is giant puppets, is quite clearly insane and should be put down at the earliest opportunity.

Millenials vs Baby Boomers

Well, I certainly know whose side I am on. Keep this generational perspective in mind as you see the same people who are defending the systematic lawbreaking of banks, financial institutions, and government agencies over decades while waxing apocalyptic over a few weeks of a little littering and trespassing. Whatever the downside of Occupy Wall Street might be, as a phenomenon it is still VASTLY preferable to the poisonous activities of Wall Street:

The Occupy movement is being driven by the Millenial Generation. They have used their superior technological and social networking skills to organize, educate, and inspire people to their cause while befuddling and confusing the authorities. They continue to rally more young people to their fight against Wall Street and K Street tyranny. The generational lines of battle are being drawn. The Baby Boom Generation, who is at the point of maximum power in society, fears this movement. They control Wall Street, corporate America, Congress, the courts, academia and the media. They have reached their peak of influence and power, which will rapidly wane over the next fifteen years. They see the Occupy movement as a threat to their supremacy and control of the system. The cynical, alienated, pragmatic Generation X is caught between the Boomers and the Millenials in this escalating conflict. It is likely the majority of this generation will side with the Millenials, realizing the future of the country depends on them and not the elderly Boomers….

Over the last six weeks I’ve watched as the young protestors around the country have been called: filthy hippies, losers, lazy, coddled, socialists, communists, spoiled college kids, parasites, useful idiots, and tools of the left. Most of the wrath being heaped upon these young people for exercising their Constitutional right to free speech and freedom of assembly has been from the Baby Boom Generation, who are at the peak of their power in our society. Sixty percent of the Senate is made up of Baby Boomers, with the next closest generation being the Silent Generation with twenty five percent. Over 58% of the House of Representatives is made up of Baby Boomers, with the next closest generation being Gen Xers at 27%. They occupy the executive suites of the Wall Street banks (Blankfein, Dimon, Pandit, Moniyan) and the Federal Reserve (Bernanke). They make up the majority of judges, local politicians and school boards. They run the Federal government agencies.

And they dominate the airwaves as the high priced mouthpieces for their corporate bosses. This Prophet generation will lead the country through the trials and tribulations of this Fourth Turning.

The disdain and contempt for these Millenial protestors flies in the face of the facts about this generation. They use drugs at a lower rate than their parents did at the same age. Teen crime rates and teen pregnancies have declined. They will have the highest level of college education in U.S. history. They were protected during their youth as organized sports taught them teamwork. They are the most technologically savvy generation in history. They volunteer at higher level than previous generations. They have been more upbeat and engaged than their predecessors (Gen X). And they are much closer to their parents than Boomers were at the same age. They reject the negativism and cynicism of their parents and believe positive change is possible in our society.

They have shown respect for authority up until the last six weeks. They were primed to be led by Boomers that could articulate a positive vision of the future based on reality and a better tomorrow. They were ready to make sacrifices in order to create a brighter future. But a funny thing happened. The Boomer generation failed to deliver on their part of the bargain….

The youth of America listened to their parents and stayed in school. They’ve racked up over $1 trillion in student loan debt getting college educations. Meanwhile, our Baby Boomer leadership had an opportunity to address the country’s unsustainable fiscal path by accepting the consequences of a thirty year debt binge and liquidating the banks that took extreme risks with extreme leverage. An orderly liquidation (aka Washington Mutual) would have punished the stockholders, bondholders and management of the Wall Street banks, while leaving the depositors whole and purging the system of debt that can never be paid off. Our politicians could have ended our wars of choice in the Middle East and cut our war spending by hundreds of billions without sacrificing one iota of safety for the American people. The political leadership could have put the country on a deficit reduction path that would have insured the long-term viability of our republic.

Instead of doing the right thing, our Baby Boomer leaders did the exact opposite of the right thing.

We can’t Logan’s Run those bastard Boomers soon enough for me. Years ago, when all the magazines were full of “50 is the new 20” stories, I used to joke that it didn’t matter how old the idiots got, they would still be insisting that it was cool to be geriatric. But I was joking… surely even the Baby Boomers couldn’t possibly be that hopelessly, myopically, narcissistically stupid, right?

Wrong. I suppose this headline was always inevitable:

Life begins at 70!

Clearly we need to exterminate the monsters before they finish raping the planet in their never-ending voyage of self-importance.

A boomer confesses

They are the Worst Generation:

A few years ago, an American author wrote a book about the men and women who endured the Depression and then fought in World War II. He testified to their courage, vision and resilience by calling his book The Greatest Generation. If anyone attempted to name their children — those born between about 1945 and 1965 — the so-called Baby-Boomers, they might consider calling them The Worst Generation.

It is now received wisdom that today’s young people may be the first generation in modern history to expect to be poorer than their parents.

Earlier this month, a report suggested the young will be 25 per cent worse off than their parents when they reach the age of 65 — the so-called ‘baby bust’ generation, having accumulated £400,000 less by the time they retire. This may not be entirely their parents’ fault. But we should certainly take a good share of the blame….

We had become not merely the luckiest but also the most selfish generation in history.

The remarkable thing is that this is coming from a British baby boomer, and the British boomers weren’t as ludicrously obnoxious as their American counterparts. Now, there is no need for the boomers to start complaining that Not All Boomers Are Like That. In the context of speaking about AN ENTIRE FREAKING GENERATION it is well understood by everyone that NOT EVERY INDIVIDUAL PERFECTLY FITS THE OBSERVED GENERATIONAL MODEL. But that doesn’t change the facts. That doesn’t change the experience of most Generation X and Y individuals with their parents and grandparents and the behavioral patterns that they have observed.

Speaking of grandparents, another thing I’ve noticed about Baby Boomers is that many of them, (again, not all), are almost nonexistent as far as their grandchildren are concerned. Far fewer of them behave in the hands-on, heavily involved, take-them-out-for-ice-cream-on-Saturday with their grandchildren manner that nearly all the grandparents of me and my friends did. They’re too busy going to Starbucks or shopping or playing tourist somewhere. I would pity the grandchildren of the baby boomers, if it weren’t for the likelihood that their grandparents would prove to be an awful influence on them.

But the evil solipsism of baby boomers can probably be seen most clearly in this quote from Slashdot concerning the student loan debacle. “In response to students burying their obligations in court during the 1970s, anti-default provisions were imposed to make it almost impossible to shed student loans in bankruptcy.” In other words, baby boomers took out student loans – in many cases to avoid Vietnam – defaulted on them, then passed a law to ensure that future generations would not be able to do the same. And their student loan debts were far smaller and far less onerous than the ones facing those who have graduated in the 2000s.

The most contemptible thing about the boomers is that they collectively never grew out of their absurd and childish narcissism. They never recovered from their sense of self-importance, and to the extent that they changed the world, they changed it for the worse. Now, I don’t believe the state of the world is entirely their fault, but I am certain that they will not be part of the solution… unless it involves Paxman’s suggestion of compulsory euthanasia.

No limits on self-defense

This McDonald’s cashier is a hero, not a criminal:

A McDonald’s cashier jailed for beating two irate customers with a metal rod says he was only trying to defend himself. Rayon McIntosh was arrested Oct. 13 after a wild fight inside a McDonald’s in the Greenwich Village neighborhood in Manhattan. Video recorded by a customer showed two furious women vaulting a counter to attack McIntosh after some sort of dispute.

McIntosh grabbed a metal bar and fought back with savage force, continuing to deliver crushing blows even after the women were incapacitated on the floor.

Good for him. I wouldn’t have any problem with his actions if he had killed both women after they were “incapacitated”. Police commit “justifiable homicide” in far less dangerous circumstances all the time and are infamous for firing dozens of shots after their target is already down. It’s simply not always possible to turn off the adrenaline-fueled aggression, particularly if you aren’t sufficiently accustomed to experiencing it.

And more importantly, once you attack someone unprovoked, all bets are off and you merit no protection from the law. The fact that the attackers were women is irrelevant, a two-on-one attack absolutely merited such a vigorous response. How on Earth could the cashier have known neither of the two hair-trigger lunatics didn’t have a weapon and wouldn’t use it once they were knocked down?

Rayon McIntosh shouldn’t be found innocent, he shouldn’t even be charged. And McDonald’s should be paying his legal fees.

Surviving la dolce vita

Speaking of culture, I had a rather exquisite lunch today. Pata Negra squared. Which is to say, Barcelona’s finest jambon and slices of bufalo parmigiano, (technically impossible and yet it exists all the same), washed down with an excellent Spanish red named after the delectable king of all pork. Spacebunny made pizza for dinner and I resorted to a jar of homemade hot oil made by the Dutch Girl which is just ever so slightly cooler than napalm. This, naturally, required the accompaniment of a nicely drinkable red, the aforementioned Spanish bottle being lamentably empty.

Ender had to be picked up from his martial arts training, but I was early, so the head of the dojo, being a hospitable sort, poured us both a glass of local white. And then another.

At this point, I am entirely certain that my arteries are as clean as a newly scoured aqueduct. I can’t say I’m quite as confident about the old liver, however. The great thing about the Southern European approach to wine is that you’re never the least bit drunk. You’re just sort of sporting a vaguely happy buzz from noon until midnight.

When sheep stampede

The retarded groupthink of the female left never ceases to provide amusement at their expense:

You may have heard about Andrew Meyer earlier this week from The Stranger, Jezebel, or Facebook. Meyer’s name was tweeted thousands of times on Monday and Tuesday, often with links leading to articles about him. Jezebel’s story on Meyer got almost 100,000 views, while one of the hundreds of people who weighed in on him on Twitter dubbed him the grand “tool of the week.” For those who haven’t heard about Meyer, his instant fame can be explained thusly: On Friday night, Meyer and a female friend went into Seattle’s Bimbo’s Cantina for food and drinks. Their server that evening was Victoria Liss. According to Liss, after the couple had behaved like jerks—mocking the food, dipping their hands into the tip jar—Meyer paid without leaving Liss any gratuity. He then took his rudeness a step further, by writing at the bottom of his bill, “P.S. You could stand to loose [sic] a few pounds.”

Understandably hurt, Liss did what anyone would do in this day and age: She took her anger to her computer. She posted a photo of Meyer’s receipt onto her Facebook page and wrote underneath it, “[T]he best part is he was dressed like that gay kid on Glee. Yuppie scum!” From there, it was off to the blog races.

Jezebel filed its post on Meyer under “Assholes.” Dan Savage, one of the most widely read alt-weekly columnists in America, also jumped on him, writing, “[Y]ou probably weren’t the only person to stiff a bartender in Seattle this weekend. But you were the only person dumb/hateful/angry enough to write this on your credit card slip.” Crushable picked up the Meyer story and published his full name, where he works, the name of his college, what fraternity he was in, and his full signature, all under the title, “Seattle Area Douchebag Gains Internet Notoriety For Stiffing And Insulting His Server.” The article even included a passage of search terms at the end to up the likelihood it would come up if someone—employers, dates, friends—Googles Meyer’s name.

Like with the lynch mobs of old, things move fast in the age of internet justice. Within about 72 hours from the moment Liss got stiffed, hundreds of people, united and galvanized by blogs, jumped into action and attempted to ruin a stranger’s reputation because he said something mean to another stranger. There was just one problem: They got the wrong guy.

So, in the barely self-aware minds of these ungulates, failing to tip a fat waitress justifies a mass attempt to ruin an individual’s reputation. But it is obvious in light of her subsequent behavior that the waitress probably provided unsatisfactory service and thus merited her lack of compensation, though perhaps not the editorial on her lack of personal fitness.

Surely all of these third-wits merit the very same behavior they dished out to the wrong individual. If I owned Bimbo’s Cantina, I would immediately fire Victoria Liss. And if I owned Jezebel, I would fire the responsible editors. The customer may not always be right, but in no case does he merit a public sheep stampede, especially over what amounts to absolutely nothing.

The transformative magic of the passport

This purported criticism of passport snobbery is still indicative of an amount of silly passport snobbery:

It’s not because there’s something magical about exposure to the quirks and customs of other cultures that transforms you into a better, wiser person. It’s just that there’s a certain provincialism that surrounds populist politicians and those who are attracted to them. And traveling widely — whether on the great continental landmass that Americans live on or across national borders and oceans — tends to not only break down said provincialism but demonstrates a curiosity about the world around you that is a vital characteristic for national leaders.

This was clearly written by the sort of individual, usually left-leaning, who genuinely believes that there is some sort of magic inherent to travel and some sort of evil inherent to what they invariably label “provincialism”. Interestingly enough, in my experience it is Americans living in the East Coast Axis of Boston to Washington DC and Canadians who are most susceptible to the disease of passport snobbery; the only Europeans who are impressed by the low percentage of American passport ownership are those who haven’t been to the USA and don’t realize how big it is.

The irony is that the passport snob primarily subscribes to the myth of the mind-expanding magic of travel due to his own provincialism. You may recall the attempt of The Prince of Wängst to label me, a multi-passport multi-lingual, expatriate who studied in Japan, as “provincial”. This was more than a little amusing given Mr. Bakker’s literally provincial existence, having been born in Ontario, educated in Ontario, and presently residing in, you guessed it, Ontario. Even more amusing was the example I have previously related of the self-appointed Canadian Euro-sophisticate from Quebec. He was happily occupied with lecturing Spacebunny and I on the near-European nature of Montreal and how it compared so very favorably to the Minnesota peasantry at the party we were attending when his fiance joined the conversation. And he was visibly put out to discover we had flown in that very morning from either Zurich or Milano, I don’t recall which.

“Well, what were you doing there?” he demanded.

Strangely, he didn’t seem to want to talk to us anymore after he found out we lived in Italy, although we were quite willing to hear more about what a European city Montreal is. Fascinating stuff.

The truth, as those who have not only traveled around the world, but who actually speak different languages and have lived in different cultures for extended periods of time, is that there are far more similarities than differences among the civilized peoples of the world. The mountain peasants of Italy, the agricultural peasants of France, and the rice paddy peasants of Japan have far more in common with each other and with the rural working class in the Midwest than they do with the Milanese industrial magnates, the banking gnomes of Zurich, the powerful, but self-effacing executives of the great keiretsu, or the Wall Street elite.

And neither transnational group has much in common with the angst-laden middle-class would-be intellectuals, whose desperate pretentiousness and feverish pursuit of credentials sets them in a particularly annoying transnational class of their own. The European ones confide to you how American they feel themselves to be while the American version forever bears the imprint of the semester it spent in [insert European capital]. The Canadian version is either the saddest or the funniest, depending upon your perspective, because it genuinely believes that a semester in Nashville or Iowa City counts as magic travel.

But there are interesting things to be learned from every group, in every country. My soccer teammates are mostly peasants, with one notable exception. My social acquaintances are mostly petty international class, and my interests tend to most closely resemble the aspirational middle-class intellectuals. But it is as shallow and ultimately pointless to look down on the rural peasantry for their lack of passports as it is to criticize the rich and powerful for their accounting strategies or the aspirational academics for their insecurities. Such things are more definitive attributes than correctable actions.

Travel doesn’t make you a better or more curious person. It simply presents you with more information. What you do with that information, and how it effects your thought processes and future behavior, will have more to do with who you already were than any transformative magic courtesy that comes from the possession of a government document.

For me, the experience gained from living most of my adult life as an expatriate that has given me a greater respect for the unique nature of historical American society as well as a deeper sorrow for that which Americans have lost.