First Lines - Der Rabbi von Bacherach by Heinrich Heine

In the Rhineland’s downstream, where the laughing face of the riverbank disappears, mountains and cliffs, with their adventuresome castle ruins, gaze defiantly and ascend with a grave and serious grandeur – there lies, like an eerie myth of antiquity, the gloomy, ancient city of Bacherach.

Unterhalb des Rheingaus, wo die Ufer des Stromes ihre lachende Miene verlieren, Berg und Felsen, mit ihren abenteuerlichen Burgruinen, sich trotziger gebärden, und eine wildere, ernstere Herrlichkeit emporsteigt, dort liegt, wie eine schaurige Sage der Vorzeit, die finstre, uralte Stadt Bacherach.

The translation is mine.

TVO and Progressive Conservatism vs. the Market as Bildung

Watching CBC transform itself from a public broadcaster into just another platform devoted solely to mass entertainment (yes, I did just go there), one forgets just how lucky we are to have at least two other public broadcasters here in Ontario - PBS and TVO(actually, 3 if you count TFO, TVO's Gallic sister station) - that don't condescend "to give the people what they want", as in the worst of Hollywood, but with beavers.

Although PBS is American, they have an affiliate here in Toronto because Canadians are huge supporters. We canucks love to mock our hillbilly neighbours, but the reality is that you stand a far better chance of catching an opera on PBS than you do on CBC.

The great thing about American culture is its catholicity. Canadians still haven't really left the 1960's in this regard.

In fact, PBS would completely shame public broadcasting here in Canada if it weren't for TVO and TFO. What's even more fascinating is that TVO and TFO were created by a Conservative government. The minister at the time was Bill Davis, who went on to become Premier, and he was feted yesterday by TVO for his contribution. We who would never vote conservative should applaud him for his pragmatism and vision.

I suspect the only reason that they have survived all these years is that they have been framed as educational stations - they are, in some sense, useful. Putting an opera on TFO, or a lecture series on TVO has a pedagogical value, if not an economic one, and this somehow insulates TVO from the criticisms CBC receives about its value vs. the ever sacred "taxpayer dollar" (I am not being facetious, tax money in Canada is culturally sacred here).

Anyway, however it has worked out, I'm just glad they are there.

Honestly though, can anyone imagine Conservatives making a positive contribution like this to Canadian cultural life anymore? I can't, and to wit, the federal Conservative government's cancellation of the National Portrait Gallery yseterday.

But the establishment of TVO back in the 1960's does point to another way of looking at culture, education, and government, where governments of all stripes believed that they had a role in ensuring that everyone had access to all the meats of our cultural stew (pace Homer Simpson).

The government of the day saw where the market was lacking, and sought to fill it. We assume now that the market satisfies all our needs, and anything that gets government money isn't valuable.

We are almost 180 degrees from the 1960's. How things have changed...

Brian Leiter on the US election

Brian Leiter has a really great analysis of the US election results over here. It was really this kind of stuff, and not his philosophy side, that kept me going back to his blog.

Not that I disagree with his philosophical views...it's more that his willingness to go on the offensive, and to be offensive when it came to politics, was always a breath of fresh air. He hasn't been doing as much of that lately, and I suspect an Obama presidency will further reduce these kinds of posts from him.

I suppose the loss of cheeky blog posts is rather outweighed by the massive increase in sanity in US politics, however....ah well, the give and tike of life...

Class Resentment is Alive and Well

The Toronto Star, which I pretty much despise now, has an article today on Toronto's Auditor General's report around civil servants and sick days.

As always, one is subjected to the predictable troll reaction to this - Outrage! Anger! Hatred for civil servants and their good working conditions and living wages! Curse those unions for delivering on their promise to improve the lives of workers!

By the way, who are these hard-working people who have nothing else to do but sit in their cubicle and post comments at the Star? Aren't they all being whipped by the man while the bureaucrat sips his latte on their dime?

It's strange that everyone is quick to talk of abuse, but no one appears to look at the actual data in the article, such as the "outrageous" difference between public and private sector workers being a mere 3 days.

The entire reaction is premised on the idea that private sector workers aren't allowed to abuse the system as much as their public sector counterparts. Bravo trolls for revealing your implicit assumptions.

But the strangest thing is that the article is premised on the idea of abuse, but the City's own statistics place absenteeism below the national average, and a 1/2 day above the morally pure "private sector worker".

So this is really a tempest in a teapot, premised on a false "public/private" dichotomy, which, if the fincianial crisis should have taught us anything, it's that governments and the private sphere are pretty tightly bound up.

The recipe for this brew is as follows - take an extreme example, find all the people who are outraged about it, and add the statistics at the bottom that invalidate the narrative just so when someone says "where's the balance" you can point out that all the facts are there, even though your aim has been to reinforce prejudice.

If only facts were all that ever mattered. There is so much resentment buried in here, and this is perhaps the most remarkable and depressing legacy of the right over the years - why is it that people with shitty jobs complain about and rail against those with less shitty jobs before they ask why they themselves can't have a less shitty job?

I really don't get it. But if workers ever want to get it, they might want to stop smacking around their fellow workers and realise that maybe organized labour could do the same for them, as in, ensure they can be sick 3 extra days a year.

Oh boy.

Aristotle wasn't an Aristotelean Essentialist

About three weeks ago, Brian Leiter linked to a tribute by Timothy Williamson for Ruth Barcan Marcus.

Anyone who has studied modal logic will be well appraised of her work, least of which the formula which bears her name. However, that's not why I'm linking to it. Rather, I have a bit of a bone to pick.

And it's not about Professor Leiter's beef with the entire notion of "analytic philosophy", my concern with Professor Williamson's talk centres around the fact that he, like many uh, analytic philosophers before him, propagate the myth of "aristotelean essentialism".

Williamson writes:

"Quine’s original criticisms were technically unsound, and he was forced over the years into a series of revisions that eventually reduced the charge to one of a commitment to Aristotelian essentialism. Even there, technical results vindicated Professor Marcus’s later reply that the commitment was to the intelligibility, not the truth, of essentialism, and that in any case there may well be a scientific basis for some form of essentialism. Philosophy has gone Marcus’s way, not Quine’s, but the vindication of her paper was a gradual process: it was years ahead of its time."

Do you see it? He doesn't even scare quote it! So what's up with it then? Why do these non-existent analytic philosophers constantly refer to essentialism as "aristotelean"?

To be sure, labeling one's opponent an “Aristotelean” has been a fairly common rhetorical move in philosophical circles since Descartes, but the recent instance was born with Quine, dean of those analytic philosophers.

In his essay Reference and Modality, he claimed that accepting modal quantified logic entailed “an invidious attitude towards certain ways of necessarily specifying x, and favoring other ways..as somehow revealing the “essence” of the object... evidently this reversion to Aristotelean essentialism is required if quantification into modal contexts is to be insisted on”. (Quine, Willard Van Orman “Reference and Modality”, From a Logical Point of View, p.155)

Given the history of the epithetical use of the “Aristotelean” adjective, it could be taken for granted that Quine's comment is there to sting rather than to bite. However, does Quine do Aristotle justice in associating him with the doctrine he describes? I would argue that he does not, and that Quine's notion of “Aristotelean” essentialism was not something Aristotle propounded.

In fact, the doctrine of "Aristotelean essentialism" Quine describes bears only a tangential relationship to Aristotle's own metaphysical views, although there is enough of a connection to guess at where Quine could have associated Aristotle with essentialism.

To be clear, I'm not defending nor rejecting the philosophical views presented by either Quine or Aristotle. Nor am I attempting to discuss Aristotle's views in the wider context of “modern” essentialism to be found in the views of philosophers such as Hilary Putnam. Rather, the narrow aim of this paper will be to see if what Quine describes as Aristotelean essentialism has a discernible analogue in Aristotle's writings.

(Part of the problem is that David Charles' 2002 book Aristotle on Meaning and Essence (Oxford University Press) deals with the contrast between modern and Aristotelean views on essence to an extent it would make my comments irrelevant save for the fact that there appears to be a more straightforward line of argument against Quine's Aristotelean essentialism)


In Reference and Modality there is a note at the mention of Aristotelean essentialism points to another essay in the same collection, Quine's very famous Two Dogmas of Empiricism, which, presumably, is meant to serve to elucidate Quine's views on Aristotle.

Quine writes:

The Aristotelian notion of essence was the forerunner, no doubt, of the modern notion of intension or meaning. For Aristotle it was essential in men to be rational, accidental to be two-legged. But there is an important difference between this attitude and the doctrine of meaning. From the latter point of view it may indeed be conceded (if only for the sake of argument) that rationality is involved in the meaning of the word 'man' while two-leggedness is not; but two-leggedness may at the same time be viewed as involved in the meaning of 'biped' while rationality is not. Thus from the point of view of the doctrine of meaning it makes no sense to say of the actual individual, who is at once a man and a biped, that his rationality is essential and his two-leggedness accidental or vice versa. Things had essences, for Aristotle, but only linguistic forms have meanings. Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word.

(Quine, Willard Van Orman “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, From a Logical Point of View, p.22)


Although the quote appears within the context of a discussion about meaning, the comments on meaning are not really relevant to the present discussion. What is clear is that Quine takes Aristotle's “notion” of essence to be a metaphysical view. However, this not much to go on.

Thankfully, Quine offers a clearer and fuller discussion of what he believes to be the erroneous metaphysical commitments of the modal logician on account of their “Aristoteleanism”.

In his book Word and Object, Quine writes:

Mathematicians may conceivably be said to be necessarily rational and not necessarily two-legged; and cyclists necessarily two-legged and not necessarily rational. But what of an individual who counts among his eccentricities both mathematics and cycling? Is this concrete individual necessarily rational and contingently two-legged or vice versa? Just insofar as we are talking referentially of the object, with no special bias toward a background grouping of mathematicians as against cyclists or vice versa, there is no semblance of sense in rating some of his attributes as necessary and others as contingent.

(Quine, Willard Van Orman, Word and object, p.199)


Quine then links this view to Aristotle, and although he concedes that this view isn't necessarily Aristotle's, he makes this concession in a backhanded way. He writes: “Curiously, a philosophical tradition does exist for just such a distinction between necessary and contingent attributes. It lives on in the terms 'essence' and 'accident',...it is a distinction that one attributes to Aristotle (subject to contradiction by scholars, such being the penalty for attributions to Aristotle).”

(Quine, Willard Van Orman, Word and object, p. 199)

Nonetheless, and despite Quine's penchant for humour, his views on what Aristotle held, or more charitably, what an Aristotelean would hold, are quite clear. For Quine, to be an Aristotelean essentialist is to propound a metaphysical doctrine which presumes a firm distinction between necessary and contingent attributes, that is, between attributes which are logically necessary and attributes which are not. The remainder of this essay will be devoted to arguing that this is not a view Aristotle actually held, although how Quine arrived at this view is not without cause.

So what is essence for Aristotle? (Although essence is the main term that gets used by Quine, it, like many philosophical words, has both a technical and vernacular use, and it should be noted that “essence” is the medieval term for Aristotle's more technical “what-it-was-to-be-that-thing”) Well, it was one of the four possible candidates for substancehood.

Aristotle equated essence with substance, and a good part of Aristotle's Metaphysics is given over to arguing this point, as well as showing that the other three possible candidates for substancehood, “the substrate, the universal under which the thing falls, and the genus or kind to which the thing belongs” (Penguin Classics Aristotle, Metaphysics, p. xxix), are not substances.

In Book Zeta of the Metaphysics, Aristotle, through his translator Hugh Lawson-Tancred, writes, “Well, the what-it-was-to-be-that-thing is, for each thing, what it is taken to be per se. For example, it is not the case that being for, say, you just is being for the musical man, since it is not per se that you are musical” (ibid p.178) Put more straightforwardly, Aristotle is arguing here that being musical is a quality, or in this case, an ability, one has, not something one is.

Anticipating Quine, Aristotle further refines this distinction. He writes,

Now an immediate objection would be that the mere assignation of a term does not make something one of the things that are taken to be per se...Suppose for example, that I had to define being white, and, to do so, I stated the account of a white man. The other case [the white man] involves rather the addition of something else to the thing to be accounted for [being white]. Staying with our [previous] use of anorak to be the term for a white man, one would illustrate the second case by just giving a definition of anorak as a white thing, but to be a white man is not just to be white.”

But then the question is whether being an anorak is a case of a what-it-was-to-be-that-thing at all. A reason for denying that it is is that a what-it-was-to-be-that-thing is the same sort of thing as a thing with thisness...So, for example, a white man is not something with thisness, assuming that thisness is a exclusive feature of substances.

Now this gives a nice clear conclusion: a what-it-was-to-be-that-thing only belongs to those things for whom an account just is a definition.

(ibid p.179)

Despite the length of the quote, what Aristotle is trying to argue in this passage is that a white man is not an essence. So then, what is an essence for Aristotle? He writes, “so the only things that will have a what-it-was-to-be-that thing will be the species of a genus, species and nothing else whatever.” (ibid p.180)

In other words, For Aristotle, only species turn out to be essences, or substances.

It will help at this point to take a slightly closer look at substances. What is substance? In the Metaphysics, Aristotle writes, “Also, some things are called things that are because they are substances other things are called things that are because they are affections of a substance” (ibid p.181)

This is not quite enough to tell one what substance is, but it is enough to indicate that Aristotle has an idea as to what it is not, which is an affection, or in more common terminology, a quality.

As Hugh Lawson-Tancred writes, “Aristotle holds that substances are things that have qualities or, conversely qualities are things that belong to substance” (ibid. p xxiv) Furthermore, “Aristotle's answer [to the difference between substances and qualities] is that the being of the quality depends on that of the substance but the being of the substance does not depend on that of the quality.” (ibid p. xxv) In other words, Aristotle holds that substances are the bearers of qualities.

Taking all this into account, a look back at Quine's story about the mathematical cyclist should help to understand Quine's error. On the issue “of an individual who counts among his eccentricities both mathematics and cycling”, it seems that Aristotle would point out to Quine that the enjoyment of mathematics and the pursuit of physical fitness through bicycling are both qualities, that is, both are dependent on there being a substance, in this case a human.

In Aristotle's view, both would be contingent to being a person, and that in specifying someone as a mathematician, the notion of necessity in not an issue, because being a mathematician would not qualify as a substance, the only place where the notion of necessity could plausibly be invoked with respect to modernizing Aristotle's philosophical position.

There is a further point which serves to demonstrate both Quine's error and also where perhaps why he described his essentialism as “Aristotelean”. With respect to substances, Aristotle argued that substances are ontologically prior to qualities. However, nothing Quine's writes about Aristotelean essentialism discusses necessary attributes as ontologically distinct from contingent attributes, something Aristotle would have insisted upon.

What Quine appears to have done in calling his essentialism “Aristotelean” is conflate substance/essence and quality with necessary and contingent attributes. Indeed, Quine's argument against “Aristotelean essentialism” relies on the fact that some supposedly necessary attributes of humans, such as two-leggedness and rationality, may also be necessary yet mutually exclusive attributes of properties contingent to humans, such as cycling and mathematics.

However, what this neglects is that even if Aristotle had said that people are essentially rational and two-legged, he would not be committed to the contradiction Quine notes, because cycling and doing math occupy different ontological positions from any essential properties. Again, describing math or cycling never invokes the concept of substance. Aristotle appears to be aiming towards something more subtle than the numerous different ways in which one can specify the attributes of an object, and there appears to be a fundamental, and perhaps incommensurable, difference between Quine's and Aristotle's ontologies.

So what, if anything, can one draw from this philosophically slight, quote laden essay? Perhaps just a cautionary note, that when one attributes a philosophical doctrine to a historical figure both loved and despised, it is best to be sure that the reference is accurate. In other words, it's not the essentialism that's important in this, it's the Aristotelean.

To that, perhaps Quine would have been more accurate calling modal logicians Lockean essentialists, but whether or not that is a fair summation of Locke's metaphysical views, a compliment or an epithet, will have to wait for another day.

I do however, think it's a bit funny that philosophers who pride themselves culturally on a particular kind of "clarity" and "rigour" would propagate this kind of canard. But I suppose making fun of people you don't agree with is just part of being human, if not the essence of being human.

Which reminds me - perhaps the only thing worse than aristotelean essentialism is the whole "for Aristotle, the essence of man is rationality" line, but let's save that for later.

Nous ne souvenons pas

Probably every blogger in Christendom is writing about the US election, and far be it from me to buck a trend.

As one of my recent posts indictates, I am ambivalent about the idea of the whole world celebrating the election of a president in a country where the vast majority of us have any standing. But it seems I am the only one. And here I was, not even trying to take an iconoclastic position.

So here in Toronto, there will be parties, lots of them, more than for our own recent election. It's as though the real government is being elected today, which I suppose is what bothers me about all this.

The Toronto Star, perhaps because the Conservatives won again, have pretty much given over their paper to Obamania, running headlines which, in the US, would have raised eyebrows, if not outrage. Over the past few weeks, we have seen headlines like "Black Canadians Cheer as Obama Edges Closer" and "Is this Canada's Obama?", the Star is seemingly desperate to capitalize on the Obama campaign and somehow make it relevant to us.

However, transposing American racial politics to Canada trivializes the enormity of Obama's election as US President, doesn't it? It also rather ignores Canada's own history and racial politics -where are the articles asking who a First Nations Prime Minister might be?

In fact, I believe the clearest analogy to Obama for Canadians is, no surprise, Trudeaumania. In 1968, Trudeau swept to power as a kind of messiah, and ran a policy wonkish government (I'm glossing over the FLQ crisis, I know) for 4 years which, according to Cabinet Ministers at the time, felt more like a grad seminar than a political environment. Trudeau almost lost the next election, and I would argue that, on some levels, he never fully recovered that potential.

So my concern is that around all this fervor, there will be disappointment. And I am almost certain that people will be deeply, deeply disappointed in Obama as President. Not because of his policies, or his actions, but because that's not what people are looking for. They are looking for the messiah.

All those atheists cheering for Obama are looking for the same thing as those who just come out and say he's the Messiah. And this isn't an epistemological point, it's a reflection of the fact that the impulse isn't theological, it's cultural.

Anyway, I'm out of steam here. Not sure if I have said anything interesting, but this is a blog, so in a week no one will ever read this again, until I embark on my political career or something like that!

Speaking of which...recognizable virtuousity

In my previous post, I wrote about harbouring a secret desire to be able to play crazy music at parties for fun and pleasure. Thinking about it, this is something I really need to do!

I am definitely going to get a bunch of Christmas songs under my belt, perhaps even some of the Charlie Brown Christmas, although I can "purge" myself of its jazziness another Charlie Brown favourite, the Op. 31 No. 3 Scherzo...God bless that Schröder!

Anyway, I have a few other pieces I have been working on in this regard, works that a purist would call "popular classics". I can play the "minute" waltz by Chopin and between a few other bits and pieces and this Christmas music, I'll have a nice little repertoire....but something's missing.

Really, what's the biggest piece someone could learn to belt out that everyone would know and love? A hit that really lets you show off? I'm sure you can all think of others, but the one which springs most immediately to mind is Liszt's 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody. (Feel free to suggest alternatives!)

But if it's good enough for Bugs Bunny, well, what more is there to say?

And just to hold myself to it, in some abstract way, I'm going to set up a counter on my sidebar to let everyone know how far I am along on learning, because it's 420 bars long, and I'm going to learn it Richter Style .

That means note by note, perfecting each bar and phrase (as well as I can, I don't mean to say that I can play like Richter!!!) before moving on. I'm going to learn it slowly, and savour it like a good book.

To be honest, I need to unlearn years of bad practise habits, including playing over the bits I can't pay and never really working through them, as well as never memorizing my music.

I'm thinking it will be ready next Halloween. The big question is whether or not I will get bored before I've learned it!

Better yet, feel free to harass me if it seems as though I'm giving up!!

Links oder Rechts

Perhaps the clearest indication that I'm a bad blogger is that I never do the whole linking thing. I read a lot of blogs, but I never let them, or you, dear reader, know what I've enjoyed! So here goes...

1) Chris Foley at the The Collaborative Piano Blog has a great post on the virtues of learning Christmas Music for the piano.

I am perhaps the most isolated musician on earth (self-imposed), but I've long harboured a dream where someone asks me if I play the piano, and I reply, oh, I know a couple of things, and proceed to do my best Brahms in a brothel bar (actually, I should learn some Brahms for this very reason...)

That being said, I usually sit down and play Beethoven, not always the most social of music.. Christmas music on the other hand, is an easy score. Chris, I'm going to go pick up some of the music you've mentioned this weekend! And watch out friends!

2) Adam Kotsko at The Weblog has a wonderful analysis of something I was all too familiar with growing up in Alberta- the young, hard-core evangelical Christian who doesn't appear to come out of a fire and brimstone family. It's a thoroughly argued post, and I have nothing to add to it except a link.

3) Waste, one of those blogs that I only recently subscribed to, and yet I had read often simply through googling some philosophical concept. And it turns out the author, Ben Wolfson, is a germanist as well, which, given my own graduate studies, makes it a must read for me.

Anyway, he has a great post around whether or not Hegel's Phänomenologie des Geistes as Shaggy-dog story, putting it against Kafka's Ein Hungerkünstler. The post's brilliance lies in the fact that he seems to have found the hermeneutic key to one of the most intractable works of German Idealism, and that's saying something...

4) Last but not least, Conrad Roth at the Varieties of Unreligious Experience takes the Benjaminian turn and starts to talk politics, but through the lens of aesthetics. My suspicion, which he has pretty much confirmed, that within that analytical breast beats the heart of a Romantic is pretty much sewn up by this post.

Don Giovanni

The Canadian Opera Company's production of Don Giovanni was a strange disaster.

Overall the singing was pretty good. Actually, it was excellent, although Gordon Gietz's Don Ottavio struggled to be heard in the ensemble pieces. He has a fine voice, but size matters, even in Mozart...I felt for him, as he's from my hometown!

The production, on the other hand...I do not know if I've ever seen so many interesting moments, so many possible dramatic avenues of exploration, totally thwarted by a hamfisted execution.

Take Julie Makerov's Donna Elvira. A warm, expressive voice, and a stone countenance. Donna Elvira is perhaps the most clearly conflicted character in the opera, and Ms. Makerov's performance communicated none of that. But perhaps that was the direction, and direction here trumped pretty much everything, included whole swaths of unavoidable conflicts with the libretto.

I have written about this before. "Regietheater" isn't a bad word to me, provided it makes some kind of sense, it hangs together. The problem with this production, and this is giving the director some credit, is that she seemed to be fighting against the tremendous weight of this opera's production history, but in those attempts, she failed, especially in the baffling ending (more on that later).

Everyone falls down before The Score. And yet, much of what we know about the opera, and it's characterizations, comes not through the score but through its performances.

And so returning to Mozart, I have a pet theory (perfect for blogs), mentioned before about the Mozart/Da Ponte operas. Having seen Don Giovanni on stage for the 6th time last night, it is clear to me that Don Giovanni is a far more problematic work than thought, but that many of these problems are "hidden" by a production history that highlights the farcical elements of the work, pulling it more in the direction of Le nozze di Figaro and away from the opera I believe it to be much closer to, namely, the much more explicitly problematic Così Fan Tutte.

The COC production teased out some of these bits, some of the darker elements that are right there in the work, but it failed because of two main flaws - making Don Giovanni a really sleazy asshole and, wait for this, making the entire stone statue scene a trick played on Don Giovanni by Leoporello, Don Ottavio and Masetto. In doing so, they flattened out the moral ambiguity in Don Giovanni to "Don Giovanni is bad and deserves to die", completely robbing the sextet, and therefore the audience, of any sense of irony in the conclusion (this piece over at Sounds and Fury does a great job of getting at the sextet's importance).

Instead, the COC production verges on nihilism. People walk out either feeling really good that the bad, bad Don got his, those same people who need to feel that way as AC Douglas mentions in his piece, or, like me, really deflated after watching some of the principals essentially torture Don Giovanni to death and then sing about his comeuppance. There's irony there, but it's in entirely the wrong direction.

So what to do? Well, one thing is that maybe this blog is a good place for me to start writing about how I think a production of Don Giovanni could go. This series will be called "Production Notes to a Don Giovanni that will never be produced."

I can't guarantee this won't run out of steam any more than any of the other failed projects here, but I've been blogging fairly regularly lately, so who knows?

And please, friends, if you've seen this production, or have any ideas, by all means, share - this is a blog, after all.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Overlords

Maybe I'm just a jackass, but this Welcome Back America celebration strikes me as kind of submissive.

I will breathe a certain sigh of relief when (if) Barack Obama is elected US President. However, celebrating an Obama victory around the world seems to miss the point - especially if he loses.

With America's standing in the world at an all-time low, this is a perfect opportunity for the world community to start the difficult and painful process of making America more like the UK and France.

How about we let America know that we like it as a country and not an empire? The idea of America, as a shining beacon of freedom, instead of the reality of its fingers in all sorts of pies?

I mean, would we celebrate any other nation's change of government like this? Isn't it their long, national nightmare that's drawing to a close?

Celebrating in this way tacitly acknowledges that the Americans rule the world, and that we're really happy that the sensible younger brother will be donning the purple instead of the crazy uncle.

How about instead we just say, "Hey, you guys are awesome, but we're not going to let you pull that Pax Americana stuff again only to screw all of us royally. How about you just play by the same rules everyone else does?"

It's one thing for the US to believe in American Exceptionalism, but it's another thing for the rest of the world to validate it.