Mullings: An American Cyber-column By Rich Galen

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Dreyfus Returns: My Trip to Paris
Part 1: Preface
Part 2: Outward Bound
Part 3: Across the Pond
Part 4: Paris Underground
Part 5: Sorely, You Must be Kidding
Part 6: Loose in the Louvre
Part 7: What's French for Restaurant

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We Covet No Territory

Monday, December 17, 2001

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In what the BBC called "a surprise visit to the Bagram airbase near Kabul," Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said the that US "coveted no territory" as the result of our current military action.

As regular Mullsters are all too aware, I am a student of military history - indeed any history - on the Sam Cooke pattern. And, as proved in the Paris Travelogue, I "Don't know much about the French I took."

However, I believe this is a correct statement: The last time a militarily victorious United States occupied any territory was after WW II: Japan (until April, 1952), and a relatively small piece the city of Berlin in Germany (and that, only because the Soviet Union insisted upon occupying half of the country).

Those four words - we covet no territory - suggest a great deal about what America is, and what America is not.

If we expand the meaning of the word "territory" to include geographical, religious, or cultural territory then anti-American agitators should be forced to explain just what we have done to become, in their eyes, The Great Satan.

Geographically, there is no place on the planet - with the possible exception of certain neighborhoods in Berkeley, California and the entire Commonwealth of Massachusetts - which is under the control of the United States and doesn't want to be. There are some PEOPLE in some places who don't want to be under the control of the US, but we tend to leave people in their own lands to their own hands.

If we wanted to annex someone else, we'd probably take Canada. Except for Quebec. We'd give them to France. To spite them both.

Religiously we don't tread on anyone. Anywhere. We not only allow everyone in every country to practice religion without interference from us, but we give those religions a tax break if people want to practice them in our country.

Truth be known, we tend to be much more zealously anti-religious here are home than we are anywhere else.

Culturally we don't force ourselves on anyone, either. We make American culture - or at least Hollywood's version of American culture - available to everyone with access to a television set or a movie projector. If reports of unrest among young people in Iran are true, it is because they have seen American culture and they like it.

We don't DEMAND that anyone adopt our culture as their own, but there was a reason the Taliban didn't allow TVs.

Indeed, how much of others' cultures should be imported to America has been a daily discussion item here since before there WAS an America; probably since the occupants of the Mayflower started complaining about how foreigners were going to ruin their way of life as they watched the second ship sail into Plymouth.

Which, in turn, was nothing compared to what the Indians must have said when they saw the Pilgrims waltzing ashore with their goofy hats and clothes looking like a British Rock group from the '60's - the first British Invasion; while the wives whined at the husbands because they were supposed to be going to the Eden Rock on St. Bart's in the Caribbean, not Plymouth Rock; that if he hadn't been such a Puritan squeezing the life out of every last ha'penny, he could have bought one of the new digital cell phones so this wouldn't have happened; does he think he might call and see if there was anything - anything - available on Martha's Vineyard; and why not go ask those odd-looking people staring at us from the woods if there is a Bob's Your Uncle Big Boy nearby?

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