Great piece by Peggy Noonan on the American character
Friday, June 4, 2010 at 12:05AM 
Great WSJ op-ed by Peggy Noonan, whose smart-ass style (look who's talking!) is softened by her beautiful writing style.
The closer:
Here is a fanciful example that is meant to have a larger point. If you, complicated little pirate that you are, find yourself caught in the middle of a big messy scandal in America right now, you can't go to another continent to hide out or ride out the storm. Earlier generations did exactly that, but you can't, because you've been on the front page of every website, the lead on every newscast. You'll be spotted in South Africa and Googled in Gdansk. Two hundred years ago, or even 100, when you got yourself in a big fat bit of trouble in Paris, you could run to the docks and take the first ship to America, arrive unknown, and start over. You changed your name, or didn't even bother. It would be years before anyone caught up with you.
And this is part of how America was born. Gamblers, bounders, ne'er-do-wells, third sons in primogeniture cultures—most of us came here to escape something! Our people came here not only for a new chance but to disappear, hide out, tend their wounds, and summon the energy, in time, to impress the dopes back home. America has many anthems, but one of them is "I'll show 'em!"
There is still something of that in all Americans, which means as a people we're not really suited to the age of surveillance, the age of no privacy. There is no hiding place now, not here, and this strikes me as something of huge and existential import. It's like the closing of yet another frontier, a final one we didn't even know was there.
A few weeks ago the latest right-track-wrong-track numbers came out, and the wrong-track numbers won, as they have since 2003. About 70% of respondents said they thought the country was on the wrong track. This was generally seen as "a commentary on the economy," and no doubt this is part of it. But Americans are more interesting and complicated people than that, and maybe they're also thinking, "Remember Jeremiah Johnson? The guy who went off by himself in the mountains and lived on his own? I'd like to do that. But they'd find me on Google Earth."
I get the angst, but Noonan's description of America's DNA is dead-on, so I also get the reasonable pushback. Toss in a good court system, and I think that, not only will we be fine, but we'll reach the right balance of rules faster and better than anybody else--without prying any guns off anybody's cold dead fingers!
Reader Comments (3)
Tom I think you are right. A good court system, and I would add, a much smaller government and a bigger people.
The dynamic she described was also at work within the US. The reason why Hollywood is based in California is because that's where the budding industry was safest from the reach of Thomas Edison's patent lawyers.
I think the lack of privacy of information rather than individuals is the next big thing.
Democratization of information and the devolving of that power into the end nodes...= individuals at home monitoring and pressuring society.More self policing and more self governing.
The directives requiring local councils in UK to open up the finances online is just a thin end of a long new wedge.
I think big Government is going to become smaller distributed good governance.
Technology creating the pace.
Even in a simple way in Pakistan....a drunk policeman caught on a mobile phone and now having his 5 minutes on cable....these things create change in a low granular level in a way that the previous system refused to.He'll never be drunk at work again and neither will his colleagues..or else his boss will get the boot.Unthinkable a decade ago.