Show me your identity papers!

When my wife was in Europe years ago, she picked up some cheap novels in French to give her a chance to practice reading colloquial French. One of the novels that she purchased was a cowboy novel set in the Old West.

Picture the scene. The local sheriff is sitting on the front porch of his office when he sees a couple of strangers, all bad looking hombres, riding into town. He stops them at the hitching post by the local saloon and asks them to show to produce their identity papers. Obviously the author of the novel did not understand that the concept of identity papers is totally alien to the American mindset. To a European, such a request would be commonplace.

This vignette illustrates a major difference between Americans and our cousins across the pond.  We don’t like bureaucracy and only tolerate it in a small doses.

Reading Gov. Palin’s piece on The Wall Street Journal’s web site entitled “Obama and the Bureaucratization of Health Care” brought the vignette from the French novel to mind. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203440104574400581157986024.html

I believe that the increased bureaucratization of American life that the Obama health care plan will require is alien to the American way of thinking.  That is why the plan is so unpopular and has caused President Obama’s approval numbers to sink like a stone. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090909/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_ap_poll_health_care

Stated simply, Obama’s plan is asking Americans to tolerate a degree of government involvement in our lives that is alien to our cultural traditions.  Such a loss of freedom might not bother someone from a European country. However, such a loss of personal liberty is not going to set will with many Americans.

If it were to pass, it would create a backlash of epic proportions. Most Americans do not think like Europeans and have no desire to live like them, no matter what the desires of our cosmopolitan elites may be!