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Surely they knew that the very idea of the future came in an American box - complete with instructions for assembling a Constitution, a MacDonald's hamburger franchise, a row of Marriot hotels and a First Amendment.
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Chapter 10, Envoi, p. 237

 

Lewis H. Lapham

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I believe that, as an American, I should be able to walk into any restaurant in America and order my hamburger – that most American of foods – medium f**king rare. I don’t believe my hamburger should have to come with a warning to cook it well done to kill off any potential contaminants or bacteria. ... I believe I should be able to treat my hamburger like food, not like infectious f**king medical waste. I believe the words “meat” and "treated with ammonia" should never occur in the same paragraph – much less the same sentence.

 

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You wouldn't want Alan Greenspan to write the instructions for assembling a beach chair.

 

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The First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment rights in the United States Constitution were being violated in Albany again and again — freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, the equal protection of the laws — I could count at least 30 such violations. Yet the president, sworn to uphold the Constitution, and all the agencies of the United States government at his disposal, were nowhere to be seen.

 

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I'm beginning to understand how Americans must have felt living under King George. What was that again - no taxation without representation? The War of Independence wasn't America against England. It was Englishmen resisting the oppressive regime of their autocratic German king - asserting their human rights, in modern parlance. America may be a melting pot now, but it began with a defence of age-old English liberties; liberties that were promptly written into the Constitution - something we never got around to doing in Britain, so we no longer enjoy the same liberties Americans do. We don't have a constitution. We don't have a First Amendment. What we have, and what the whole of Europe has, is the Lisbon Treaty, a kind of top-down constitution that has been imposed on us against our will. And, unlike the American Constitution which empowers the people, the European constitution disempowers the people, and empowers the unelected bureaucrats and career politicians for whose sole benefit it was created.

 

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If you could extend the elective franchise to all persons of color who can read the Constitution of the United States in English and write their names and to all persons of color who own real estate valued at not less than two hundred and fifty dollars and pay taxes thereon, and would completely disarm the adversary. This you can do with perfect safety. And as a consequence, the radicals, who are wild upon negro franchise, will be completely foiled in their attempts to keep the Southern States from renewing their relations to the Union.

 

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