It’s often said that the best anthropological study of the
United States by a European is Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1835
classic “Democracy in America.”
Granted, the eminent French political thinker and historian
probably didn’t spend an inordinate amount of time downing
cheap vodka from Rite Aid, bumming around on the beach, blowing
stupid amounts of cash in Las Vegas, and getting arrested in
Tijuana, but I’ll try my best to follow his noble example and
offer some insightful final thoughts on this great country that I
have in many ways fallen in love with.

What do the motley crew of Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill,
Jesus Christ and Malcolm X all have in common?
Are you struggling? Let me give you a little hand.

The British election that took place two weeks ago was
remarkably unremarkable in every way except one. In one
constituency in London, a man named George Galloway was elected to
the British Parliament.

There’s an election today that is infinitely important. It
will be an ideological litmus test. The winners will embark on a
career that will change the conditions of the people who voted them
in.

The late Ernst Mayer, one of the most revered biologists of the
20th century, said a few years ago that “the average life
expectancy of a species is about 100,000 years.” This should
worry us interminably because our own species, homo sapiens
sapiens, has had the intelligence to establish civilizations for
around that same period.

This week, after a little playful goading, I feel it is time to
broach a subject that has become a phenomenon in the political
discourse of right-wing America: the ideology of supposed
“anti-Americanism.”
On Tuesday, a contributor to the Daily Bruin wrote that it was
“high time that Matthew Kennard explain why he is in this
country when he obviously cannot stand its policies and
politics.” I interpreted this and the rest of his letter as
saying, “if you have the temerity to criticize the Bush
administration and support working people, then you are profoundly
anti-American and should leave.”
It’s an interesting premise because it displays an
attitude that is typical of a set of uniquely ideological
neo-conservatives who attempt to define what it is to be American,
and posit that any departure from that definition is antithetical
to “American values.”
In my experience, “anti-American” has been used
merely as a lazy pejorative that’s thrown at any foreigner
““ or American for that matter ““ who makes reasonable
objections to the Bush administration and its radical agenda.

If you eat in the dinning halls on campus, it’s no
exaggeration to say that your actions today will have a huge effect
on thousands of lives.

On Tuesday of this week Tony Blair announced that May 5, 2005
would be the date of the British General Election. As a liberal
Englishman and a traditional Labour voter, this puts me in
something of a quandary.

John Lewis Gaddis, professor of history at Yale, writes in the
latest edition of the influential Foreign Affairs Journal,
“Second terms in the White House open the way for second
thoughts.

In October 2003, the noisy Harvard Law School Professor Alan
Dershowitz was a visitor to the UCLA campus. He came to give a
typically nuanced talk at Royce Hall titled “The Case for
Israel.” At the time of his speech, attention was being
brought to the charge that his new book of the same name was, in
the words of notable Middle East expert Norman G.