Tonight on the NBC Nightly News, Brian Williams introduced a segment on recent attempts in Massachusetts by asking viewers to "Imagine a place where just about everyone has health insurance..." Can you imagine such a place? Wouldn't it be amazing if such a utopian place existed?

Europe exists, Brian.

This is an indication of the American insularity I mentioned in the previous post. There's a sense that while America has always had much to teach the world about technology, democracy, human rights, and so on, that it's a bit laughable to think we could possibly have anything serious to learn from other parts of the world. Just look at how Rove and Company managed to use the fact that John Kerry spoke French as a way to emasculate him.

There is no question that American culture has been the most productive and interesting in the past century or so. No other country comes anywhere near America's accomplishments in inventiveness, artistic creativity, scientific advancement, and so on. But here's a notion: while right-wing ideology claims credit for this creativity by attributing it to America's relatively brutally unfettered capitalism, perhaps it's more a result of the seething cauldron of multi-culturalism in American society. The blues, jazz, and early rock and roll, for example, certainly didn't benefit from the American low-tax, you're on your own capitalist system. These genres had all existed for decades before anyone with serious money started to pay attention -- and even then, it was mostly when poor whites -- Elvis, for example -- had started mimicking the styles.

There seems to be a notion that Europe is some kind of joke and that European solutions couldn't possibly work in the U.S. But next time you want to imagine a place where folks don't have to worry about being uninsured, where the streets aren't full of desperate people tossed out of psychiatric hospitals (see the Reagan revolution), where non-violent offenders aren't sent to prison, and where government policy reflects, at least to some extent, the notion that society exists in order to take care of the least among us, just get a flight to Europe.

No need to imagine such a place, Brian, you can visit. Hey, you might even consider doing a news story about it!