Daniel Henninger: Would Harry Truman Blame Paris?
Daniel Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.
The Europe of Charlemagne, Marco Polo and Churchill, after millennia of undoubted achievement, has finally spent itself to the verge of collapse and irrelevance. Witnessing this historic catastrophe, Barack Obama, the president of the United States, is complaining that it's bad for business in Pittsburgh. What electorates in Europe and here have long suspected is proven true. Ours is the age of small men.
Europe is in the grip of a financial plague wiping out a generation of wealth and opportunity for millions of its citizens and threatening the world's economies. Does anyone believe that JFK's Treasury secretary, Douglas Dillon, would, like Tim Geithner, wave toward Europe that the solution "is in their hands"? Or that former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, the architect of NATO, would have been as screamingly silent as Hillary Clinton is now? Or that Democratic President Harry Truman, who appointed George Marshall, would blame Madrid for tanking his re-election prospects in Milwaukee?
Before American public education fell into the anti-history hands of the teachers unions and politically corrected textbooks, Europe's heritage was routinely taught in the United States. Young Americans knew why Europe mattered in their lives. Music ed meant Mozart, Verdi, Bach and Beethoven. Art appreciation stretched from da Vinci to Picasso. Science was James Watt and Marconi. European literature, for those of us who fell into the writing trade, was an endless delirium...