And look at what they eat. Kidney pie, blood pudding, head cheese. That's stuff we throw away. And they boil everything. They boil bacon.

 

And look at those tiny little row houses they all live in, all jammed up together. They drive on the wrong side of the road, and not only that but their cars are tiny and the steering wheel is on the wrong side, so that wrong-side-of-the-road thing doesn't even help the mailmen over there. The policemen don't carry guns, so I bet even the cop shows are kind of boring over there, but if they're anything like the rest of the English shows I've seen I bet they look like they were filmed with a hand-held video camera.

 

Of course there is a lot to be said for English people. They can be really well-mannered and they tend to reason things out better than we do. Like how an American preacher will get up and yell and scream and cry and try to get you all worked up; but once I heard an English preacher at a revival and everything he said was so quiet and well thought-out that you would have totally felt like an idiot to disagree with him. And there's the Beatles and the Who and Elizabeth Hurley and Monty Python.

 

I'm glad I'm not English but I should say that English folks don't bother me any more or less than anyone else. Especially any other Europeans, who I don't dislike as much as I just don't understand. In America folks talk about Europe like it's so cultural and historical; this from people who don't know or understand their own culture or history. I don't understand how in Europe they manage with so many languages, like you get in your car and drive 20 minutes and all of a sudden you can't read the road signs; but then, I don't understand how in America most folks get by not even knowing how to speak the one language they do know. I don't understand how come Europeans are always rioting at soccer games, when here it's all you can do to even get someone to go to a soccer game; but then, I don't understand why kids in America go to concerts and shoot each other.

 

Anyway, I was talking about America, and how we celebrate our independence by blowing things up. I'm not sure why, but it might be because we have a long history of blowing things up, starting with the folks who were here when we first landed. Then the English, then the French, then the English again, and then the Mexicans and then each other. We've blown up people on every continent that has people, except South America. And Australia, I mean, if you believe in Australia.

 

Now, I'm not anti-American. I'm not one of those angry liberal hippies who says America sucks and cops are facists and drugs should be legal, and blah blah blah....I think America is the greatest country ever. On the other hand, I'm not one of those rednecks who thinks that there's nothing wrong with America.

 

But, aside from all the crap that folks usually say about how America is so great because we have the best bombs or the best music or we lead the world in beef production, let me just tell you why America works. And it's not because our founding fathers were insane, even though I think that most of them were. And it's not because we're the most honest, hard-working people in the world, because that's not even true.

 

In the last 200 years, there's been a lot of political experiments, like communism and fascism and Enlightened Socialism and just plain old imperialism like Japan in the 30's. France has had like 14 different forms of government in that time. Italy has had 38. I mean, these aren't little third-world dictatorships that rise and fall overnight, these are established powers. But all these experiments were one of two kinds:

 

The Bible tells us that man is sinful and his heart is evil and will always turn away from the things of God. The guys who wrote the Constitution knew that, not just because it was drilled into them since birth, but because all they had to do was look around the room. They couldn't even get along with each other.

 

There's a verse in Isaiah that says God is my law-giver, my judge, and my King (or something like that), and I've heard folks say that that's where the notion of the three branches of government came from. I don't know about that, but I do know that that's exactly how they split up the three branches of government.

 

And then they did something that no one ever did before. You see, they knew that people were basically greedy bastards and that each branch of government would at every opportunity try to seize more power than the Constitution allowed. So like Congress may make a law, but the courts can overturn it; or the President can do whatever he wants to do, but Congress can impeach him; or the courts can convict a guy, but the President can pardon him. There are all sorts of things that they can do to keep each other in check, or even just to screw with each other. So the system doesn't just allow these guys to be selfish bastards, it relies on it; the founding fathers just kind of assumed that everyone is a power-mad maniac and set up this system that kind of keeps them in check by pitting them against each other.

 

And like I  said, no one had ever thought of this before. These guys were all pretty radical, and they all still argued and beat the crap out of each other and sometimes even shot each other, but in the end it all worked and its still working today. Because no one can keep a power-hungry maniac in check better than a bunch of other power-hungry maniacs.