By: Peter Isackson

Peter Isackson — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 07:46:37 +0000

Atul, I came to America six decades before you, having chosen Chicago as my birthplace before convincing my family a year later to move to LaLaland. That’s where I grew up and remained until adulthood. During the Vietnam war (that with impeccable logic followed JFK’s elimination), I became convinced we were definitely – and it turned out definitively -on the wrong track, I went on from UCLA to Oxford and then settled in France; which felt like an escape to sanity.
Everyone knew and regretted that Europe, including Asterix’s homeland Gaul, was becoming Americanized. Still, we Europeans managed to maintain some modicum of independence and cultural pride… until recently that is. We have now fully adopted America’s model of studied irrationality: the military Keynesianism (complete with MK-Ultra) that brought us Vietnam, the drama I managed to escape.
That is why I cannot say “Happy Fourth” and count on American resilience to get us out of the current mess.Thanks to the still vibrant culture of free speech, the US continues producing wonderful and inspiring thinkers, investigators and analysts, but they have been very efficiently exiled to the margins.The problem is that the “can-do will-do” culture you admire is monopolized by the one thing that makes “doing” possible: money. You can and will do nothing without massive amounts of it. What America needs before I can wish a happy Fourth is a can-think and will-think culture. But that was banished long ago.

Comments on: Happy Fourth: Hope in Magnificently Messy America at 250

By: Peter Isackson