The after-dinner conversation drifted to politics, as it sometimes will, despite the best intentions of its participants.
I mentioned a Thai man who had complained to me about repression in Thailand. Speaking out against the king will land you a jail term or worse, he claimed.
“But it’s the same all over,” my British companion said. “The king is sacred there. In America, if you called Washington a sod—”
“As in George Washington? Nothing would happen. You can say just about anything you want in America,” I said, feeling a bit sheepish about giving so obvious a civics lesson. For good measure, I added: “You can burn a flag on the Capitol steps if it makes you happy.”
“You can?”
“Well, of course. Can’t you in England?”
“No. Burning a flag in Britain, they’d arrest you for that.”
“And they should,” the Australian said. “Why do you need to do that?”
Flag burning has always been a sort of informal litmus test for me. If someone is unable to grasp the irony of prohibiting the burning of a piece of colorful fabric meant to symbolize, among other things, political freedom, then usually we have to agree to disagree.
“That’s why you have all these problems with Al Qaeda running around in America,” he continued. “Society’s too open. I hope freedom never goes that far in Australia.”
This was a new one. As a rare American abroad, I am frequently asked to apologize: I’m sorry our president eerily resembles a chimpanzee in both appearance and oratorical skill; I’m sorry our currency is so strong; I’m sorry our coffee is so weak; I’m sorry we’re so very, very fat. I’m sorry. These sorries are always doled out to Europeans, despite the fact that I am traveling through a country to which American does, in fact, owe a very big apology.
But I’d never before been asked to apologize for having an excess of civil liberty. I half-expected the Australian to peel off a rubber mask and reveal himself to be John Ashcroft.
I wasn’t sure what to tell the guy about the state of America today. My friends at home say that everyone is stockpiling duct tape and plastic sheeting, so that they can wrap themselves in giant plastic tape balls in the event of a terrorist attack. One friend who is renovating her apartment had the misfortune of actually needing plastic sheeting for non-paranoia related reasons just as all the hardware stores ran out. Meanwhile, my mother has warned me not to use words like AK-47 (whoopsie) in my emails and web posts. She seems to think that doing so will cause a bell to go off in some Pentagon sub-basement.
Mostly I felt like telling the Australian that he was completely loopy. Instead I drank my beer.
(A quick postscript: I have no idea what the British and Australian counterparts to the Bill of Rights look like, but I certainly don’t trust the opinions of the two I was talking to last night. I continue to assume that members of the British commonwealth enjoy much the same freedoms as Americans.)
