I suspect many OBB readers only want pictures and are closing their browser tab right now. For readers, I think you will find optimism here.
Loudmouths daily say how bad things are.
Visiting strangers tell how good we have it.
by Peggy Noonan
On our 250th birthday,
let us never forget the gift of the
Scottish national soccer team and its
followers, the famous Tartan Army—
the pleasure and delight they gave as
they marched through America,
drank our cities dry, sang their songs, and said: We love you. They brought
something out in us; they moved us
and helped reveal something we’d
stopped noticing. They allowed us to
see our battered old country whole,
and through fresh eyes.
No one knows exactly how many
global visitors have come and are
coming to the U.S. for the World
Cup. Oxford Economics predicted a
surge of 1.2 million international
tourists for the games, peaking in
June. The U.S. Embassy in Luxembourg said as many as 10 million
would come to the 11 host cities.
However many there are, we are
hearing from the young ones as they
fan out across the country to venues down South, out West, in Texas, and in Utah. They are seeing an America
they never imagined and have made
now-famous videos about how
shocked they are—in the most positive sense. They expected a dark
and brooding nation; they discovered a sun-filled magnificence. It’s
so big, so spacious, has such wondrous shops, the best food, and absolutely wonderful people. The videos have flooded TikTok, Instagram, and X, and they speak with the wonder of 18th-century explorers who discovered an unknown
indigenous people on a
brilliant new continent. discovered an unknown
indigenous people on a
brilliant new continent.
They couldn’t stop
talking about it. Texas
barbecue, ranch dressing, endless refills—in
England, asking for a
refill is like “asking for
a second mortgage” said
one video—huge portions, 24-hour gyms,
Buc-ee’s, Costco, Chickfil-A. Football stadiums,
air conditioning, the
sheer variety—all the
hot sauces, and 50
states with different
rules. Strangers smile
and ask how ya doin’.
Among my favorites:
seeing them delight in
yellow school buses,
which they thought only
existed in movies
A young man in his
20s, with wonder: “I
would trade my Canadian passport for American citizenship without hesitating a single second. Some states have no state
income tax.” Here, he said, a young
person can compete and succeed. A
British woman, about 20, driving
through a suburb, asked to be adopted “by anyone in the USA as soon
as possible.” With Britain’s housing
crisis, you “have to live in a cardboard box for your first house.” She’s
driving past homes here, finding
their prices on websites, and is staggered
by the bang for the buck.
One video has a German telling CNN’s Jake Tapper that back
home he’d gotten “a lot of negative
views about the Americans in the
last five years,” but had discovered
“the people are amazing, so welcoming, the culture is amazing.”
A young Englishman in his 30s:
“The media portrays Americans as
rude, lazy, all of the above, and it’s
further from the truth. . . . The
amount of hospitality and kindness
. . . and pride Americans hold is truly
like no other country I’ve been to.”
A 30-ish bearded South African
man: “I’m in awe of the United
States of America.” Walking through
a park, he sees “women walking along in fancy handbags, jewelry on,
glasses on, they’re not being harassed, nothing. If this were South
Africa, gosh, first of all I wouldn’t be
able to walk through this bloomin’
park by myself.”
An African or Caribbean man of
perhaps 30 marvels at his room service. “When they say everything in
America is big, I understand it. Why
the hell is this quesadilla the size of
my head?” A now-famous blond
woman of about 25 at a fast-food
drive-through: “They have bible
verses on the bottom of their cup!”
Why were they all gobsmacked?
Because when they hear of America
in the news, it’s school shootings and
assassination attempts, riots, Los Angeles burning down with no fire
trucks or water in the reservoir. This
isn’t the fault of journalism; it’s an
inevitability of journalism: News is
the big thing that’s happening. Over
the years, they’ve probably absorbed
the idea that Americans are violent
incompetents—a fat and sated people who are altogether a new thing
in history: dull-eyed fanatics.
They have also been brought up
surrounded by powerful information systems, not only in media but also in academia and other institutions,
that reflect general progressive international opinion, which sees
America as a cruel place where ignorant people eat bad food in bleak
landscapes.
And then they landed, and none of
this matched. The offerings were
fantastic. The people were good.
I keep wondering if, when the millions go home, they’ll remember
what they saw, and it will have an
impact on future international relations. (It is 2056, and the final, crucial meeting at the Quai d’Orsay. The
U.S. representative says, “I am asking you to trust us, Pierre. Because
our nations go back, and because for
all our theatrics, we are a good people.” Pierre waves his hand. “You
don’t need to say that, Jake. I was
there in ’26, at the games, in Missouri. I know who you are.”)
Why have the visitors’ views mattered so much to so many of us?
There’s a funny thing about
America: We’ve not cared
about the approval of other nations,
and in this, we are unlike other nations.
And in part it’s that
the negative portrait of
America absorbed by
Europeans in recent
years was also absorbed
by us. We internalized
our troubles, which are
real. The dark sides of
our country made us see
ourselves pessimistically. But what the
World Cup tourists saw
was real, it wasn’t just
sentimental. The spaciousness really is staggering. The generosity
of Americans, our openness, is exceptional. The abundance is real, the
food culture extraordinary in its
range and quality.
What they saw functioned as a
needed corrective.
Something else. The visitors confirmed something—that the American character still lives at the street
level, in ordinary encounters. They
documented what endures and is
genuinely lovable.
For me, as I scrolled through
them at night, as I thought about
why I was so drawn to them, I realized: I am moved because they prove
the thing I love is actually there.
Those young visitors, who saw us
clearly and said what they saw, gave
us a little 250th birthday present.
And here, soon, it comes. No
party owns this birthday, no president has dibs on its meaning; we’re
simply marking an epic journey
through history as a people who invented a new political arrangement
for man, who knew how to survive,
how to triumph, and still care about
the opinion of the stranger.
What a journey.
Here’s to it, to us, to more. Onward
to 251.
