Happy Birthday America

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.