 G'day, May 40 here. So one thing I love about Americans is how enthusiastic they are compared to any other people of which I'm aware. Americans seem more likely to feel free to be naked in their emotions. Like I come from Australia, which has kind of a stiff upper lip British approach to emotions. So if you got really enthusiastic in my Australian upbringing, you'd be accused of raving like a yank. I remember when I was talking to friends in 1983 about how much I love the movie The Man from Snowy River, my Australian friends would say, oh, you're raving like a yank. And when we would watch American films in Australia in my first few years of life, one thing that made them so different from Australian culture, there's so much more emotion expressed. Like so much more enthusiasm and anger and passion. Just Americans much more likely to be naked in their emotions, which is awesome. I came to America at age 11 and I was like, wow, this is great because of the first time in my life, girls felt free to show an interest in a guy because even girls would be less afraid to get naked with their emotions. So I love the enthusiasm and the emotional honesty and the passion of Americans. And this came up when Joe Klein writes here in the New York Times Book Review about a classic work that came out in 1989, Albion Seed for British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fisher. And Joe Klein concludes, one night in Soviet Moscow, I walked through a feathery curtain of soft, fat snowflakes with a Russian friend. This is great. I shouted. He said to me, I wish I could smile the way your Americans do. So this one American called Dennis Prager on his radio show after he'd been in Australia. And she said she'd caught a performance at the Sydney Opera House. And afterwards she was the only one in the audience who like stood up and clapped. So this this standing up and clapping, this being naked in your emotions, this getting passionate and enthused and emotionally open and wearing your feelings on your sleeve. This is distinctive to American culture as opposed to British culture or French or German or Northern European culture. It's it's got more similarities with, say, Southern Southern Europe. So Mediterranean culture is, I think, even more emotionally expressive than American culture. But certainly Americans are far more expressive emotionally than far East Asian culture or Anglo cultures. So this Russian dude who said, you know, I wish I could smile the way Americans do. Well, his parents are taught him that any stray public emotion could lead you to the gulag. And most Americans have no such fear. Americans by and large, probably the most free, most resistant to intimidation of any society of which I'm aware. Americans smile, they combative, they antagonize one another and they thrive. So freedom is is a probably a higher value in the United States of America than any other society of which I'm aware. Now, there are four British folkways that profoundly influenced American culture. So for New Englanders, they are profoundly affected by the Puritans, where order was freedom, right? Everything was regulated, right? And people had to report and spy on the domestic tranquility of every every family in their jurisdiction. So an honorable person, one who's studious, humble, patient, reserved and mortified. So this this tends to still be reflected in large parts of, say, Massachusetts culture. So this is very different from the attitudes towards freedom by other groups. So there's the Scots, Irish, the Borderlands people. And Joe Klein comments as watching the daily maps of COVID-19 cases of vaccinations. And I'm thinking that the divide between maskers and anti-maskers, between vaxes and anti-vaxes, is as old as Plymouth Rock. It is deeper than politics, it's cultural. So from my perspective, DNA and environment produce culture, which then produces religion and politics and everything else. So the Appalachian Hill Country much of the Deep South were settled by wild immigrants from the Borderlands of Scotland and England. They brought with them a Kleinish violent independent culture, which evolved over seven centuries of borderland warfare. So this was a society of autonomous individuals who would not endure any external control. They are incapable of restraining their rage against anyone who stood in their way. So you can see the spirit of the Scots, Irish borderlanders in the January 6th insurrection at the US Capitol, because their ancestors staged the Whiskey Rebellion against the US Constitution. Now in New England, influenced by the Puritans, very different. Then you've got the Cavaliers, who influenced Virginia culture. So the Scots, Irish were intensely resistant to change, intensely suspicious of foreigners, and in the early 20th century, they would become intensely necrophobic and anti-Semitic. So Fisher, in this terrific book, describes 22 different patterns of behavioural folkways for each of the four cultures from dress to cooking to marriage, child rearing to government, to criminal justice. And each of these four cultures had a very different definition of liberty. So freedom in America has never been a single idea. It's a set of different and often contrary traditions in creative tension with each other. So the Puritans, the Cavaliers, the Quakers and Scots, Irish all had very different notions of liberty, but they all provided an essential part of the American idea, according to Joe Klein. So for the Puritans, ordered freedom was what freedom was all about. So you had to get a fishing licence to get the freedom to fish. Now, from a Scots-Irish perspective, that was ridiculous. And you see these divisions playing out in our current struggles over COVID responses, vaccination, masks, gun control, etc. So for the Scots-Irish, they had a deeply libertarian sense of freedom. They moved to the back countries so that they could do what they want. So natural liberty was not a reciprocal idea. They did not recognize the right of dissent or disagreement. So the American military tradition and disproportionate number of its soldiers emerges from the descendants of these Scots-Irish borderland warriors in the Appalachian Highlands. Now, the Virginia definition of freedom was complicated contradictory and hierarchical. It was, in essence, the freedom to be unequal. I am an aristocrat. I love liberty. I hate equality. OK, it was a freedom to enslave. It was a freedom granted to the masters to indulge themselves to gamble and to debauch. And American cuisine mirrors these four cultures. So the Puritans baked as in beans and pies. The Cavaliers in Virginia roasted as in barbecue. The Quakers boiled as in cream cheese and the Scots-Irish fried and mashed as in pancakes and grits. So Puritans would not wear black. That was reserved for the clergy, but they favored the sad colors. So you see Harvard's Dore Crimson, Yale's Navy Blue, Dartmouth's Forest Green, Brown University's Brown. Scots-Irish spoke a dialect that predated current British English with tremendous antipathy to fix schemes of grammar and poxuation. And the Quakers created the first political parties in colonial America and William Penn and joined them. Don't be so government-ish. So there is there is something special about American culture, American emotional openness, Americans' freedom to get naked in their emotions and to, you know, express what they're feeling without fear and intimidation. Bye bye.