Posted 3:33 PM by Paul
The Pursuit of Happiness

Sipping a Diet Pepsi on the way back home on the train from Norfolk I got to thinking what it is that I like about the USA. I made a list to while away the time as the train sped towards London.

- Disney cartoons
- The poetry of Walt Whitman
- Real hamburgers
- A sense of optimism
- Jazz
- The Manhattan skyline
- Soul music - particularly Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin
- FDR
- My old friend Matt Carney
- Hollywood
- FDR
- The Marshall Plan
- The first Ramones album
- Martin Luther King
- Godfather I and II (Forget about III)

The list goes on, but the essence is embodied in one line of the Constitution.

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

The American Constitution is a document that stands alongside Shakespeare, the speeches of Winston Churchill and the poetry of Dylan Thomas as one of the great works of the English language. The idea that happiness and not power should lie at the centre of the aims of the State is an idea of transcendental beauty. For me it is even more powerful that the notion of Justice.

Tell a British journalist that you are in Politics to make people happy and they would think you were a buffoon. Joy is not serious. The pursuit of a contented life - evidence of a feeble mind.

Years ago I was briefly one of the leading lights of Red Wedge, an organisation dedicated to promoting left wing ideas through popular culture in the hope that more young people would support the Labour Party. Now of course our successors are marching against the Labour Party and its leader Tony Blair. Good luck to them.
One evening after work, I was asked how I would define Democratic Socialism. These kind of theological considerations used to exercise my mind in the mid-1980s, whereas now I am more likely to be contemplating the new lunch menu at the Savoy Grill. I replied that I thought that Democratic Socialism might be something along the lines of collective joy and happiness. My interrogator let out an embarrassed laugh and changed the subject.

But in the pure constitutional America of our dreams, Happiness and even Fun are legitimate political goals.

And Bush? Well clearly, he was born in the Friesian Islands.