Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
Near the start of the 1992 film Patriot Games, retired CIA agent Jack Ryan is vacationing with his family in London when he encounters members of a radical IRA splinter group attacking and attempting to kidnap members of the British royal family. An American, Ryan charges into the gunfight, tackles and disarms one of the terrorists, shoots another, and disrupts the plot before the authorities arrive to restore order. The result of this heroism? The Queen of England makes him a member of The Royal Victorian Order, which I found a strange honor for an American, and a number of armed and vengeful Irishmen seek to have a word with him back in the states. As I recently discovered, Patriot Games is available for streaming on Netflix.
Saving royals is typical for an American in Europe, the Tom Clancy film seems to tell us. This self-congratulatory idea of “American exceptionalism” comes up in high school AP American history classes, and in Republican debates. The President whose party brought us birthright citizenship, Abraham Lincoln, asserted in his Gettysburg Address that our country was “conceived in liberty,” and since then (and before, as we can see in the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville), pundits have asserted that our country is like that “city upon a hill” whose light cannot be hidden.
Of course, doesn’t every country think it is special, and perhaps the most special? History has presented us with (some) haughty Parisians who scoffed at all others, (some) bellicose Germans who believed that a master race of proto-Aryans came were descended from residents of Atlantis, and (some) citizens of homogeneous Japan who believe that outsider visitors cannot act with sufficient decorum and respect. Our pop culture favorites have commented upon such nationalistic chauvinism, as well. The national anthem sung by Borat reminds us that “Kazakhstan [is the] number one exporter of potassium! / Other countries have inferior potassium.” We smile as we agree with Geoff Mulgan, the Chief Executive of the (British) National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts, who once said that “All of nationalism can be understood as a kind of collective narcissism.”
That said, I found myself swelling with nationalistic pride this past weekend when reading about the young men from Sacramento who, like Jack Ryan in Patriot Games, stepped up to stop the terrorists when Europeans needed them to. As you no doubt have heard, three locals are being celebrated by the heads of the U.S. and French governments because of their quick thinking. This is how the story began in Saturday’s Sacramento Bee:
Three childhood friends from the Sacramento area were hailed as international heroes Saturday after thwarting a gunman armed with an assault rifle and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. French officials said the man was planning mass murder on a high-speed train bound from Amsterdam to Paris.
Anthony Sadler, Spencer Stone and Alek Skarlatos, who had known each other since middle school, said they first heard shattering glass, then realized a man was brandishing an assault rifle in the train aisle. They jumped into action.
“My friend Alek just told Spencer, ‘Go get him,’” and “Spencer gets up in a split second and runs down the car and arrests the guy before he can shoot,” Sadler told reporters Saturday.
The three men, with help from another passenger, tackled the gunman, wrestled him to the ground, then hogtied him, saving themselves and other passengers.
This morning those three young American men were awarded the Legion d’honneur (Legion of Honor), France’s highest decoration, by French President François Hollande. As I said to my wife yesterday, it was a good thing that some Americans were nearby when a terrorist was loading his guns and looking for trouble. Peggy Noonan once wrote in The Wall Street Journal that “America is not exceptional because it has long attempted to be a force for good in the world; it attempts to be a force for good because it is exceptional.”
It’s not every day that I agree with Peggy Noonan or the Wall Street Journal, but when it comes to heroic and exceptional young men from the Central Valley of California, I find myself swelling with patriotic pride and gratitude.
Thanks to local reporter and editor David Greenwald for publishing a slightly different version of today’s newsletter in today’s People’s Vanguard of Davis. You might check out that version to see how locals have commented on my musings.
Tonight’s pub quiz will touch upon one or more topics that I have raised above, as well as foreign princes, the live-ball era, critiques from Angelinos, sleepy rabbits, periodic mathematics, cities in the news, Oscar Wilde, popular TV shows, King Tut, superheroes, musicals, tick tock Clarice, George McGovern’s nuked owl toy, Barney & Friends, famous alumni, praising that which is praiseworthy, common symptoms, that which is razor-thin, birthright citizenship, school attendance, expected and unexpected sports, winners of Academy Awards, what films make, women in film, the Commonwealth of Virginia, reprehensible slogans, breakfast cereal, and Shakespeare.
Thanks to all of you who attend our Pub Quiz every week. Last time some teams were told at 6:15 that all the tables had been claimed, so I encourage you to arrive earlier than usual. For some, tonight will be the last chance to participate under their current lease, so I expect a bit more calmness next week. And as the poet Josiah Gilbert Holland teaches us, “Calmness is the cradle of power.” See you tonight!
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Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:
- Internet Culture. What is the last name of the CEO of Amazon.com?
- Southern Generals. What did Robert E. Lee do after the Civil War? A) He fled the U.S. for England, B) he moved to a large estate in Atlanta, C) he became the president of Washington University, or D) he spent two years in prison for treason.
- Great American Cities. Bicycling magazine ranked the top 50 bicycling cities of 100,000 or more people. Name one of the top three.
- Four for Four. Which of the following cities, if any, are found in El Dorado County? Placerville, Roseville, South Lake Tahoe, Truckee.
- Unusual Words. The phrase “Ta Moko” refers to tattoos worn by what indigenous people whose name starts with M?
P.S. Thanks for reading to the end. Here is a welcome comment from a favorite Pub Quiz regular: “I too felt a moment of irrational pride when the three bros got their medals and a kiss from President Hollande – I also hope they’ll get some kisses from Les Demoiselles, too. However, I have seen far too much of the terror American Exceptionalism has wrought on this continent and beyond our shores to celebrate what they and few older gentlemen did on this train as its example. From the press accounts the French, British and American travelers did what they did as a manifestation of a human and humane instinct to protect their friends and total strangers from a criminal intent on mass murder. We should instead celebrate this moment as one in which shared humanity and cosmopolitain citizenship defeated barbarism and a hateful ideology. Our side – civilization and humanity – won this one, not America.”