Reasonable people

Well, no wonder my ambitious ancestors came over to the US from Europe. Here’s a typical mailbag comment from over there:
“treasonist? What kind of word is that?
Also, I really wanted to make some comments to the Ted Rall rants, but as you really seem to be just a few inches short of being a fundamentalist, I really can’t be bothered.
yours,
[name]
condescending european”
Well, CE, if you’d like to make the case that a pro-choice, pro-gay-rights New Yorker is a fundamentalist, please do have at it!
And while we’re on the topic, Europe has chopped up more of its own people in the past 10 / 5 / 1 centuries than any other continent. In just the past 100 years, Europe has given us two world wars, the mass murder of the Jews, the acquiescence in Stalin’s murder of the Ukrainians and his ideological enemies, and the murder of at least 100 people at the Berlin Wall. Oh, and o yes, no thank you to y’all for starting us out with our own American original sin — slavery.
But when we get down to track records — in the past century, America has freed more people, lengthened more lives, liberated more countries, preserved a greater peace, far better than any European nation, singularly or as a whole. So just where does this moral haughtiness and snobbery come from? Are you pissed that we took all the good people from your great-grandfather’s generation?
UPDATE: I’d presumed my European friend was correct and that treasonist was my neologism, though it turns out it’s not.
Even more enjoyable is that Stone is currently Google’s #7 entry for “treasonist”.

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