Mark Steyn on Thanksgiving. And Starbucks?

Mark Steyn's column this week is about the uniquely American holiday of Thanksgiving, and why the rest of the world should be thankful for America. He also had a comment to make about Starbucks:

"Who would have foreseen that the nation that inflicted fast food and drive-thru restaurants on the planet would then take the fastest menu item of all and turn it into a Kabuki-paced performance art? What mad genius!"

Of course he had a larger, more serious point to make.

"We know Eastern Europe was a totalitarian prison until the Nineties, but we forget that Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal) has democratic roots going all the way back until, oh, the mid-Seventies; France and Germany's constitutions date back barely half a century, Italy's only to the 1940s, and Belgium's goes back about 20 minutes, and currently it's not clear whether even that latest rewrite remains operative. The U.S. Constitution is not only older than France's, Germany's, Italy's or Spain's constitution, it's older than all of them put together."

As Always, it's worth your time to read the whole thing.