Barack Obama and his allies a gauche would like to model our national economy after that of the Social Democrat statopias of Western Europe, with the model of France being a particularly attractive model for leftists. A reading of the auto-biography of Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (Harcourt, Brace & Company 1948) suggests that the American national psyche has already gravitated toward the francophilic.Merton spent the better part of his life in cloistered monasteries, practicing a mixture of fierce Christian faith and a meditative practice that drew from the ways of Eastern spirituality. As a child, he lived in France and came to revile it and the change in the character of the French people as their sense of cultural smugness blurred their sense of place in both the world and the universe. "..I suppose the most shocking thing about France is the corruption of French spirituality into flippancy and cynicism; of French intelligence into sophistry; of French...(Read Full Post)