Like most Canadians, I’ve long wondered why the US has stubbornly refused to adopt the metric system. (Which is apparently a myth: they have, but they just don’t use it. So, like Canada, except that we use it a lot more even if not always all of the time.) In a society obsessed with convenience, you think that they’d have long moved on from a system that includes all numbers except 10 as possible conversion factors.
So a recent CNN article about this topic caught my attention.
There were, of course, the usual slew of explanations: Americans hate change (except when they have to buy the latest model of whatever (car, TV, cellphone, partner, …) with all the new features or move house for the fourth time in the past three years) or to stand up against “international tyranny” (especially on the part of France, whose only noteworthy achievement on the world stage since 1815 was getting the points in the Eurovision Song Contest to also be announced in French).
But it’s the last paragraph of the article that’s really telling:
“If I were to describe what makes America America, it’s oftentimes our cludgy workarounds that actually sometimes are less disruptive and allow us to function and tolerate the many different ways of doing things within a single country. And that’s not a minor achievement, actually, on some level, if you think about it. And it’s embedded in our political system, with 50 state governments operating simultaneously with a single national government. And perhaps on some level, it’s embedded in (sic) well in our very ugly but functional system of measurement.”
Stephen Mihm, University of Georgia
Ignore the details (e.g., 50 states or the measurement system) and this American history professor has basically described the way virtually every nation and any federalist government system on Earth functions as being uniquely American.
Or, to adopt the phrase used somewhat earlier in the article, another failed attempt at “American exceptionalism”.
The Blog About Fog 