Gallagher Mark George wrote {{fact}}! I don't think parochialism is limited to any one group - that defies my sense of how things are around the world. How people express it: yes, but that's a different kind of cultural matter. A thread on this is almost inevitably going to end up causing offence. There's a more interesting discussion to be had, I think, about 'founding assumptions' from 1776, 'American' thought being characteristically that you can divide the European heritage as signal+noise, and the having of the signal alone. Charles ----------------------------------------- Email sent from www.ntlworld.com Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software Visit www.ntlworld.com/security for more information